Rosalind is on the far side of the hall, trying to cut through the noise. Virn is near the lower junction. Syin blocks a passage with two other Zmaj. And Kavor is half in shadow, one clawed hand pressed to the floor.
He’s too far away. Still, I feel him before I fully see him. The blue in my arm pulls. His head lifts. Across the hall, through smokeand dust, bodies and fear, and all the old lies of the City, his eyes find mine.
Everything stops. No. Nothing stops.
The crowd surges. The floor pulses. Adran speaks. The runner beside me makes a small, desperate sound. But inside me, something holds still.
Kavor sees me standing where I shouldn’t be. Hurt. Barely upright. Probably an argument in human form. He does not come to me. He stays where the floor needs him. Good. Terrible. Perfect male.
Then the floor beneath the ration hall flashes white-gray and the crowd screams. Kavor slams his burned hand against the junction seam. The pulse breaks around him, but only there.
Other seams light.
Too many.
The system is using the crowd. Vibration. Heat. Blood. Fear. All of it. It does not need an anchor now. It has the City’s panic. No one can stop this from below.
The City needs a route, and that is my specialty.
Routes. Pressure. Heat. Fear. How people move when they think they’re dying. How to make them move another way.
I look at the hall not as a disaster. As a map.
Central stair blocked. East exit too narrow. West service corridor behind me. Lower nursery cleared. Old ration chute dead-ended but still physically intact. Heat vent galleries above the north wall. Second Stillness access blinded but passable if Ila’s purge holds.
The crowd must get off the center floor. Not up. Sideways. I grab the runner by the sleeve.
North gallery,” I say.
He blinks. “What?”
“Find Ila. Tell her to open the old ration chute gates. All three. They lead into the dry storage tunnels.”
“They’re sealed.”
“Rusted, not sealed. Break the lower pins.”
“How?”
“Tell Ila the lower pins owe me money.” His face goes blank. “She’ll understand enough to be annoyed. Now go.”
He goes. Good. Now the crowd.
I start down the overlook steps. Halfway down, Merra appears at the base like a furious healer demon.
“No,” she says.
“Move.”
“You are bleeding again,” she says.
“Then keep up.”
She looks like she might slap me. Instead, she turns and walks beside me.
“If you fall, I am leaving you there.”
“Liar.”
