She smiles, tired and fierce.
“You’re the one who reads fault lines and stress planes, Alina. What happens when a single line takes too much pressure?”
“It cracks,” I say automatically. “And then it breaks.”
We all look at one another.
“No,” Phoebe says, half horrified, half intrigued. “You want to break it?”
“Not destroy,” I say quickly. “Reshape. Redistribute. Like… like taking a single load-bearing beam and turning it into a ring of pillars.”
“And you think the crown will just let us?” Jules asks.
I think of the way the Barrow has been rearranging its halls around me since the day I arrived.
Of how the Marches went quiet the first time Dagan touched my hand.
Of how Nightfall itself feels tired of being forced into one mold.
“I don’t think the crown wants Idris,” I say. “I don’t think it wants a tyrant any more than the rest of you do. It’s just stuck in the old pattern. So yeah. I think if four true bonds and four Lords all tug at the same time—” I swallow. “We might be able to rewrite it.”
Jules lets out a low whistle. “So we jailbreak the magic hat.”
Delia snorts. “The most New Jersey description of a god-tier artifact I’ve ever heard.”
Phoebe hugs her knees for a second, thinking. “What do you need from us?”
My mouth goes dry.
I look at each of them in turn.
Jules, pale but steady, one hand on Marcel’s tiny back.
Phoebe, curls wild and eyes fierce, mind already racing with tactical implications.
Delia, buzzing with adrenaline and fear and stubborn compassion.
I love Dagan.
I don’t know when it happened, exactly—somewhere between the first time he called me Oona and the way the earth went quiet under my boots when we stood together over that fault.
But I know it now.
And I know this.
I will not sit here and do nothing while he bleeds himself dry, trying to hold up a collapsing system we could fix.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
The room goes very still.
Not because they’re unsure.
Because they’re weighing the cost.
Phoebe is the first to nod. “You’re the only one here who understands this stuff on a structural level. If you say it might work?”
“I’m in,” Delia says, stepping closer, dark eyes shining. “You saved people on your world with your brain. You’re trying to save all of ours now. That’s good enough for me.”
