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Anita looks up at me with tears cutting clean tracks through the dust on her face. “Teren?”
I have killed men with less pain than this answer costs me.
“He told me to tell you he was right.”
Her face breaks.
I stand there in the dark with blood on my hands and dust in my lungs, holding the line between the woman fate claims is mine and the violence coming to take her.
Above the sealed tunnel, a distorted transmission bleeds through the comm static one final time.
“The Choir of Revelation has entered the deep.”
Then the signal dies, and the ruins close around us.
CHAPTER 7
ANITA
The tunnel behind us has become a grave marker made of collapsed stone, twisted support beams, and dead comm static.
Dust hangs so thickly in the air that every breath tastes like scorched metal and powdered glass. My lungs ache from smoke and panic. Emergency lamps flicker weakly along the lower passage, staining the black ruin walls in alternating washes of amber and blood-red light. Somewhere beyond the collapse, the excavation site burns under Choir control while the last dying fragments of surface communications crackle through Ghar’s wrist comm in broken bursts of static.
I clutch the archive case against my chest hard enough that the reinforced corners dig into my ribs.
Teren’s blood is still smeared across one side.
I keep staring at it because the alternative is thinking too clearly, and thinking too clearly means remembering his smile through the dust and gunfire. It means remembering the way he mouthed don’t before the second volley tore through the smoke. It means remembering that his final joke somehow survived longer than he did.
He told me to tell you he was right.
The memory loops through my skull with vicious persistence.
Brakk coughs hard enough to double over, then wipes black dust from his muzzle with the back of one thick hand. “We need to move before those choir-singing lunatics find another way down here,” he growls, his voice rough from smoke inhalation. “I am not dying underground because a death cult got emotionally invested in architecture.”
Sira stands near the collapsed tunnel with one pale hand braced against the wall. Soot streaks her silver-white skin, but her composure remains infuriatingly intact. The emergency lights catch in her eyes, making her look less like a frightened academic and more like a spirit wandering through a tomb she remembers from childhood.
“They will continue pursuing us,” she says quietly. “The archive fragments altered the situation.”
I let out a bitter laugh that does not sound remotely sane. “That’s one way to describe it. I woke up an impossible artifact, transmitted a signal into space, and accidentally invited murder priests to dinner.”
“You did not order the attack,” Ghar says.
I look at him sharply.
He stands several feet away, broad shoulders angled toward the collapsed passage behind us, sidearm low in one hand while his attention sweeps the darkness automatically. Blood has dried near his hairline where falling debris split the skin. Dust clings to the black scales along his jaw and throat. Even exhausted and injured, he still positions himself between me and every possible threat without appearing aware that he is doing it.
“The Choir chose murder,” he says again, his voice low and controlled.
“I activated the archive.”
“You did not pull their triggers.”
“No,” I snap, tightening my grip on the case. “I just rang the damn bell.”
Brakk points a grimy finger toward me. “Kid, as the expedition’s leading authority on blaming scholars for catastrophic decisions, I officially declare this one the fault of the homicidal fanatics with plasma rifles.”
Under any other circumstances, the sentence would sound absurd.
