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“Clearly one of our own broke the formation,” another voice said. “No human could have stopped this alone. We should have listened.”

“But who among us would think to stop a—”

“I know who.” The voice came from the far side of the circle, and Maia knew it before he lowered his hood: the silver scars, the unhurried tilt of the head. Bleddyn. “We are all thinking it. He is not here. He has not come for three nights.”

No one answered.

“You all saw him in the ruins,” Bleddyn went on. “Stood between her and me in front of half the hall. He told me she would not be touched.” He paused. “Ask yourselves when Caelith last said that about any of the girls he’s been with down there.”

“Bleddyn,” Safir said, very quietly, “You are standing in a circle he drew.” He did not look at Bleddyn. “He would not betray us for a scribe.”

“Then where is he?”

No one answered.

“We will find out whose hand it was,” Safir said. He looked down at his own palm, the silver line already closing. “And when we do, we will ask him what the girl is to him.”

Maia’s heart twisted, the memory of silver light and shadow flaring violently in the Archive rushing back. The Archive. The fragments. The night she had nearly died. It hadn’t been chance. It hadn’t even been the Fracture, not really. It had been arranged, planned, discussed in a room like this one, by voices that spoke of her almost-death like it was a mere statistic.

And Caelith knew about it.

Something clattered behind them, just a shifting of stone, but every Umbralyn in the courtyard went still at once, heads turning in perfect, silent unison, like a single creature with six faces. For one unbearable second, nobody in the corridor breathed.

Then Selinne’s hand closed like a vice around Maia’s wrist and they ran. The two of them slipping into the darker corridor as fast and silently as they could manage before any of those shadow-drunk figures could turn.

They didn’t stop running until the corridor opened into a broader walkway, where the faint glow of ward-lights offered the illusion of safety. Both girls leaned against the wall, breaths sharp and uneven.

Selinne was shaking so hard her teeth clicked. She pressed a fist to her mouth, eyes wide and glassy. “Maia, they would have killed us. They would have—”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.

“I know,” Maia whispered, though the words barely found any shape. The voices still echoed.

One of our own.

They didn’t know yet who stopped the wraith. But they suspected.

And now she knew that the wraith was meant to be there. That the Umbralyn weren’t there to protect Eryssan at all.

And Caelith had stopped their plans. Not, as she understood now with a horror that had nothing to do with the creature, because he opposed whatever this was. Not because he’d chosen a side. He’d stopped it because it came for her, she decided. But if the Wraith had simply taken the fragments and left, if she and Julen had never been touched, would he have let it happen?

She didn’t know. And not knowing was its own kind of sickness.

“Maia?” Selinne’s hand found her arm again. “Are you all right? You look… pale.”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

Selinne looked at her for a long moment, and Maia watched the fear settle into something steadier behind her eyes. The look of someone deciding to be brave because the alternative was worse. “We can’t tell anyone,” Selinne said quietly. “You understand that? Not the masters, not the other Guardians. We don’t even know who we’d be telling.” Her voice dropped further. “We weren’t supposed to hear any of that. If they find out we did—”

“I know,” Maia said.

“I mean it.” Selinne’s grip tightened. “Whatever this is, it’s bigger than us. And right now the only people who know what we know are standing in this corridor.” She held Maia’s gaze. “So it’s you and me. We keep it between us until we work out what to do with it. Agreed?”

Maia nodded slowly. Something had shifted between them in the last few minutes: they had walked into that annexe as friends and were walking out as something more binding than that.

“Agreed,” she said.

Only then did Selinne let go, glancing toward the deepening dark beyond the arches. “I have to return to my family home before the curfew. My mother doesn’t manage the stairs on her own, and she won’t settle until I’m in. Especially not with the bells like this.” She squeezed Maia’s arm one last time. “Be careful getting to your quarters, I’ll see you up here later. Promise me.”