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It happened fast and almost silent, Halver closing the distance in two steps and driving a controlled strike into the side of the man's temple before he'd managed more than a startled intake of breath, catching him under the arms as he dropped and lowering him to the ground rather than letting him fall loud enough to draw attention.

We both stood frozen for three full seconds, listening for any sign the sound had carried.

Nothing. No shout, no running feet, no change in the steady rhythm of picks working the crystal seam outside.

Then a second voice called from just outside the flap, close enough that my whole body went cold.

"Dennet? You in there?"

Halver's eyes met mine across the unconscious guard's body, and I understood the question in them without either of us saying a word. I grabbed the last loose page from the desk, shoved it into my shirt with the rest, and Halver dragged the guard's limp form behind the crate of samples, out of the direct line of the flap.

"Dennet's taking a minute," I called back, pitching my voice low and rough, hoping the canvas muffled enough of it to pass. "Bad guts. Give him a second."

A pause stretched long enough that I thought we'd been caught outright, and then a short, disgusted laugh answered from outside.

"Tell him to hurry it up. Foreman wants the tally before shift change."

Footsteps retreated, unhurried, and I let my breath out slow, hands not quite steady where they gripped the edge of the desk.

"That won't hold long," Halver said.

"I know."

"We need to go. Now. Before someone comes looking for him properly."

We slipped out through the back the way we'd come in, low and fast, the weight of everything I'd shoved into my shirt shifting awkwardly with every stride. The open stretch of ground felt twice as long on the way back, every shadow doubling as a possible guard, every distant voice a possible alarm about to break. Halver stayed half a step ahead of me the whole way, checking corners before I reached them, moving with the kind of controlled urgency that meant he was working just as hard as I was not to break into an outright run and give us away.

We made it back along the shadowed edge without further incident, Nykos falling into step beside us the moment we cleared the last stretch of open ground, his face tight with the particular strain of a man who'd been holding a guess together through pure nerve for the better part of half an hour.

"Clean?" he asked.

"Clean enough," Halver said. "For now."

"Someone almost caught us in the tent," I added, keeping my voice low as we moved. "We talked our way past it, but that clock's running now. Whoever that guard was expecting to see walk out of there is going to notice pretty fast when it isn't him."

Nykos's jaw tightened. "Then we don't have long."

"No," I said. "We really don't."

I understood with total clarity that whatever window we'd slipped through to get in here had just started closing considerably faster than any of us had planned for, and that getting back to Jade before that window shut completely had just become the only thing that actually mattered.

We ran the rest of the way back to the passage mouth, evidence, fear, and everything else we'd carried out of that chamber weighing about the same by the time we reached her.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Just Hands and a Blade

Nykos

The horn sounded before we'd covered a hundred paces back toward the alcove, one long note that cut through the steady rhythm of picks and carts, and every guard in that chamber went from bored to lethal in the space of a single moment.

"That's the guard," Halver said, already moving faster with Jade cradled against his chest. "Someone found him."

"That fast?"

"Fast enough."

I'd spent my whole life with a constant, low hum of other minds sitting at the edge of my awareness, close enough to touch if I ever chose to reach, and the absence of that hum right now felt like standing in a room with my eyes closed, waiting for a blow I had no way to see coming. I couldn't feel how many guards were converging on our position. I couldn't feel which direction held the greatest concentration of bodies, or whether the man rounding the corner ahead of us was alone or the first of a dozen.

Every instinct I owned screamed at me to reach anyway, some useless reflex trying to grab a tool that simply wasn't there anymore, and each failed attempt cost me a fraction of a second I couldn't actually spare. I forced myself to stop trying somewhere around the fourth reach, and made myself trust my eyes instead, because eyes were what I had left to work with.