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I didn't have time to feel good about winning. Another set of footsteps was already closing from below.

"Halver!" Alex's voice, further up the tunnel, tight with something I didn't have the breath to name yet.

"I'm here. Keep moving."

"You've been back there a while."

"I noticed."

The second guard came at me with a short blade instead of a sword, faster and meaner for the smaller weapon, and I took a shallow cut along my forearm before I managed to close the distance and end it with my hands instead of trying to fight his reach. The cut stung worse than it probably should have, adrenaline and exhaustion both making everything feel sharper than it likely was.

A third came almost immediately after, then a fourth close enough behind that I barely had time to catch my breath between them. I held that stretch alone longer than I wanted to admit, skirmishes blurring together into the same exhausted rhythm, block and strike and keep breathing, until my knuckles had gone raw and my legs had started shaking in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with simple, grinding fatigue.

Nobody up ahead could see what was happening behind me. I understood, distantly, that not being able to check on me was its own kind of torture for whoever was imagining the worst up there in the dark, and I didn't have anything left to spare on reassuring them beyond staying alive long enough to catch back up.

By the time the pursuit thinned enough to let me fall back into the group, my shirt had gone dark with blood that wasn't entirely mine, and Nykos's hand found my shoulder for one brief, steadying moment before either of us said a word about it.

"You're still standing," he said, like that alone counted as a small miracle.

"Barely."

"Barely counts."

The tunnel widened into a natural chimney twenty minutes later, and widening turned out to be the wrong kind of good news.

Old rockfall choked the passage from floor to ceiling, a solid wall of loose stone that had clearly come down long before any of us were born, undisturbed enough that dust had settled into every gap over what looked like decades. Corian set Jade down as gently as the ground allowed and turned to study the blockage with the same focused calculation he gave everything.

"We dig," he said. "Or we die in a tunnel arguing about whether there's a faster way."

Nobody argued.

We worked with our hands first, hauling loose stone free and passing it back down the line to clear space behind us, and when the rocks got too large for hands alone, Alex found a length of broken support beam and we used it as a lever, three of us hauling on one end while Nykos guided the freed stone clear of the gap.

"Left side's looser," Nykos called, wedging his shoulder against a boulder that shifted a half inch under the pressure. "Push here, not there."

"You're sure?"

"No, but it's the only guess I've got and we're out of time to test a second one."

We pushed where he said, and the boulder gave way all at once, tumbling free and opening a gap large enough to widen with our hands rather than the beam. Alex's palms had gone raw from the stone, and mine weren't much better, but none of us slowed to check the damage while there was still rock left blocking the way through.

Voices carried up from below while we worked, closer with every passing minute, and I measured our progress against that sound the way I used to measure a hunt against a fleeing animal's stride, calculating whether we'd clear the blockage before whatever chased us actually arrived.

It was close. Closer than I wanted to know exactly how close.

"Almost through," Corian said, shoving his shoulder against a stone that finally gave way, tumbling loose and opening a gap wide enough for a body to squeeze through sideways.

I checked on Jade in the pause that followed, her breathing shallow but steady against my ear when I leaned close, and found her eyes half open, tracking my face with a clarity that hadn't been there an hour ago.

"Halver."

My name, barely more than breath, and I forgot the rockfall, the voices closing below us, everything except the fact that she'd found her way back to me even for a moment.

"I'm here."

"You smell like blood." A ghost of something that might have been humor crossed her face. "More than usual."

"Occupational hazard today."