Page 160

Jade sat close to the fire, Ashter curled solid against her side, Halver's shoulder a steady line against hers. She stared into the flames with the particular stillness she wore when a problem had gotten under her skin deep enough that pretending otherwise wasn't worth the effort.

I watched the two of them for a moment longer than the observation needed, the easy way Halver's arm had settled behind her without either of them making a decision about it first. Something in my chest did the thing it always did lately, small and quiet and entirely inconvenient, and I looked back at the fire instead of examining it further. I told myself I was glad for them. Halver had earned this kind of ease as much as anyone I knew, and Jade looked steadier for it in a way that mattered more than whatever I felt watching from the other side of a fire. I had no business measuring myself against this . That was true enough to say out loud if anyone asked.

It wasn't the whole truth, and I knew it wasn't the moment I finished thinking it. Whatever I felt about that particular picture wasn't hers to manage and wasn't mine to indulge, not with my father's arrangement still sitting unsigned, and a command structure that made anything else a question I had no right to ask.

I'd built a career out of knowing exactly what I could and couldn't afford to want. This was the first thing in years I hadn't managed to talk myself out of wanting anyway, and I still didn't know what to do with that except set it down somewhere I could pick it back up later, when there was less at stake than a squad's trust and a contract with my name on it.

Later. I was good at later. I'd had a great deal of practice.

"Someone's hiding something down here," she said, apparently unaware of any of it, or simply better than I was at not letting it show. "Something big enough to be worth two dead men and a cover story. I don't think we're going to like what's actually behind that rubble."

Nobody argued with that either.

"We don't move on guesses," I said. "Tomorrow we go in with rope, full light, and Alex tracing every crate and tool back to a mark somebody can identify. If this connects to a guild, or a smuggling line, or something worse, I want it documented clean enough that nobody gets to close this file the way the Warden closed his."

"And if it's more than smuggling?" Jade said.

"Then we'll have documented that too."

She didn't look comforted by the answer. Neither was I, if I was honest about it. But comfort wasn't what this job paid in, and I'd stopped expecting it somewhere around my second year commanding.

I banked the fire lower once the meal was done and set the first watch myself, Halver's shape already shifting back into something built for keeping guard through the dark hours ahead. Tomorrow we'd go back in properly, rope and fresh light and every hand ready, and pull apart whatever waited behind the last honest wall in that tunnel.

Tonight, the mine kept its silence, and I didn't know how much that silence was costing someone else to maintain.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Nothing Left to Reach For

Alex

We went back in loaded down properly this time, rope coiled over both shoulders, fresh crystals swapped in for the ones that had dimmed the day before, and I'd spent an hour before we left checking every knot Halver tied twice, since a knot that failed forty feet down wasn't the kind of mistake anyone got to fix twice.

Nobody talked much on the way in. Corian led with the map held low against his leg, checking it every few dozen paces against features that mostly refused to match anything drawn on the page. Jade walked close behind him, Ashter solid and alert around her wrist instead of drifting loose the way he usually did on an easy stretch, and I noticed her hand drift toward her collarbone more than once, an old habit from a life none of us liked to bring up directly.

"You alright," I asked her, mostly to fill the quiet.

"Fine."

"You keep touching your throat."

"I'm aware."

She didn't offer anything past that, and I didn't push. Some things about Jade you learned to let sit exactly where she left them.

Past the crates, past the alcove with its unmarked tools, the sealed passage kept going further than it had any right to. We hit ground that matched nothing on paper at all, the slope pitching downward at an angle no registered shaft should have carried, steeper with every stretch, the crystal light throwing our shadows long and strange against walls that had stopped looking like Greymantle's workings entirely.

"This isn't in the survey," Corian said, checking his copy against the tunnel ahead for the third time.

"Neither was the last three passages," Jade said. "That's sort of the point of a sealed section nobody wanted found."

"I know. I don't like how far down it keeps going regardless."

Neither did I, though I'd been keeping that particular opinion to myself since somewhere around the second downward pitch. The air had changed too, cooler than it should have run this deep, carrying a faint mineral taste that caught at the back of my throat every time I breathed in through my mouth.

Halver, human for this stretch since the ceiling had opened up enough to allow it, slowed near a bend where the walls pinched tighter before opening again.

"Something's different up ahead. I can't place it yet."

"Different how," Corian asked.