Baba Yaga stepped forward.
No purple smoke. No sparkles. No theatrical entrance. Just a woman who looked thirty-five and carried three centuries behind her eyes, walking across shattered cobblestones toward an entity that had once been her student. Her manicured fingers hung loose at her sides.
"Thaddeus."
The Collector froze. His gaunt face twitched at the name—a flinch so slight Hazel almost missed it.
"Don't."
"But never one that chose to grow instead of hide."
Something cracked in his expression. Not resolve—something deeper. The void wavered, lost its surgical precision, and for one stuttering heartbeat the pressure on the web eased.
Then his face locked shut. The void roared back with doubled fury.
He flung Baba Yaga sideways with a gesture that cost him nothing. She hit the fountain hard enough to crack stone, and the water turned to ice around her.
Hazel watched six more connections die in the space between breaths.
They were losing.
The web was dying.Hazel could feel it the way a body feels blood loss—not pain exactly, but a hollowing. A dimming at the edges of everything. Twenty-three connections remained from the original sixty-seven. Then twenty. Then eighteen.
"Hazel." Nate grabbed her arm, and even through the chaos his touch sent warmth flooding up to her shoulder. Their bond still blazed—the brightest thread in the tattered web, pulsing gold so fierce it cast shadows on the cobblestones. "He's working inward. Eating the outer rings first."
"Because ours is the center."
"Because ours is the meal."
She looked at him. Really looked. Blood from a shallow cut tracked down his temple. His green eyes were wide and bright with something she recognized because she felt it too—not fear, not resignation, but the particular clarity that comes when every option narrows to one.
Another connection snapped. Mrs. Shufflewick collapsed against the library steps, her costume flickering so fast she became a strobe of personalities—warrior, poet, librarian, child—before settling into a woman in a rumpled cardigan who looked very small and very afraid.
Fourteen connections.
"Nate."
"I know."
"If we let him start to take us, but don't resist?—"
His jaw tightened. His hand found hers. Not gently this time—a grip so fierce his knuckles went white.
"We can get close enough to reverse the flow." She said it flat, matter-of-fact, as though she were explaining a cataloging discrepancy rather than their probable death. The Codex hummed against her hip, its leather binding warm enough to feel through her jacket. It agreed. It had always agreed. The ancient tome understood sacrifice the way a river understood gravity—not as choice but as natural law.
"The reversed flow might not work."
"It will."
"You don't know that."
"I know us."
Three more connections died in rapid succession. Eleven left. The golden web looked skeletal now, a ribcage stripped of flesh, still trying to hold a shape that had already collapsed.
Nate exhaled through his teeth. Ran his free hand through his hair. Dropped it.
"Together?"
