I duck through the crawl first because I fit more easily. Kavor follows with difficulty, his wings scraping the stone, his horns nearly catching on the broken lintel. He says nothing, but I hear the tightness in his breath.
Open spaces bother him. So do too many directions. So does danger he cannot kill.
The lower cistern access is chaos, but it’s not a full collapse.
The chamber is long and arched, carved from old City stone and patched so many times that the walls look diseased. Cracks branch across the floor, glowing faintly white-gray in places where the wrong rhythm has crawled through buried channels. Dust hangs thick in the torchlight. Storage bundles have spilled open: dried root, hide wraps, empty water vessels, broken tools.
People crowd the far end, pressing toward the east service hall. Others kneel near the cracked floor, trying to pull someone free from under a fallen storage rack. A rack has pinned two children against the wall. Lysa’s children.
My blood turns to ice.
Lysa is there, hair coming loose, hands bloody from trying to lift metal she cannot move. Beside her, Penr braces his shoulder against the rack, face gray, too young and too terrified to be useful alone.
One child is crying. The other is not.
Everything in me goes quiet.
Then moves.
“Sera!” Penr sees me first. His voice cracks. “Sera, it shifted. The floor just shifted, and the rack?—”
“I see it.”
I shove the sample bundles and map against Kavor’s chest. He takes them without question. Good male. No. No time.
“Keep these separated. Do not let anyone touch them. Especially not Adran. Especially not anyone else.”
His eyes sharpen. “Sera.”
“Do it.”
He looks past me to the trapped children. Then back.
“I have them.”
I believe him, and that costs nothing now. Everything moves to later.
I push through the dust toward Lysa.
Her eyes catch mine, wild and red. “Please. Please, Sera. Miri is not answering.”
“I know.” I do not know. I cannot know. “Move your hands.”
“I can’t?—”
“Move your hands.”
The old voice comes out. Route voice. Emergency voice. Do not think. Do not feel. Count exits. Count weight. Count bodies. Lysa obeys because people do when my voice goes that flat.
Good, even if I hate it.
Penr shakes too hard to hold the rack steady. “It keeps slipping.”
“Then stop fighting it.” I point to the left brace. “Hold there. Not the top. The top twists. Put your shoulder under the crossbar. If it drops, drop with it. Do not fight upward.”
“I can’t lift it.”
“I didn’t ask you to lift it.”
