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Then Valene arrived. She came from the direction of the café, an enchanted salt-blend canister under one arm, a cast-iron pan in the other, and fury all over her face. The pan was a physical and magical weapon, eleven inches across and unafraid of Rift-corrupted creatures. “I did not survive three bad engagements to die like this!” she announced at a volume that carried past the vendor stalls and somewhere into the water.

The remaining creature appeared to reconsider its available options.

It did not reconsider fast enough. Valene threw the enchanted salt in arcs honed over seven years of managing a ward-reactive café. The creature hit the salt line and dissolved with a sound like a struck bell. Bexley: “Three.”

Garnet: “Four more.”

“I can feel the breach. The pillar’s gone.”

Valene, deploying additional salt in a practiced arc: “How do you feel the breach?”

“I don’t know how. I just do.”

“That’s new.”

“Everything is new. I’m handling it.”

“You’re handling it,” Valene agreed, in the tone she used when she was grudgingly impressed and wouldn’t make it easy. Mirelle raised her head. Four more at the dock line, larger than the first three. Dark-edged, directed, spreading.

Okay. Still handling it. She named what she needed and the magic answered.

The second wave came through the dock line. Mirelle took them in and decided. She stopped managing the magic and gave it direction instead. She named what she needed: not careful, not managed, not smaller-than. The Lantern blazed gold-white, the Margot cohort multiplied, and three new summons arrived that she hadn’t called before. Larger. Ward-bright. The kind that came when the magic finally had enough room.

Oh. There you are.

She sent them forward.

Garnet anchored the south end without being told, the salt canister open, working the creature with the same three unwasted motions she brought to everything. Valene held the vendor row line with cast iron, her expression suggesting the new creatures had made a significant personal error. Bexley called positions from the notebook as if she were conducting, which she was.

And Fiora.

Mirelle caught it only in her peripheral vision: Fiora moving through the east approach, not like someone who’d been practicing quietly. Like someone who’d always known what she was doing and had been waiting for permission or necessity, and necessity had finally arrived. She closed the north gap with a sharp, clean ward-flash, far more than Mirelle had seen her do before.

Another creature dissolved. “Fiora.”

“Later.” Already moving. The next creature tried the same gap another had used during the forest patrol, and Mirelle closed it before it cleared the line. Not fear. Knowledge: months of paying attention had taught her where the gaps were, and the pattern no longer worked against her.

One more creature dissolved.

Mirelle stood on the boardwalk with the Lantern blazing at her side and the salt lines holding, and said: “Is that all of them?”

Garnet: “I don’t see any more.” Althea’s voice came from behind her. “Good.” Mirelle turned.

Althea had arrived sometime in the last two minutes, from the residential street, breathing hard from what had to be a two-block run and not planning to mention it. Her eyes swept the salt lines and the summons, still holding. Garnet, Fiora, and Valene were at their posts, and Mirelle stood at the center of it all. “Good.” Flat and certain, and she meant it. “That’s right.”

Valene lowered the cast-iron pan. “I want it noted that I ran here from the café and I’m wearing my good apron.”

“Noted.”

“The apron has embroidery.”

“Also noted.” Bexley was writing. She had, Mirelle saw, already moved to a new pen color.

The boardwalk had gone quiet the way places did after something had happened in them. Mirelle stood at the north dock and studied the spot where the pillar had been.

Gone. The crack from the cliff fight had spread through the ward over weeks, and now nothing remained but a silent patch and a stretch of dock that needed real work. She noted it for the report, then let herself breathe. She felt eyes on her.

Not the tourist kind. The other kind. She turned.