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"Fine," she said. "I'll say something before it's bad. Not because I think it'll get that bad. Because you asked."

"That's all I wanted."

She didn't fully believe I'd leave it there, I could tell, but she didn't push either. She just breathed through whatever the movement had cost her ribs and kept walking, half a step slower, refusing to acknowledge the difference beyond that single concession.

I kept my eyes on her anyway. Not obviously. Not in a way that would turn into an argument . I didn't have the energy to win. Just enough that if her steps changed again, I'd catch it before she did.

Ashter walked at her side, something about the set of his body had looked wrong in a way I couldn't name precisely. His eyes stayed half open. His breathing, when I got close enough to notice it, came shallow and quick, nothing like the slow, banked warmth he usually gave off.

"He alright?" I asked her.

"He's stuck," Jade said, one hand rising automatically to rest against his back.

"Is he in pain?"

"I don't know." Her voice caught slightly on the admission, small and unwilling. "I can't feel him right now either. That's never happened before."

"Is he getting worse?"

"I don't think so. Not since the shelf." She kept her hand on him as she walked, steady, like the contact itself was doing something even if she couldn't say what. "Whatever's keeping him solid, he's holding it there himself now. Pulling on whatever he's got left instead of waiting for me to fix it. I don't know how much of that he has."

I didn't have anything to offer that would fix that, so I didn't offer anything at all. I just kept walking close enough that if either of them went down, I'd be within reach.

I'd never let myself think too hard about what losing him would actually mean, past the obvious fact that it would break something in Jade nothing else could touch. Walking beside him now, watching him hold himself together on nothing but stubbornness and whatever reserve a creature made of smoke and old magic happened to carry, I understood it wasn't only her loss I'd been avoiding. He'd claimed a spot on my own chair without asking permission for it months ago, and some part of me had let him, the same part that had stopped being able to imagine the house without him in it.

Halfway through the second hour, Ashter's breathing changed enough that even I noticed it without being told, a faster, more labored rhythm that pulled Jade's attention away from her own steps for the first time since we'd started walking.

"Ashter." She slowed, cupping his face in her good hand. "Hey. Stay with me."

He blinked at her, slow and heavy, and made a small sound low in his chest.

"Do we stop," I asked.

"No." She said it fast, too fast, and caught herself. "No. Moving forward gets us out of here faster, and getting out of here is the only thing that will actually help him. Stopping doesn't fix what's wrong with him. Leaving does."

I didn't argue, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and partly because arguing with her about Ashter felt like exactly the kind of overreach I was trying to stop making today. I just adjusted our pace half a step slower anyway, enough to ease the jostling without either of them noticing I'd done it on purpose.

The side tunnels branching off the main cavern told a story none of us liked.

Halver found the first worn trail an hour in, a path of packed earth cutting through otherwise undisturbed stone dust, too consistent to be anything but repeated foot traffic over weeks or months rather than the accident of a single crossing. He crouched over it longer than the reading actually needed, running his fingers along the edge where boot and bare stone met, and I understood without asking that he was working twice as hard for half the information a shifted pass would have given him for free.

"This isn't old," he said, straightening. "Whoever's been walking this did it recently, and did it a lot."

"How can you tell without-" I stopped myself before finishing the question, since the answer was obvious enough that asking it felt like an insult to the effort he was already putting in.

"Eyes," he said anyway, not unkindly. "Same as anyone. The edges haven't softened. Loose dust would have blurred this by now if it had sat untouched more than a few days."

It was slower work than his shifted senses would have managed, and he knew it as well as I did, but he didn't complain about the difference and neither did I.

Further along, Alex's boot caught something half buried near the tunnel wall, and he crouched to pull it free, turning it over with a frown.

"Ration wrapper," he said. "Standard wax paper, but the pattern's not Citadel issue. Not Garrison either. I've seen enough of both to know the difference."

I took it from him, turning it over in what little light we had left in the dimmest of our remaining crystals. Whoever had eaten this had done so recently enough that the paper hadn't yet gone brittle with age, and carelessly enough to leave it behind rather than pack it out, the kind of small laziness that only came from people comfortable enough in a space to stop being careful.

Comfortable. Which meant they'd been here long enough, and often enough, to stop worrying about being found.

We found the map fragment twenty minutes after that, pinned to a support beam with a plain iron nail, half torn away at one edge like someone had ripped it free of a larger sheet rather than made it to fit this size. The hand-drawn lines showed a section of tunnel branching deeper into the mountain, small notations marked in a cramped, practical hand, distances and turns recorded the way a person recorded them when they expected to need the information again.