Page 38 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

The satellite phone chirps from the cup holder before anyone answers him. No name on the screen, but I know anyway. Sabine has been a thorn in my heel since Prague.

"You're walking into a grave," Sabine says. Her usual amusement has been scraped clean. "I got hired to make sure nobody leaves Sablecrest with anything useful. Casimir's leftovers pooled their money with something hungrier, and I took the contract because the number was obscene." Wind claws across her end of the line. "Then I read the small print. They don't want the vault contained. They want witnesses erased after it opens. I don't burn libraries, Harrow. I steal from them."

"So don't take the shot," I suggest.

"I haven't decided who deserves one." Static cuts through her breath. "Professional courtesy: Casimir's men aren't collectors anymore. Lucien's people got to them first, and now they believe they're saving history by owning it. The ridge team has eyes on you. Watch the high ground." She cuts the call before I can press her, and I set the phone down slowly, trusting the warning about as far as I can throw the mountain. That's not very far.

Nico has been silent beside me through all of this, his focus fixes on my face as if every flicker matters. The rubber mat below me is frosted from the obsidian.

"They'll expect us to keep climbing. We need to stop." I spread the copied survey map across my knees and drag a finger along the river cut east of the ridge. "This meltwater channel runs under the approach. Steep, miserable, glacier-fed, cold enough to punish anything with a pulse. Lucien will likely burn time on the logging road. Casimir's faithful watch the obvious pass. We come underneath. Gabe scouts the tree line and lays false tracks east. Cass keeps feeding me old protocol names. If Sablecrest was built to keep us out, it has doors that answer to old habits, and I want every one before I'm touching stone." I look at Nico. "I lead. I read the locks. You guys keep teeth off me while I do it."

For the space of a breath nobody speaks. Then Gabriel laughs, delighted, and taps the steering wheel. "Centuries alive, and the human has turned us into a burglary crew. Excellent."

I brace for Nico to correct me. Instead something eases at the corner of his mouth, the approval he rarely lets become words.

"She's not wrong," Nico says.

It isn't praise. It's better than praise. It is him taking my idea seriously in front of everyone.

Gabriel studies the map in the mirror. "If I cut north first, they'll follow the tire marks before they check the river."

"Do it," Nico says.

Cassandra folds one archive sheet against her knee. "The dead mission matters. Sablecrest may not answer to the obvious entrance."

My throat tightens around the fear. "Then we don't use the obvious entrance."

26

NICO

The meltwater rises to my waist, and there is no honest way to fight in the strength of the current. That is what gnaws at me as I follow Riley into the drowned throat. A passage only shoulder-width wide. One way forward, one way back. A killing box. If I had set an ambush against my own kind, I would have set it here.

"You're brooding," Riley says. "I can feel it at the bottom of my neck."

"I'm assessing."

"Same face. The pass was the trap, Nico. Wide road, clean approach, big friendly mouth in the mountain. That's where they want us. So we had to go under."

I despise that she's right. Lucien is old enough to bait a hook with the obvious, and Riley has spent her life slipping through the seams of things, she saw it before anyone did. I keep that to myself.

Cassandra brings up the rear, reading the stone like a page. Gabriel ranges ahead, because Gabriel cannot help himself.

"Throat's narrowing," he calls. "There's carving down here—old work⁠—"

"Gabe. Stop." I call.

He freezes mid-step, one boot lifted, water sluicing off his coat.

Cassandra comes up fast beside me, and whatever she reads in the channels pulls the warmth from her face. "Keeper marks. A kill-route, built to punish speed. Move like a vampire—too fast—and whatever's in the stone comes down." She works at a seam, cursing in a language older than the country above us. "I can't unmake it. Not in time."

So we stand in a flooded grave with spikes in the walls, and the one thing I have always trusted—my speed—is what will gut us here.

"Everybody hold," I say.

Riley is already crouched at the channels, head tilted, listening. Water strikes the carved grooves in a sequence—three taps, a stutter, a pause, again. She lifts a finger as it falls.

"It's about rhythm." She breathes it half to herself, the way her father once must have taught her to. "Water hits three channels on a loop. The safe steps are in the gaps. We move on the quiet, never on the noise."