Page 6 of Bite Bonded Bride

I study her for a moment longer than is strictly necessary. She is injured with a gash along her left temple that has been bleeding long enough to dry into a dark line, and the way she holds her right arm suggests something in the shoulder is wrong. Unarmed except for the tools still strapped to her body: chalk pouches, a measuring cord, a battered map case. No blade. No secondary weapon. Nothing that reads as deliberate concealment.

Scouts travel in pairs and carry steel. This woman carries chalk.

"Name," I say.

She looks directly at me. Does not look away. "Cybele."

Just the name. No title, no begging, no attempt to make herself smaller. I had expected at least one of those.

"Cybele," I repeat, tasting the shape of it without meaning to. "I am Zareth."

I watch her face for recognition. There is none. Her brow does not shift. Her breathing does not change. The name that has made grown Vrakken warriors recalibrate their posture in a doorway lands on her like any other arrangement of sounds. Which tells me more about the state of surface knowledge than any intelligence report Veyrik has managed to produce in the last decade.

They think we are extinct. Or myth. Or both.

"Who sent you into the lower passages?" I ask.

"A foreman named Theren. He hired me to map unstable tunnels near the Wildspont."

"And the others? Who came down with you?"

"No one. I work alone." She says it the way people state facts they are tired of explaining. "I fell through a floor I didn't know was a floor. That part wasn't in the contract."

Veyrik makes a sound low in his throat. I lift one finger and he goes quiet.

"You triggered an ancient mechanism," I say. "One that has been sealed for longer than any surface human has been alive. And you expect me to believe that was an accident."

"I expect you to believe whatever you decide to believe," she says. "But yes. It was an accident. I touched a pressure stone I thought was a standard load-bearing formation, the floor gave way, and I fell for what felt like a very long time." She pauses. "I hit the bottom harder."

Consistent. No ornamentation.

Fabricated accounts reach for detail in the wrong places, they over-explain motivations, under-explain sequences. Her account moves the way a genuine memory moves: forward, with friction, with the small ugly specifics that no one bothers to invent.

She stumbled into my kingdom. Alone. By accident.

"Who is expecting your return to the surface?"

"My foreman knows I went down. He's expecting a preliminary report by nightfall."

"Anyone else?"

An expression moves across her face. Not quite grief, and not quite fear, more complicated. "My brother. But he doesn't know where exactly I am."

I hold her gaze. She does not look away. I have spoken to diplomats, council elders, and enemy commanders who could not manage what this human woman is doing right now. She's standing injured and chained in front of what should terrify her but instead, holding eye contact like it is the only thing she still controls.

It irritates me and holds my attention.

"She's not a threat," I say finally, and I mean it the way I mean mathematical conclusions. No sentiment attached. "She's a cartographer who fell down a hole."

"She knows we exist," Veyrik says.

"Which is a problem with a clean solution." I meet his gaze. "Memory erasure. Remove the last four days, return her to the surface before her foreman's deadline. She wakes up with a gap she'll attribute to a head injury and a mapping contract she'll never be able to complete."

Veyrik's expression says he would prefer a less complicated solution. I ignore it.

"Take her to the restoration chamber. I want a healer present, I'm not returning a corpse to the surface and inviting questions." I look back at Cybele. "You will not be harmed."

"You say that to everyone you chain up?"