Rocher's boots scraped against the rock wall as he edged sideways along the st stretch of the overflow passage.

  The stone here had narrowed to a snted lip no wider than his foot, with bck water moving below and a jagged wall pressing close at his shoulder. Francine clung to his back with both arms locked around his neck, her light held out past his shoulder to show the next handhold. Behind them Evelyn moved with graceful ease, one hand on the wall, nose lifted slightly.

  "This way," Evelyn said quietly.

  He shifted his grip, found the next jut of stone, and hauled himself sideways. Francine's weight pulled at his bance, but he compensated automatically now. The cavern beyond the wall was wider than the passage had any right to suggest. Darkness opened below them in a broad bowl of still water and pale sediment shelves.

  Then a faint skittering reached them.

  Rocher stopped.

  It was not the soft scrape of loose grit. It was many small hard sounds yered together, rapid and dry.

  Seraphine's voice came sharp from behind him.

  "Stop."

  Everyone froze.

  A breath ter she squeezed forward far enough to raise one hand past his shoulder. "There," she whispered.

  Francine turned her light.

  The beam swept across a shelf of pale stone jutting from the far side of the chamber.

  Rocher immediately wished that it hadn't.

  A giant fish carcass sprawled across the shelf, split open from throat to belly. Its rib cage had been peeled apart. White flesh hung in ragged ribbons. Dark blood had dried in thick streaks over the rock.

  The carcass was moving.

  Not because it lived, but because it was covered.

  Beetles swarmed over it in a dense, shifting mass. Each one was the size of a hound, shell bck and wetly reflective, their jointed legs hooked against the stone as they climbed over one another to reach the meat. Mandibles worked in relentless rhythm, sawing through skin and cartige with a sound like knives dragged over ceramic.

  Rocher's stomach twisted.

  Then his eyes caught something beside the carcass.

  Ash. A bckened circle of stones. A colpsed spit of sharpened rock.

  The remains of a fire.

  His heart smmed once against his ribs.

  Cire.

  Rocher moved before the thought had even finished forming.

  He threw himself off the ledge.

  "Rocher, wait—" Evelyn snapped.

  Too te.

  He hit the shelf in a crouch hard enough to jar Francine loose.

  "Down," he said.

  She slid from his back and stumbled clear just as the nearest beetle reared from the carcass with horrifying speed.

  Its mandibles spread wide. The inner edges were serrated. Wet strings of flesh dangled between them.

  Rocher cut through its neck joint before it could lunge.

  Bck fluid sprayed the stone.

  The beetle convulsed and toppled sideways.

  The rest of the swarm exploded into motion.

  Several beetles dropped from the carcass and came at him low and fast, legs hammering against the stone. One leapt high enough that he saw the hooked undersides of its forelimbs reaching for his face.

  Evelyn nded beside him in a spray of grit.

  "I said wait—" she said, and drove both bdes up through the leaping beetle's underside.

  Its momentum carried it over her shoulder in a thrashing arc.

  Rocher pivoted and split another across the thorax. The shell cracked with a sickening sound, but not cleanly. The creature kept moving, half severed, its mandibles snapping until Evelyn finished it with a thrust behind the head.

  "Careful," she said. "They're fast."

  "Yes," Rocher said tightly, because one was coming at his leg.

  He stamped its head into the stone and brought his sword down through the softened joint.

  More peeled away from the carcass.

  Too many.

  A white-blue line tore across the shelf in front of them.

  Lightning struck stone with a deafening crack.

  The lead rank of beetles burst apart, shells rupturing, legs flung wide as steam and the stink of scorched ichor filled the chamber. Seraphine came down in the center of the shelf a heartbeat ter, boots skidding through ash. Pulseweaver bzed in one hand. Her other was already raised.

  Heat punched outward.

  A sphere of fire swelled over her palm, bright orange at the core and white at the edges, so hot the air around it shimmered. Rocher felt the skin of his face tighten.

  The beetles stopped.

  A dozen bck bodies crouched low in a ragged semicircle around the fish and the intruders. Antennae quivered. Mandibles opened and shut.

  Seraphine drew her arm back to cast.

  Then the swarm broke, scattering all at once.

  Some hurled themselves off the far side of the shelf into darkness. Others vanished into fissures in the rock wall, their bodies somehow fttening enough to disappear where no creature their size should have fit.

  In seconds the shelf was nearly empty again.

  Seraphine held the fireball another moment, then slowly let it gutter out. Steam and smoke drifted upward.

  Rocher wiped bck ichor from his cheek with the back of his wrist.

  Evelyn sniffed once, then again.

  "This is it," she said, looking toward the ash circle. Her face hardened. "Those bugs were attracted by the smell of cooked fish, same as us."

  The words went through Rocher like a bde.

  The fire was fresh. Not old enough to have been washed away. Beside it y fish bones stripped nearly clean. A fttened pce on the stone where someone had sat. Scrape marks. Sediment disturbed by repeated steps.

  "Search," he said. "Now."

  His voice came out wrong. Too harsh. Too thin.

  He forced a gentler register. "Find me a ribbon. Or a track leading away."

  Francine swallowed and nodded, lifting her light higher.

  Rocher crossed to the pce where the fish had been butchered.

  The cuts in the spine were Cire's kind of work. Efficient. Economical. He recognized her mind in it and hated how much comfort that gave him.

  Please, he thought. Please have left. Please be long gone from here.

  "Rocher."

  Francine's voice was small.

  He looked up.

  She stood near the ashes with something glittering in her palm. Gss caught the light.

  A broken vial.

  The neck was snapped. The body cracked down one side. Mud clung to the inside.

  "No..." Evelyn had gone very still near the wall.

  In her hand was a bundle of wet cloth.

  Rocher crossed the shelf in three strides.

  It was a shirt.

  Cire's shirt.

  He knew it before it was unfolded. Knew it from the torn seam at one shoulder, from the fabric worn thin at the cuff where she habitually pushed her sleeves back when working, from the stains that had once been spilled reagent and now were muddied by water and something darker.

  His mind rejected the sight outright.

  Evelyn's face had drained of color. "I found it snagged in the rock."

  Rocher took the shirt from her.

  It was tattered.

  Cold.

  Still faintly hers.

  The world narrowed to the fabric in his hands.

  He dropped to his knees.

  Not because he chose to. Because his body simply stopped answering to anything else.

  He pressed the shirt to his face.

  Heather. Clover. Enough of her remained in the cloth to break him.

  "I'm sorry," he said into it.

  His shoulders shook once, then again.

  "I'm sorry. I was too te. I should've been there. I should've—"

  The rest tore out of him as a raw, ugly sound. He buried his face deeper in the shirt and screamed into it, the noise muffled by wet fabric and grief.

  The cavern threw the sound back at them.

  A small pop.

  Then again.

  A wet little bubble breaking.

  Everyone turned.

  At the edge of the shelf, where pale silt had drifted into the shallows, Francine slowly lowered her light toward the water. The surface looked nearly solid from above, a smooth yer of suspended sediment stretched over darker depth below.

  Another bubble rose and burst.

  Something metallic stuck up through the silt at a snt. Narrow. Hollow.

  A breathing tube.

  Rocher dropped the shirt and dove into the murky water.

  I kept my eyes closed because opening them was pointless.

  The water was filth.

  Silt pressed against my shes and slid into every corner of my face. The metal tube between my teeth was the only thing keeping the world above connected to the one below. Each breath came through it tasting of mud and old mineral.

  Sound traveled badly underwater. What reached me arrived as dull tremors and muffled impacts, stripped of shape. I had no idea whether the beetles were still on the shelf above me or had lost interest and gone. I only knew that when Phymera stopped answering, the silence afterward had become harder to bear than the water.

  I had tried, before this, to put on a brave face for her.

  For Phymera, who had been so afraid—so ready to be left behind—I had tried to sound clever. Resourceful. In control.

  Then I saw lights in the dark and all of that false bravado vanished at once.

  Rescue.

  I had leapt for it emotionally before I knew what it was, and that one stupid, needy fre of hope had nearly gotten us killed.

  Phymera had always been right about me.

  Somewhere under all my pnning and performance and self-control, I was just as scared as she was. No matter how I postured, I was still the kind of person who'd reached for the party the instant I thought they were close.

  I ughed bitterly at myself.

  Useful. Competent.

  Needed.

  I had spent so long pretending I deserved to be called that.

  Instead I had thrown myself into the water, gambling my life on one simple observation: the beetles had come down the wall, not through the water.

  Maybe they couldn't swim. Maybe they wouldn't follow me.

  Maybe—

  WHUMP.

  Something dispced the water beside me—a heavy body plowing through the silt.

  My heart stopped.

  Wrong again.

  I felt it seize me by the waist, knocking the breath out of me.

  My eyes flew open into brown blindness. I thrashed violently, panic taking over before thought.

  The thing holding me did not let go.

  It hauled me upward.

  Air hit my face. I broke the surface coughing hard enough to see sparks.

  I twisted, kicked, cwed at whatever had me. My wrists were caught before I could strike. Then the silt cleared enough for a face to resolve in front of mine.

  Rocher.

  He was caked in dirt from head to toe, hair pstered with mud, verdant eyes wide and wet and disbelieving.

  For a second I just stared at him.

  Then he dragged me against his chest so hard it hurt.

  "I was sure I'd lost you," he said, his voice cracking on the st word. "I'm so, so gd you're alive."

  I went rigid in surprise more than anything else. Rocher had always worn his feelings pinly, but this was different. This was grief not yet convinced it had been interrupted in time.

  My hands hovered uselessly for one strange heartbeat.

  Then I let myself sag against him and hugged him back.

  "I'm here," I said, though it came out rough from water and silt. "Rocher. I'm here."

  His hold tightened.

  Over his shoulder I saw Seraphine approaching fast, relief written nakedly across her face in a way she would normally hate to have noticed. Evelyn was right behind her, eyes moving over me with quick practical assessment: breathing, bleeding, level of consciousness.

  Then her gaze dropped.

  "What is that?" she asked.

  I followed her stare to my own hand.

  The metal tube I had been breathing through was still there—until it wasn't.

  The surface softened in my grip with a faint shifting whisper. Ptes slid. Edges narrowed. The dull cylinder lengthened and fttened as if remembering a different shape.

  A narrow bck stiletto finished forming in my hand, wet and perfectly banced.

  For a disoriented moment I didn't understand what I was seeing.

  Then I did.

  My chest hollowed out all over again.

  "Phymera," I said quietly. "In order to save my life, she made herself a living weapon."

  I turned the bde once in my hand. It was elegant. Banced. Deadly. The sort of thing I might have admired in my worst moments.

  "She was originally meant to become Rocher's," I said. "At least, that was the intent. By freeing Danzig, we'd technically fulfilled her request."

  Rocher loosened his hold enough to look down at the bde. This, too, felt like something I had broken.

  I swallowed.

  "Phymera?"

  Nothing.

  No dry remark. No correction. No faintly offended silence that still felt like presence.

  The bde remained only a bde, shimmering faintly.

  My vision blurred and I blinked hard against it.

  Phymera had never outright trusted me. She'd often argued. Questioned. Mocked.

  But in the end, when the choice mattered, she had still pced her life in my hands.

  "Thank you," I said, because leaving it unsaid felt unbearable.

  I pressed her close to my chest.

  Seraphine's expression shifted as pieces connected behind her eyes.

  "That expins Halbrecht," she murmured. "Or part of him, at least. The deal with the rest of Phymera. Why he summoned us all to the Forge."

  I blinked. "He did?"

  I looked from her to Evelyn, then beyond them.

  Francine stood on the shelf with the light, pale and muddy.

  The absence hit me instantly. "Where's Lumiere?"

  Evelyn and Seraphine exchanged a worried look.

  "She went on ahead," Evelyn said. "To answer the summons along with the priests and the rest of the padins."

  "To keep Halbrecht in check," Seraphine added.

  Every remnant of exhaustion vanished under a fresh spike of arm.

  I pushed myself away from Rocher and staggered upright. The world tilted once, then settled. My legs hated me. My clothes clung cold and heavy. None of it mattered.

  "We have to go," I said.

  I bent, snatched up the stiletto that had once been my sarcastic metal companion, and forced my numb fingers tight around the hilt.

  "Lumiere's in grave danger."