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"This morning, I'd have felt it coming before he even decided to swing."

"You still caught it. Just slower."

I didn't have anything to say to that, mostly because I wasn't sure yet whether it was meant as comfort or simple fact, and right now I didn't have the luxury of sorting the difference.

The second fight cost us more.

A guard broke from the group pursuing us and made straight for Halver, ignoring the rest of us entirely, and I understood his reasoning even before Corian shouted the warning. Halver was slow. Halver was carrying dead weight against his chest that made him an easy target compared to the rest of us still moving at full speed, and whoever trained this guard had trained him to recognize an opportunity.

I lunged toward them myself, too far away to matter, watching the distance with the particular helplessness of a man who used to close gaps like that with nothing but a thought and now had only his own legs to argue with.

Ashter got there first.

He'd kept pace along the tunnel floor since the horn first sounded and whatever the day had cost him, it hadn't touched the instinct underneath it. He crossed the last stretch of ground in one low burst of speed, and hit the guard's throat before the blade had finished its downward arc.

There was no hesitation in it. No warning growl, no testing lunge. Just teeth, and weight, and a man going down with a short, wet sound that ended whatever he'd been about to do to Halver before it started. Ashter didn't let go until the guard had stopped moving entirely, and even then he stood over the body a moment longer, blood dark against his muzzle, before he finally released his grip.

None of us said anything. I'd watched him curl warm and harmless against Jade's wrist for months, watched him beg for scraps at the fire and accept a scratch behind the ears like the most ordinary companion in the world, and the creature standing over that guard's body belonged to some harder version of him I'd never once been shown.

"Ashter." Halver's voice came out careful, low, the same tone he'd use to talk down anything cornered and dangerous. "Good. That's good. Come here."

He came, unsteady, pressing himself back against Halver's side like nothing at all had happened, and I understood, watching him settle, that nothing about this had been personal cruelty. It had been exactly what it looked like. Something that loved her, doing the only thing left in its power to keep her safe.

A second guard used the half second all of us spent watching Ashter to close on Jade from the opposite side, blade already swinging in a wide arc that came close enough that my breath locked somewhere in my throat and stayed there, close enough that for one full, terrible second none of us could tell whether it had connected or not.

"Jade!" I heard my own voice crack on the name, raw and too loud for the tunnel.

Halver twisted hard, shielding her with his own shoulder, and the blade caught fabric instead of skin, tearing a long line through the blanket wrapped around her without ever reaching what lay beneath it. Corian closed the last few feet a half second later and put the guard down for good before he got a second swing.

"She's fine," Halver said, fast, breathless. "She's fine, it missed, keep moving."

I didn't fully believe it until I saw her chest still rising and falling against his arm, and even then some cold, useless part of my mind kept replaying the half second where I hadn't known, over and over, a wound that had never actually happened and still somehow ached.

Alex finished off a third guard I hadn't even registered closing on us from behind while the rest of us were still recovering, a clean strike that spoke to exactly how much of his own fear had converted into precision rather than panic.

For a moment the four of us simply stood there, breathing hard, checking each other with our eyes because none of us had breath left to spend on words. The tunnel had gone quiet enough in that instant that I could hear my own pulse hammering in my ears, and somewhere underneath it, closer than the sound had any right to be, the distant echo of more voices closing from behind.

That was when Jade's eyes opened.

"Nykos."

"I'm here."

Her eyes found mine, glassy but present. "You could try. To get in. Find some way around whatever keeps you out of my head. You're smart enough. You've never once tried."

"I wouldn't."

"I know you wouldn't. That's the part I wanted to say." Her hand twitched against Halver's arm, weak, searching. "Everyone else who ever found something they couldn't get past treated it like a lock to pick. You never have. Not once."

"Jade-"

"I should have told you that mattered. Before now."

"We can try when we get out of here, Jade."

"Promise?"

"Promise."