One minute. Two. The wolves at my flanks have their ears tilted toward the east approach. They heard something I didn’t. I tighten my focus.
There. Boots. Moving fast.
At minute three, two guards round the east corridor at full speed and the first one has a ward-breaker in his hand, designed to disrupt magical work in progress. If he reaches Mira, the node neutralization fails.
The power grabs the device out of his hand. He stares at his empty palm for half a second and I use the half second to cover the distance and put him through the wall. His partner swings for my head. I duck it. The blade passes close enough that I feel the displaced air across my scalp, and my body does the ugly efficient thing it does now, the force reaching into him and finding the fault line and pulling before I’ve finished choosing to, and he goes down and stays down and I don’t look at what the pulling did.
The heat kicks. A spike from low and inside, the twins responding to the combat, the amplification surging, and I grab it and hold it and shove it down before it reaches for anyone on my side. The wolves watched the whole exchange without moving. They learn fast. They’ve learned that when it flares, distance is the only safe position.
Four minutes left. Hold the junction.
At minute six, Mira swears.
“The thread is layered into a secondary circuit,” she says. Tighter. “He built a trap inside the node. If I sever the primary connection, the secondary triggers a local ward collapse on this corridor. Not the whole estate. Just us.”
“Can you disarm the secondary?”
“I need four more minutes.”
“You have three. The clock is running.”
“Then I work fast and you pray to whatever you pray to.” Her hands are moving in patterns I can’t follow, her magic visible as a pale shimmer between her fingers and the stone. Sweat on her brow despite the cold air. Her jaw clenched so hard I can hear her teeth.
At minute seven another guard finds us. Solo this time, coming from the west branch, and I drop him before he clears the corner. The cost stacks higher. The fever is in my neck now, working its way toward my temples, and through the bond I feel the thing that happened in the medical wing after the gas attack, the pull that shouldn’t exist, a thread of the strain lifting, carried north. Somewhere in the building Maximus just took a piece of my fight into his own body without being asked. The mechanic that alarmed him then is happening again, and I let it, because the alternative is the gift burning me out before I reach the second node.
At minute nine, sixty seconds past the margin, the stone under Mira’s palm flashes white and goes dark.
“First south node neutralized,” Mira says. She pulls her hands back and they’re shaking. “The secondary trap is disarmed. The system held. His vitals are stable.” She looks at me. “He trapped the node. The other nodes will be trapped too. The estimate just became twelve a node, and the clock doesn’t care.”
Julian on comms. “North team, first node confirmed. Seraphina reports a secondary trap, same architecture. She’s adapting. Five nodes remaining. Forty-three minutes.”
Forty-three minutes. Five nodes. Every one of them booby-trapped. And the clock that started at sixty just lost seventeen minutes to two traps nobody saw coming.
He told us in the letter. “I’ve been ready for you since before you knew I existed.” He wasn’t bragging. He was giving us the terms.
I straighten. “Move. Second node. Now.”
We move.
The corridor between the first and second nodes runs deeper still. The stone changes color as we descend, gray to brown to a dark reddish hue that says we’ve passed below the level where builders used local materials and into the level where Konstantin chose the stone for how it holds magic. The ward-hum intensifies. The vibration sits in my wrists now, in the bones of my forearms, a vibration that sits just below the threshold of sound and makes the air feel thick.
Mira walks with her hands open at her sides, palms facing the walls, reading the failsafe threads as they run alongside us. “The next node is deeper,” she says. “And he’s increased the guard density. I can feel footfalls. Five, maybe six, positioned at the junction ahead.”
“Range?”
“Thirty yards. They know we’re coming. The first node sent avibration through the system when it neutralized. They’re waiting.”
The second node is three corridors deeper and guarded by five fighters who have been waiting for us since the first node went dark. They’re positioned well, staggered at intervals that prevent me from reaching all of them with a single sweep, and the first two engage simultaneously from opposite directions while the third hangs back with a ward-breaker aimed at the corridor behind me.
The gift takes the one on my left. I throw him into his partner and both of them hit the wall in a tangle of limbs. The third raises the ward-breaker and I rip it from his grip with a precision pull that costs me more than the broad throws, the fine-motor work burning hotter through my spine, and while he’s still processing the loss I close the distance and end the conversation with an elbow strike.
The fourth comes from a side corridor I didn’t see on the schematics. His blade catches the edge of my tactical vest and the fabric tears and the blade scores a line of cold across my ribs. Shallow. Not enough to slow me. I grab his wrist from across the corridor and twist until the blade drops and then I grab the rest of him and introduce him to the ceiling.
The fifth surrenders when I pin him up there beside the fourth and ask politely.
Mira steps over the fallen guards and puts her hands to the second node before the dust settles. Her fingers are trembling. Not from fear. From the sustained magical output that’s been running through her since the first node, the reserves draining faster than she’ll admit, and the pink new skin on her palms from the first node’s ward-burns is getting pinker with every contact.
“Secondary trap is here,” she confirms. Flat. Already working. “Same architecture. Different trigger orientation. He’s not repeating himself. He’s evolving the design across nodes.”
