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I listened, straining past my own heartbeat to catch anything more specific than the general shape of the sound, and found nothing more precise than what my ears alone could offer, no sense of numbers or distance beyond rough guesswork, no read on intent beyond the obvious fact that whoever was making that sound wasn't doing it by accident. This morning I'd have had Nykos sweep the passage before we got within a hundred paces of a threat like this. Now I had five sets of eyes, five sets of ears, and whatever judgment the people attached to them had managed to build over years of training that had nothing to do with an ability at all.

Skitters didn't swing pickaxes. Cave-ins didn't argue in low, unhurried voices about however many carts still needed loading before shift change.

These were people. Working, comfortable, and entirely unaware that five strangers had just found the edge of whatever they'd spent months building down here in the dark.

I looked at Jade, at Halver, at Alex and Nykos crouched low behind us with blades drawn and nothing else to rely on, and understood with complete clarity that whatever happened next, we were going to have to handle it exactly the way my father had once warned me every real crisis eventually arrives, with nothing but the people already in the room and whatever they'd actually learned before the moment that mattered.

No shield. No spark, no shift, no sense of a mind to read before it turned hostile.

Just training, and trust, and whatever the five of us had built between ourselves long before any of it stopped being enough on its own.

I raised one hand, palm flat, the oldest signal any of us knew.

Hold. Listen. Wait.

Nobody needed to be told twice.

Chapter Twenty-Four: What the Collar Never Took

Jade

The alcove Corian found sat tucked off the main passage, small enough that all five of us fit shoulder to shoulder without much room left over, and I claimed the wall behind me the second we stopped, grateful for something solid to lean against that wasn't my own strength.

"If they're running carts out through the eastern branch," Corian was saying, crouched over the torn map fragment with his crystal angled low, "then the exit has to sit somewhere past the third fork. That's our fastest route back to the surface, assuming it isn't blocked or guarded."

"Assuming a lot," Alex said.

"I'm aware."

"And if it is guarded?"

"Then we find another way, or we deal with it the way we're dealing with everything else down here. Slowly."

Nykos crouched beside him, tracing one finger along a line on the fragment that didn't quite connect to anything else drawn on it. "This section's torn away entirely. We're guessing past this point."

"We've been guessing since the floor gave out under us."

"Just wanted it said out loud."

Halver said something after that, low and even, about the pickaxe sounds and which direction they'd been coming from, something about a second passage running parallel to the one we'd already scouted, close enough that whoever worked those tunnels might already know ground we didn't.

I meant to listen. I really did. The words reached me present but muffled, arriving a half second late and already smudged at the edges.

I was too busy counting my own heartbeat.

It had gone wrong sometime in the last hour, too fast for how little we'd actually been moving, a hard, insistent throb that I could feel in my jaw and my fingertips and, worst of all, in the mess of torn cloth wrapped tight around my ribs. Every pulse pushed fresh warmth against the bandage there, small and rhythmic, and I didn't need to look down to know what that meant. The bleeding hadn't stopped.

Ashter sat solid against my hip, too still, holding himself together through nothing but stubbornness and whatever reserve he still had left to spend on it. He hadn't gotten worse since the shelf. Small comfort, but I'd take it.

I kept my face arranged the way I'd learned to arrange it years ago, blank enough that nobody reading it would find anything worth commenting on. It was a good face. It had fooled better observers than four exhausted men arguing over a torn map in bad light.

"Jade." Corian's voice, closer than I expected. "Does that match what you found on the trail?"

I blinked, dragging myself back into the conversation from somewhere several sentences behind it.

"Sorry. What?"

"The wear pattern. Heavier toward the east fork or the south one?"