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Maia didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure she could.

“And there’s something else,” Julen said. “They’re not all ours. Half the Guardians on the lower stairwells came in from somewhere else in the last fortnight. Nobody announced it.”

Maia thought of the stairwell outside the healer’s wing, the pair of them standing with their marks unfamiliar.

“So it’s already started?”

“It started before you were hurt,” Julen said. “You were just the part they needed to prove.”

Silence settled over the three of them.

“I don’t think they’re as afraid of the Fracture as they say they are,” Maia said at last. “I don’t think they’re protecting us from it. I… I think they’re preparing to use it.”

Julen looked at her sharply. “For what?”

“I don’t know. But I’m fairly sure Caelith did. And I think that’s the actual reason he’s gone.”

“Then it’s obvious what we do next, right?” Selinne asked. “They’ve written him out of every record in this city. So, we write our own version.”

“Exactly,” Maia said. “Julen takes the Archive records. Selinne, you watch the patrol patterns - where the new ones are posted and who they answer to. I’ll keep working on the fragments and see what’s hiding in the readings.”

“Caelith risked his life to save me,” Julen said quietly. “It would be a poor repayment to abandon him now.”

Selinne’s smile was thin and dangerous. “And I’m the only one out of the three of us who can still run if things go awry. That ought to count for something.”

Maia exhaled, steadying herself. “Thank you,” she said. And meant it in a way she couldn’t quite find words for.

It was the kind of plan that only worked if everything went right. But it was a plan.

Maia had spent days flinching at footsteps, rehearsing lies, watching her own hands shake. She was finished with that now.

She would rather burn than wait.

33

Wardlines

CAELITH

There was a crack in the ceiling of the cell that ran four feet and then stopped.

Caelith had found it on the second day and had been unable to stop finding it since. It ran east from the corner above the door, widening at the third foot, narrowing, then ending, as though whatever force had opened it lost interest.

It wasn’t structural. He had checked. It told him nothing about the stones, the wards or the Umbralyn who had put him there.

He looked at it anyway, because the alternative was to look at nothing, and he had learned very early what happened to a mind given nothing to look at.

Inventory, he thought. Again.

Four wardlines in the floor, laid in a square, the seams two inches proud of the stone. He had stood guard over cells like this one for longer than most of them had been alive, and had said once that the corners were a weakness. No Umbralyn was to be held in one. And yet here he was.

Feeding twice a day: lukewarm and enough to keep him upright. Which meant they wanted him alive and expected to need him.

The alignment would be complete in eleven days. Possibly ten. He could feel it through the wall like a fever coming: a long, slow tightening, everything in the stone pulling very gradually towards one note.

Eleven days. Three hundred years in the building, and it would be here in eleven days. And he would be in a room four feet across when it did.

She will be in the Archive now.