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“The access records —”

“Pulling them now.” Elder Voss started talking about procedural review. Tor stopped listening to Elder Voss.

Gerri, without lifting her eyes from her tin, selected another pastry. “He’s going to get to the part where it was actually for their own good in about three minutes.” She considered the pastry. “I’ve heard this speech four times.” The room went briefly sideways. Tor did not spare Elder Voss’s expression a glance. He had already decided to study the table until the moment passed.

The access log reached Drayce’s tablet before Elder Voss finished his first point. Drayce angled the screen toward Tor under the edge of the table. One name had opened the restricted archive four times in the past year: Selrick Dorne. No department listed, and a badge photo of a pale man with dark hair, in a flat government light that couldn’t quite make his eyes ordinary. Tor had never seen the man. One glance at the photo and he understood what Mirelle had meant by weight he hadn’t earned.

Drayce put the name before the Council, and they revoked Selrick Dorne’s credentials before the session closed. Pike texted from the field: the address was empty, packed up well ahead of the need. The operation wasn’t gone, but Selrick was out of reach. Nobody said it out loud, because saying it out loud meant acknowledging how long he’d gone undetected.

Gerri Wilder, from the chair by the door: “For what it’s worth, the person who passed those records along knew full well what they were doing.” She held up the pastry tin toward Elder Voss. “Cardamom? No? Suit yourself.” Elder Voss began to respond. Gerri fixed him with a steady, patient stare. She’d heard this exact speech before and had already decided how it would end. He did not finish the sentence.

The alert came through Tor’s radio minutes later: someone was in the shoreline tunnels on valid credentials, and no maintenance was scheduled. Tor was on his feet before it finished transmitting.

Mirelle sat on the corridor floor outside the chamber, her back against the wall, her notebook open. He’d told her to wait there rather than in the room, because introducing her to Elder Voss at this moment would not have served anyone. The Lantern hovered the way it did when she worked through a problem. She lifted her head as he came through the door. “Tunnel breach. Unauthorized access. We’re going.” He turned his phone toward her. “Selrick Dorne. Badge photo from the archive log.”

Her face went still. “That’s him.” She was already standing. “I know where the entrance is. Bexley mapped it. She had the coordinates.”

“You’re not —”

“Tor.” She held his gaze. “The pillar that failed this morning was the northern anchor. This tunnel connects to the eastern one. If the breach is moving underground, that’s next, and if my magic is what stabilizes these things —”

Drayce came through the door behind Tor. “Her reasoning is correct. Let her come.”

Tor had held one opinion since the alert: she wasn’t going in there alone, and he wasn’t leaving her behind, and those two facts pointed to one conclusion. “Stay behind me.”

“I’ll stay with you,” she corrected.

Tor chose not to argue the distinction.

She found the tunnel entrance before he did. The access panel was set into the cliff face, disguised as weathered stone and visible only because Bexley’s map had marked the spot. Mirelle had memorized it as insurance.

She moved toward the thing she was afraid of, he noted. He followed. This, it seemed, was who they were now.

The tunnel ran narrow and utility-lit, the ward connections visible in the walls, the ocean audible through the rock, as it always was in enclosed spaces near water. Everything slightly louder than it should be. Cold stone, mineral salt, and underneath those: a wrongness. Tor tracked it. Mirelle tracked it too. He could tell by the way she’d moved forward, then stopped, the Lantern dimming slightly at her left. “The eastern anchor. That’s where it’s coming from.”

“How far?”

“Left branch, fifty yards.”

“How do you know?”

“The Lantern’s avoiding it.” The small ovoid drifted right instead of straight. “Same as on his stretch of the boardwalk. It goes around whatever’s wrong.” His eyes went to the Lantern. Then to her. “Fifty yards.” They went left.

The eastern anchor should have been dark and stable. It was neither. The anchor was lit from below, Rift light at close range, not the slow seep of a distant breach. Immediate. Opening. Tor pulled Mirelle behind him. She went without arguing, which meant she had already assessed and agreed.

The breach opened. Not gradually. One moment the tunnel floor was the tunnel floor; the next it wasn’t, and something came through, large, dark-edged, and far older than the boardwalk creatures. The kind that had been behind the barrier for ages.

His wolf was through with waiting for permission. Tor shifted. Fully. This time nothing in him tried to hold any of it back. Years of standing alone on this exact stretch of coast fell off him in one motion, and beneath the fury was something that hadn’t been there on the cliff or in the forest: her, right behind him, already answering before he’d finished moving. For the first time since he took this post, he wasn’t carrying it alone. Tor’s wolf hit the creature with all the years he’d spent defending this shoreline, and he wasn’t finished. The creature was large. Tor was larger. He drove it back toward the breach. Behind him, Mirelle used her magic: light, warmth, the amber-gold of her summons flooding the tunnel, ward-warm and wrong for anything that came through a Rift. He did not turn around. He trusted her. Her instincts had been right every time.

The creature dissolved. He shifted back.

The tunnel was quiet. The breach had pulled back, him driving it from one side, her light surrounding it from the other, both of them working it without having planned to. Mirelle was beside him. She put her hand on his arm, the one that kept getting hurt, and the Lantern’s warmth came through her palm. “I’m fine.”

“I know.” She didn’t move her hand. “Still checking.”

He stood in the tunnel, Mirelle’s hand on his arm, the breach small in the distance behind them. Dim light from the utility lamp lay on her face, the Lantern steady at her left, the amber-gold still faintly in the air around her. Tor thought of only two things. One: this was what partnership meant, going in with her instead of managing her from a distance. Two: she would want to check the arm again on the way out, and he would let her, and he’d known that for the past ten seconds.

Pike showed up thirty seconds later with Maelin and Drayce, breathing hard from a dead run, and he wasn’t about to admit it. “Maelin.”