Page 170

Arms found me before I'd fully processed the question being asked, careful and impossibly steady despite how fast his heart was hammering against the side I got pressed to, lifting me clear of the stone floor like I weighed nothing at all. Pain flared bright through my ribs at the movement, sharp enough to pull a sound out of me I didn't have the strength left to swallow.

"Sorry," Halver said, immediately, adjusting his hold with a gentleness that cost him speed he clearly wanted to spend elsewhere. "Sorry, I know. Almost there. Just hold on."

"Ashter," I managed.

"He's coming, Jade, I promise," Alex said.

"This is embarrassing," I said, or tried to, the words coming out slower and less coherent than I intended. "Being carried. I walked the whole way down here."

"You can complain about it later," Halver said. "Loudly. I promise to listen to every word."

"I'm holding you to that."

"Good. Something to look forward to."

I appreciated the attempt at lightness and some small, distant part of me noted that even now, even like this, he'd found exactly the right thing to offer instead of panic.

The world had narrowed down to a handful of fixed points by then, Halver's heartbeat under my ear, the sound of Ashter at our side, the particular quality of fear in four voices trying very hard not to sound as frightened as they clearly were. I couldn't track the plan anymore, couldn't follow which fork we were taking or why, and some old, stubborn part of me hated that failure more than the fever itself, the same part that had spent a lifetime being useful because usefulness had always felt safer than being helpless and cared for.

"You're allowed to stop fighting this for one minute," Halver said, quiet, like he'd heard the thought. "Let us carry the rest. You've done enough today."

I wanted to argue that.

Instead I closed my eyes, and let the darkness at the edges of my vision finally win the argument I no longer had the strength to keep having, Halver's voice was the last thing I held onto on the way down.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Paper Trail

Alex

I went in on my stomach, close enough to the chamber's edge that the crushed rock bit through my shirt with every inch of forward progress, and stopped the moment I had a clean line of sight over the lip of the ledge.

It was bigger than any of us had guessed.

The chamber opened out below in a wide, terraced bowl, crystal lamps strung along support beams in a grid too even to be improvised, throwing steady light over a seam of raw black crystal running through the rock face. Dozens of workers moved along that seam in organized lines, picks and chisels working in a rhythm too practiced to belong to anyone new at this. Guards stood posted at regular intervals, armed, alert, rotating through positions with the bored precision of men who'd done this shift a hundred times before and expected to do it a hundred more.

I counted three separate crews working different sections of the seam, each with its own small cart track running back toward a loading platform where raw crystal sat stacked in crates ready for transport. This wasn't a handful of opportunists chipping away at something they'd stumbled onto. This was infrastructure, built and maintained over what had to be months, possibly longer, complete with rotation schedules and a supply chain organized enough that nobody down there looked remotely worried about being found.

Off to one side, half tucked behind a stack of empty crates, a canvas tent stood open at the flap, and inside it, visible even from this distance, a man sat hunched over a ledger with a quill, writing steadily by crystal light like he was doing nothing more dramatic than balancing a merchant's books.

I stayed flat another minute, watching two guards cross paths near the tent and exchange a few words too casual to be anything but routine.

"...shipment's late again," one of them said, close enough that the words carried up to my position on some trick of the chamber's acoustics. "Third time this month."

"Not our problem. Foreman handles the schedule, we handle the floor."

"Foreman's going to have my ears if the quota's short again."

"Then dig faster."

They parted without further comment, one heading back toward the seam, the other toward a smaller side passage I hadn't noticed on my first pass, cut into the rock near the loading platform and dark enough that whatever lay beyond it didn't get the benefit of the chamber's lamps. I filed that away, a second unexplored route that might matter later, and kept watching until I'd counted enough guards on rotation to build a rough sense of their numbers.

Then I backed away slowly, inch by inch, and made my way to where the others waited in the dark mouth of the passage we'd come down.

"How bad," Corian asked, low.

"Bad in the organized way, not the desperate way." I kept my voice down to match his. "Dozens of workers. Armed guards on rotation. Processing gear set up like it's been there for months. And a tent with a clerk keeping a ledger in plain sight, like this whole operation expects to need paperwork someday."

"That's not smuggling," Nykos said. "That's a business."