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That ended the conversation. I hadn't really expected otherwise.

"What's our signal if something goes wrong," Halver asked.

"Whistle, twice, low. If you hear that, you get out however you can and worry about regrouping after." Corian's eyes moved over each of us in turn, the same weighing look he gave any deployment briefing, except this time I could see exactly how much it cost him to sound as steady as he did. "Nobody plays hero down there. Grab what you can, get out clean, come back to her."

We split without further discussion, Halver easing Jade down onto a folded blanket in the deepest shadow of the passage mouth, checking her pulse one more time with two fingers before he made himself stand and walk away from her, which I understood cost him something significant even if his face didn't show it.

Nykos took position at the ledge for the better part of twenty minutes, watching the guard rotation with the kind of focus I'd only ever seen him give a genuine telepathic sweep, except now it was just his eyes doing all the work, tracking footsteps and shift changes and the particular way tired men moved when they thought nobody important was watching them do it.

I crouched beside him for the first few minutes, watching him watch, and found myself holding my breath every time a guard's path drifted too close to our angle before correcting away again.

"You'd usually just feel this," I said, quietly.

"I know what I'd usually do." He didn't look away from the chamber floor. "This is slower. Slower isn't wrong, just harder to trust."

He counted under his breath at one point, tracking two guards against some internal rhythm only he could hear, jaw tight with the effort of holding a dozen small variables in his head at once without the shortcut he'd relied on his entire adult life. I'd never seen him work this hard at something that should have taken him half a second, and something about watching him grind through it manually made the whole situation feel more dangerous than it had a moment before.

"There," Nykos murmured, mostly to himself. "East patrol's running four minutes behind the west one. That's the gap."

"You're sure?"

"No. I'm reasonably confident, which is going to have to be enough."

His hand came up eventually, two fingers raised. Go.

Halver and I moved together, low and fast along the chamber's shadowed edge, past crates and equipment and one stretch of open ground that had my heart in my throat the entire six seconds it took to cross it. Every footstep felt loud enough to carry, every shadow ahead looked like it might turn into a guard's silhouette before I could stop moving toward it.

Halfway along the edge, a guard's path shifted unexpectedly, cutting closer to our line than Nykos's read had accounted for, and Halver's hand closed hard on my shoulder, dragging me flat behind a stack of empty crates before I'd even fully registered the danger. We held there, pressed together in the narrow gap, close enough to hear the guard's boots on stone as he passed within a few feet of us, whistling something tuneless under his breath.

He didn't look our way. Didn't break stride. Just walked on toward whatever checkpoint waited at the end of his loop, and I let out a breath, quiet enough that it barely disturbed the air.

Halver's grip on my shoulder eased, and he tilted his head toward the tent, close enough now that a straight sprint would cover the remaining distance in under ten seconds.

We reached the tent's back wall without further incident, and Halver lifted the canvas edge just enough for both of us to slip through into the dim interior.

The clerk's ledger sat open on the makeshift desk, abandoned mid-entry, and beside it a locked case that gave way to Halver's knife in under ten seconds. Inside, samples of raw Null crystal sat nested in packing straw, more of it in one small case than I'd ever seen assembled outside a Citadel vault.

I grabbed the ledger, flipping fast through pages of dates and figures, shipment tallies recorded in the same cramped, practical hand that had marked the map fragment we'd found earlier, columns of weights and destinations that meant nothing to me yet and everything to whoever eventually got to study them properly. A second stack beneath it held something that made my stomach drop properly, a set of wax shipping seals, official-looking enough that my first instinct was to assume Citadel issue.

Corian's face kept surfacing behind my eyes while I worked, that half second where something in it had simply broken. I'd known him years and never once seen it happen, not through Silvaria, not through the engagement, not through anything. It sat wrong somewhere I didn't have time to examine properly, so I did what I always did with the things I didn't have time for. I folded it up small and put it somewhere it couldn't slow my hands down, and told myself I'd let it back out once we weren't standing in a stranger's tent counting minutes.

I turned one over, studying the pressed design, thumb running along the raised edge the way I'd been trained to check for exactly this kind of forgery years ago in a life that felt increasingly far away from this tent.

"Alex."

"Give me a second." I'd handled enough legitimate Crown paperwork over the years, enough legitimate seals crossing enough legitimate desks, to know the difference between forged and real when I held it close enough to actually look. This wasn't clumsy. Whoever made this, or stole it, understood exactly what a genuine seal needed to pass inspection, down to details most forgers never bothered getting right because most inspectors never bothered checking that closely.

"Either these are forged well enough to fool people who check for a living," I said, "or somebody actually got their hands on real Citadel seals and this operation isn't smuggling anything through the cracks. It's moving through channels that are supposed to be protected."

Halver's jaw tightened. "That's worse."

"That's so much worse."

I pocketed the seals along with a set of route records tucked beneath them, ink notations tracking shipments through waypoints that read like official supply lines rather than anything a criminal operation should have access to, and closed the case as quietly as I'd opened it.

That was when the tent flap moved.

A guard stepped through, mid-yawn, clearly running an off-schedule check nobody had planned for, and his eyes hadn't even fully adjusted to the dim interior before Halver was already moving.