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I look down at her. “I choose the scholar who will argue with me when I am wrong. I choose the woman who values truth but chose my life over knowledge when the stone fell. I choose the partner who will help carry this shard not as a trophy, but as a burden shared.”

Her lips part, but no joke comes. Her eyes fill instead.

I lift her hand to my mouth and press my lips carefully against her knuckles. “If sacredness is what conscious beings make when they honor value beyond use, then this is sacred because I make it so.”

The ruins crack overhead.

Brakk wipes at his eyes with furious aggression. “That was beautiful, and I hate the timing.”

Sira says softly, “The timing may be the point.”

“Do not encourage poetry during structural failure.”

Rolaev ’s voice comes low. “You think choosing makes meaning stronger than revelation.”

“I think choosing is meaning,” I say.

She looks toward Anita. “And if she chooses wrong with the shard?”

Anita answers before I can. “Then he stops me. Sira stops me. Brakk probably insults me until I reconsider. Other people get a say. That is the difference between stewardship and doctrine.”

Brakk nods. “I am very prepared to insult you responsibly.”

Anita smiles through tears. “I know.”

Another section of ceiling drops at the far end of the junction, blocking one of the false corridors. Brakk swears and yanks the anchor control free.

“Touching vows are over,” he says. “Reality has resumed trying to kill us.”

I turn toward the amber-lit corridor. “Then we leave.”

Sira supports Brakk as he resets the escape route. Rolaev follows at a distance, no longer an ally, not forgiven, not trusted, but moving with us because collapse does not care about moral categories. Anita slips the shard into the reinforced case strapped across her body, then checks the seal twice.

I take position at the rear despite her glare.

“You are hurt,” she says.

“So are you.”

“I am less structurally important in combat.”

“You are more important in every other way.”

“That was a dirty argument.”

“It was effective.”

She steps close, rises on her toes, and touches her forehead briefly to my chest where the armor is burned away. “Come with me, not behind me.”

The request is quiet enough that only I hear it.

I look at the corridor ahead, at the collapse behind, at the woman before me who has become the first faith I build knowingly rather than inherit blindly.

I move beside her.

Together, we run as the ruins tear apart around us, and every step feels like a vow made without witness from heaven.

CHAPTER 29