Page 29 of Orc’s Bones

I considered what to tell her and landed on the truth, because Serah Vell had stationed herself at the Archive entrance to monitor a building she hadn’t been asked to monitor, and she’d caught a signal pass that I hadn’t caught, and that was not someone who deserved a partial picture.

“Malverek knows I’m going to dismantle his system. He’s offering to help.”

Her eyes went wide before she controlled it.

“He’s offering to help you dismantle his own system.”

“He wants me to understand it well enough to recognize what’s worth keeping.” I looked at the wall. “He doesn’t want everything destroyed. He wants someone who understands the work to be the one who decides what survives it.” I stepped back. “He thinks I’m the right person for that.”

“Are you?”

I looked at her.

She held it — notes tucked under her arm, the alert eyes that were always running a more thorough assessment than anyone expected from someone her age. She’d asked a direct question and she wasn’t pulling it back.

It was the sharpest question anyone had put to me since I came back through the gateways. Not about the method or the evidence or the timeline. About whether I was the right person. I didn’t have a clean answer and I didn’t have the luxury of finding one standing in the lower district with the clock running.

“I don’t know yet. Come with me.”

“Where?”

“The Cathedral.” I started moving. “I need to tell Thruk I met with Malverek, and I need to tell him before he finds out another way.”

Serah fell into step. The lower district was quiet at this hour, the ghostfire thin between pools of dark.

I’d met the man building it. I’d gotten what I needed from him.

I’d also gotten his offer, which I was not going to think about until I’d talked to Thruk, because thinking about it before that conversation would put me in the position of having decided on an answer before I’d said it aloud, and decisions made in the aftermath of a meeting with Malverek were not decisions I trusted to hold under daylight.

The Cathedral spires rose ahead of us through the lower district rooftops, pale and cold and watching.

Thruk was going to be angry.

Good. He should be.

EIGHT

THRUK

He knew before she walked through the Cathedral gate.

The relay pulse had moved through the bone network at the second hour — he’d read it in the Crypt levels, that disturbance of a sigil responding to proximity, and he’d been tracking its direction back to the Archive when Varek appeared at the passage junction with the expression he wore when he had information Thruk was not going to be pleased to receive.

“She went back to the Archive. Alone.”

Thruk went absolutely motionless for exactly as long as it took him to finish the thought he’d been in the middle of. Then he went up.

He’d been in the Cathedral’s outer courtyard for eleven minutes when the gate opened.

She came through first, walking at the pace she used for everything — unhurried, nothing in her movement acknowledging that she knew what was waiting for her. Serah Vell two steps behind, close enough to be solidarity, smart enough not to be between them.

Xya stopped six meters out and looked at him.

She didn’t apologize. She didn’t open with an explanation. She stood in the ghostfire light of the courtyard with her research case in one hand, her coat carrying the Archive’s cold, and she waited to see what he was going to do about it.

She walked into the Archive alone after we agreed she doesn’t move independently. She knew. She went anyway.

He crossed the courtyard toward her.