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“Maia.”

“I can hold it,” she said again, sharper. “Just tell me what we did wrong.”

He nodded once. “The resonance broke because we let it match too closely,” he said. “Two currents moving as one are not strong enough. It needs friction, not harmony. You push toward the threshold. I push against you, toward it from the other side. The ward wasn’t built to resist two forces working against each other in the same space. Only one, or two, moving together.”

“That sounds worse.”

“It will hurt more,” he agreed. “But it might work.”

They had modelled for two people moving together. But nobody had accounted for two people willing to hurt each other to get through.

Then a sound came from above them. Footsteps, rapid and heavy, somewhere in the structure above.

“They know,” Julen said sharply from the corridor. “Something just changed up there. I can hear them moving.”

“Then we don’t have time to be careful,” Caelith said. “Maia. Now.”

She raised the shard the third time. Her hands were shaking badly enough now that she had to force her grip closed around it, and when his hand closed over hers, she felt, for the first time, that his was shaking too.

“Hold,” Caelith said to Maia, low and urgent. “Don’t stop. No matter what it looks like.”

She didn’t. The light between their hands was built wrong this time, jagged where it had been smooth, straining against itself in the way Caelith had described rather than flowing together. And it hurt in a way the first two hadn’t, a grinding resistant pain that ran up through her wrists into her teeth.

The ward’s markings didn’t blaze steadily now, they flickered violently, fighting the friction rather than absorbing it.

Her vision blurred at the edges.

“Caelith—”

“I know. Don’t let go.”

The footsteps above grew louder. Closer.

The threshold split.

It wasn’t clean. It was a jagged collapse of pressure that sent a shockwave through the room, cracking the stone along the wall, and filling the air with the sharp, acrid scent of discharged Fracture energy. Maia’s knees buckled fully this time and she didn’t have the strength to catch herself. Caelith moved.

He crossed.

The ward screamed, reverberating through stone and bone alike. Maia was thrown backward, her shoulders striking the wall behind her, the shard skittering across the floor. The light extinguished. The markings went dark.

Above them, the footsteps broke into a run.

For a moment, everything was very still.

Then Julen was beside her, pulling her upright. “Are you—”

“I’m fine.” She wasn’t entirely sure that was true, but she was standing. She looked up.

Caelith stood on the other side of the threshold. Outside it, for the first time since they took him.

He was breathing hard, one hand braced against the corridor wall, but his eyes were already moving. Then they found her, and stopped.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“Ask me later,” she said. “We need to move.”

From somewhere above them, deep in the cliff structure, something shifted. A change in the resonance, and hushed voices beneath it.