Page 31

Carrick said, “I recovered a copied diagram from one of Keevandrie’s abandoned ritual sites decades ago. It never made full sense because the structure had an open anchor point. If Maisie is right, your rig sketch may tell us what that anchor was designed to hold.”

Light slowly brightened in the air above the table. A glowing, hovering diagram of intersecting lines, runic clusters, and containment geometry appeared within the soft, white illumination.

At first, I saw nothing but another nightmare of intersecting geometry.

Maisie leaned in from my right. “Move.”

I looked down at her. “Excuse me?”

“You’re enormous and blocking my view.”

Guy made a sound that might have been a cough if my brother had not been grinning like an ass. Bernie, traitor that she apparently was, stepped smoothly to the side and gave Maisie a clearer angle on the table.

I should have been irritated. I was irritated. But I moved anyway, because Maisie MacDonald said it like she expected the world to obey, and some traitorous part of me wanted to see what she saw.

Maisie braced both hands on the edge of the table and stared at Carrick’s projected diagram. Then she glanced down at my sketch of the rig, the one I had drawn from memory with a Texas Ranger’s precision and a dead man’s hatred for every line.

She did not look at the runes first. She looked at the spaces between them.

Her eyes narrowed, not with fear, but with the sharp, focused concentration of an artist studying composition. Shape. Proportion. Negative space. Repetition. Balance. All the things I had dismissed because I had been trained to see threat, weakness, and tactical function.

“You guys keep looking at the symbols,” she murmured.

Bernie’s brows drew together. “They’re Spellwork.”

“They’re also a composition.” Maisie reached for the pad with my drawing and rotated it ninety degrees. “Look at the negative space.”

Carrick went silent on the other end of the communication spell. Guy leaned in. Bernie’s expression sharpened from academic curiosity into something far more dangerous.

Maisie slid the paper closer to Carrick’s glowing diagram, then angled it again. The projected light shimmered across her charcoal-smudged fingers. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then sections of the two patterns aligned.

Not completely. Not enough for the clean match an investigator could take to the Council and use as evidence for a Tribunal. But enough that the lower-deck containment architecture from my drawing of the rig and the structure from Keevandrie’s abandoned ritual site shared the same bones, as if one had been adapted from the other for a different terrain.

The same underlying geometry. The same containment logic. The same empty center where everything else bent inward.

Maisie lifted one finger and tapped the open point in Carrick’s diagram. “What goes here?”

No one answered fast enough.

Carrick finally spoke, each word carefully spoken. “In the diagrams I recovered, that location was labeled as the primary living anchor. The component had to be positioned there before activation.”

Icy cold fingers crawled down my spine. Not fear. Recognition.

I reached for the pencil. My hand did not shake as I added a single mark to the oil-rig sketch.

X.

Guy’s voice came from beside me, quiet and sharp. “What’s that?”

I stared at the mark I had made until the graphite blurred at the edges. “Where I was standing when the floor disappeared.”

The silence told me everyone else had reached the same conclusion.

No one spoke. Not Guy. Not Bernie. Not Carrick crackling through the communication spell. Even Sully went still inside me, his fury folding inward and morphing into something colder and older than rage.

Maisie’s hand settled on the table beside mine.