Page 31 of Orc’s Bones

She opened the research case on the courtyard stone and drew two pages of dense notation — the frequency mapping approach she’d been developing when the vote happened, extended into the new problem. “He sacrificed fidelity for transfer speed to make it work, which means the array’s outer ring elements are vulnerable to a counter-resonance barrier tuned to the fidelity frequency rather than the transfer frequency. He doesn’t know I know that because he doesn’t know how I would have solved the problem.”

“You would have solved it differently.”

“I would have solved it correctly. His solution has a gap where the fidelity transfer belongs. If the counter-resonance barrier I build targets that gap, the array can’t compensate.” She held the pages out toward him. “It’ll collapse from the outside in rather than the inside out. The relic stays intact. Your lineage anchor survives. Malverek’s array dies.”

He took the pages.

He looked at them and at her. The heat of it had nowhere to land — she’d brought back the key to ending this, stood in front of him without apology or theater, and the more he looked at her the worse the problem got. Not the tactical problem. The other one.

He crossed the space between the tactical problem and the other one, and held both where they were.

But Varek was at the gate and Serah Vell was six meters away, and there was work to do.

“You don’t go alone again.”

It came out low. Not a tactical directive. Low that sat in the chest.

She heard it. Her eyes moved across his face with attention the words didn’t require — then she answered, the fraction her chin had lifted telling him everything before she spoke.

“I know.”

Not compliance. Acknowledgment. He read the difference and it landed in his chest and he left it there.

He stepped back. Let the space return.

Serah Vell had not moved or spoken through any of it. She had the quiet of someone who understood that the room she was in was not hers right now, and the intelligence to hold that understanding without making it obvious. Thruk filed it the way he filed everything that might be useful.

“Vell. You’re staying in the Cathedral tonight. Korven’s at the secondary gate — you’re under his watch until I say otherwise. Not negotiable.”

She looked at Xya once — a look that was both a question and a statement — and then she walked toward the secondary gate.

The signal she’d caught at the Archive entrance had been the sharpest read of the night. Thruk filed that without saying it.

Varek didn’t argue the decision. He fell into step.

“What you’re feeling about her,” he said after three strides. “Keep it separate until this is finished.”

“You’re not wrong,” Thruk said.

Varek turned briefly — the look of a man who’d braced to argue and received agreement instead. Then he kept walking. “She’s worth it. That’s not nothing.”

It wasn’t nothing. That was the exact problem.

She was ready at the Crypt entrance before he was.

Research case. A secondary instrument set he hadn’t seen before — compact, bone-handled, the tools of someone who worked in tight spaces with no margin. The channels in his forearms were still lit from the Crypt fight. The braids pulled back tighter than they’d been since she arrived.

She heard him come through the passage junction and looked up. No preamble.

“The counter-resonance barrier has to be anchored at the lowest lineage tier. That means we go all the way down — past mid-level, past the Aldrath alcoves, down to the founding chamber.”

“I know where the founding chamber is.”

“Good. Because the founding chamber is also where Malverek’s array is centered.” She held his gaze. “We’re not only building the barrier. We’re going into the room where he’s been working.”

“And if he’s there.”

“Then we proceed.”