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Her eyes slid shut again, the effort of staying present clearly costing more than she had left to spend, and Halver adjusted his hold on her without a word, already moving again before I'd fully found my footing back under me. I filed the moment away somewhere I could return to once we weren't actively being hunted, and made myself focus on the ground ahead instead of the ache it had left behind.

We lost Alex somewhere in the confusion of the third clash, a checkpoint manned by two guards who hadn't yet heard the horn clearly enough to know exactly what they were watching for, and by the time the rest of us fought clear of that passage, he was nowhere in sight.

"Alex!" Corian's voice, sharp, cutting through the noise of our own retreat.

No answer came back.

"He'll find the tunnel," Corian said, though I heard the strain underneath the certainty. "He knows the route."

We didn't have the luxury of going back for him. The voices behind us had grown thick enough now that I could pick out at least six distinct sets of boots, closing steady, and somewhere beneath that, a shouted order I didn't need to hear clearly to understand the shape of.

Find them. Don't let them reach the surface.

I hated leaving anyone behind more than I hated almost anything else in the world, an old wound from a life spent watching people vanish into obligations bigger than themselves, and every step further from where we'd last seen Alex felt like betting on a certainty I had no actual way left to confirm.

We reached the mouth of the side tunnel with blood on all of our hands that wasn't entirely our own, Corian's forearm wrapped hastily in a strip torn from his own shirt, my jaw already swelling where the guard's fist had connected, Halver's arms shaking with the effort of having carried Jade through every single one of those fights without once setting her down.

Alex appeared out of the dark less than a minute later, wearing a guard's jacket two sizes too large and breathing like he'd run the whole distance at a dead sprint.

"Told a checkpoint I was hauling contraband to the foreman," he said, breathless, already falling into step beside us. "They believed me just long enough."

"Just long enough for what?" I asked.

"For me to walk past them instead of through them. Ask me again once we're not currently being hunted."

We took stock of ourselves in the few seconds we could spare, a rough accounting nobody wanted to give out loud but all of us ran anyway. Corian's arm, bleeding through its makeshift wrap. My jaw, already stiffening enough that I could feel my own pulse in it. Halver's shoulders, trembling with a fatigue that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with hours of dead weight held against his chest through every single exchange of blows. Alex, bruised along one cheekbone from something none of us had seen happen, moving like the adrenaline was the only thing currently holding him upright.

And Jade, unconscious again, blood soaking fresh through the bandages Alex had packed hours and a lifetime ago, evidence of an operation none of us fully understood yet tucked against Halver's side along with everything else he refused to set down.

The tunnel mouth opened dark and narrow ahead of us, climbing steep enough that we'd need both hands free just to manage the grade, evidence and wounds and Jade's unconscious weight all coming with us regardless of how the terrain felt about the arrangement.

Behind us, the sound of the search organizing itself carried clear through the passage, closer than any of us wanted to admit out loud, and I understood without needing an ability to confirm it that whatever ground we'd bought ourselves, we hadn't bought nearly enough of it yet.

We started the climb without another word between us, five sets of lungs burning and one heartbeat too many going quiet somewhere against Halver's chest, and I kept my eyes on the dark ahead rather than the ground we'd already covered, because looking back wasn't going to make any of it faster.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Everything Came Back at Once

Halver

The side tunnel climbed steep enough that we lost the luxury of walking two abreast within the first hundred feet, forcing all five of us into a single ragged line with the rock pressing close on both sides.

"Give her to me," Corian said, already reaching. "You need your hands free if anything comes up behind us."

I didn't want to hand her over. Some unreasonable part of me had decided somewhere over the last several hours that carrying her was the one thing I could still actually do for her, and letting go of that felt like losing ground I didn't have to spare. But Corian was right, and being right mattered more right now than what I wanted.

"Careful with her side," I said, easing her into his arms. "The wrapping's loose on the left."

"I've got her."

I believed him. That didn't make my arms feel any less empty once she was gone from them.

Ashter pressed close against my leg the moment my hands were free, still moving slower than his usual quick glide but sticking close enough that I nearly tripped over him twice in the first few minutes. I didn't have it in me to mind. This day had cost him more than us, he'd spent every scrap of it staying near her, and there was something steadying about having him there, low and warm against my side, a reminder that none of us were doing this entirely alone even when it felt that way.

I took the rear alone once the tunnel narrowed past the point where two of us could have covered it together, the others moving ahead in single file while I walked backward through the worst of it, watching the dark behind us for the first sign of pursuit.

It came faster than any of us wanted.

A guard rounded the bend below with a torch held high, and I met him in the narrow space with nothing but my own hands and the same technique our trainers had drilled into all of us long before any ability had ever manifested. He was fast. I was tired. The fight that followed had none of the clean efficiency a shifted form would have given me, just two exhausted men trading blows in a space too tight for either of us to properly dodge, until I got a hand on his wrist and used his own momentum to put him into the wall hard enough to end it.