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Her eyes checked over him now whenever she entered a situation, he was already in. His forearm. His face. His hands. He watched her confirm he was unhurt, then decide in the same breath that the anchors needed her more than he did.
He stepped aside.
She looked at Colleen. At Tor, standing three feet behind her. At the panel and whoever had clearly had no business using it.
“Is there always this much water in the dramatic confrontations, or is tonight special?”
“Tonight is special.”
“Noted.” She looked back at Colleen. “I’m going to need the whole story later,” she said to Drayce, then went straight to the anchor array. He put his hand on her shoulder as she passed — the briefest contact, the gesture that said he was here and she could do what she needed to do — and her hand came up and pressed his once before she let go, already turning toward the anchor housing, her attention narrowing to what was in front of her the way it did right before she did something difficult.
She put her hands on the anchor housing, and the fire in her palms went out immediately, steady and warm — running clean, the way it had once she’d stopped fighting herself and was doing what she was built for. The fractured wall’s pressure on the anchor array lessened by a degree he could read in the color of the ward lamps.
From the stairs, quietly: the scratch of pen on paper. Pike was writing.
Good. Someone should.
He turned back to Colleen.
“How many council members knew?” He was still staring at the access log. Three sessions. Eighteen months. The number sat there, unchanging.
“None. It was my authorization. My changes. I kept it contained.”
“How many suspected?”
She was quiet longer than the others. “I can’t speak to what other people suspected.”
“Noss. Serath.”
“Noss believes in controlling what people know. He would have approved of the outcome regardless of how it got there.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No. It isn’t.” She looked at the anchor array, at Althea’s hands pressed against the housing. At the fire running in the ward lamps. At the fractured wall, holding under pressure it shouldn’t have been. Her face had gone unreadable — blank, caught somewhere she clearly hadn’t planned to end up. “She’s more effective than I expected.”
“That was the point.”
Colleen looked at him. “I know that now.”
He held the wolf down with the practiced effort of three decades and looked at the woman in front of him — not a villain, not a monster — just dangerous, the way intelligence and fear together make someone dangerous: reasoning that stopped checking itself against what was actually happening. She’d been trying to protect the town. She’d been destroying it in increments, one targeted provocation at a time, too far down the logic chain to see the shape of what she was making.
“Tor.”
Tor slipped in closer to the group.
From the stairs, Pike’s voice: “Do you want me to come down there?”
“No.”
“I have the notebook.”
“Stay on the stairs.”
“The water is knee-deep.” She looked down at it. “I’m noting that for the record.”
“Good.”
The water crested at knee depth shortly after midnight, before the eastern fracture pressure eased enough for it to begin receding. Althea held the anchor array for forty minutes. He gave her part of his attention for the structural assessment and the rest to simply watching her stand in a flooded underground chamber, pressing her hands against ancient stone and holding, without drama, without crisis, without the internal fight he’d watched her wage for weeks against her own fire magic.
