Down was a word with a bottom to it for everyone except Mona.
They went into the seam in a line.
Selah and Maren still chained hand to hand because the second they let go the wall ca down, so they walked sideways shaking and hating it.
Soren had a hand on the mole the whole way because Mona’s map was the only map.
The thing in the dark didn’t move when they ca.
It sat in its rootless place under the yard the whole academy drilled on every morning, and it let them co down to it.
Then it stopped being patient.
The seam closed behind them with a sound like a jaw, and the floor Soren had been standing on a breath ago was gone.
What ca up through it wasn’t the entity.
It was a shape the entity had made out of itself to do its hands’ work, a thing the size of three n with too many joints, and it ca to Yara first.
"Grimm!" Soren said, and Yara was already gone, red eyes blinking out, the wolf landing where the woman had stood.
Grimm took the shape’s first arm in her teeth and Mute ca off her in a wave, and the thing’s roar died in its own throat with nothing behind it.
◆◆◆◆
Their defense was bad.
Selah and Maren couldn’t fight, both their hands were spoken for holding the wall that kept the real weight off them.
The mont either of them broke the chain the Dual-Channel collapsed and the pressure ca down on all.
Troy was good but he was one knight and one man on a ledge that kept crumbling under him.
Dani’s moth lit the cavern pale and that was all Dani’s moth could do.
Grimm was holding the puppet, getting under the Mute, growing a second mouth lower down where the silence couldn’t reach.
Soren ran the board twice and got the sa answer both tis, which was that they were going to lose the wall before they killed the shape.
So he stopped looking at the shape.
He went down on one knee next to the mole, and the mole turned her blunt face up at him with her little useless eyes and her nose going a mile a minute.
Soren said the thing he’d never said to her because she’d never been bonded before to take an order.
"Mona! The roof, all of it on top of that thing. Now!"
She didn’t understand the words.
She understood his frequency, she’d been homing on it since the day the wound opened.
The mole made a sound he’d never heard her make.
Then she went into the floor like it was water.
What happened next, Soren reconstructed afterward from Mona’s map and the way the cavern shrieked.
She dug fast and she dug wrong, the way she did everything.
A tunnel up and to the left that should have been straight, a second one crossing it that no engineer alive would have drawn.
A third one she started and abandoned halfway because she got bored or lost, and the whole ceiling above the puppet turned into a thing held together by nothing but habit.
"Grimm, off it," Soren said. "Troy, off the ledge, NOW!"
Grimm let go and folded into shadow and ca up at Soren’s heel as the wolf again.
Troy threw himself flat against the far wall a half-second before the world fell.
The roof ca down on the puppet in one piece, all of it, a slab of the academy’s own training ground driven straight down into the thing that wore the entity’s hands.
The puppet ca apart under it with a wet final sound, and the pressure on the wall vanished all at once because the hands that made it were paste.
Selah and Maren dropped the chain and dropped to their knees in the sa motion.
[DING! — Hostile construct terminated. Source signature withdrawn.]
Soren felt the puppet die under the slab, he’d felt it go, and the thing that had made it had simply pulled its attention back down into the dark a half-breath before.
◆◆◆◆
Mona didn’t co back up where she’d gone down.
She ca up in the middle of them, through a hole she made, and she was coughing dust and she was very pleased with herself in the way only she could be, and then the system did a thing the system had not warned him about.
Mona didn’t co back up where she’d gone down.
She ca up in the middle of them and she was coughing dust.
She was very pleased with herself in the way only she could be, and the bond-line he’d already tied to her in the dark a day ago ran warm with it.
He’d half expected her to take soul cost the way the others had.
She never had.
The Quill wound had done the wiring before he ever got to her, she’d been homing on his frequency since the day the breach marked her, so the bond had cost him nothing then and it cost him nothing now, it just carried what she felt.
[DING! — Mona. Elent: earth, excavation, terrain. Obsession Index: 1/75. Tar cost: none (wound-tether circuit).]
He was reading it, glad about it in his cold flat way, when the mole stood up.
The shape that pulled itself up out of the dust where the mole had been was not a mole.
It was a woman, mostly, and the mostly was the problem, because she had clearly never done this before and her body hadn’t decided yet which parts of being a mole it was keeping.
Broad through the shoulders, strong in a heavy soft way, dark hair full of dirt that kept moving like it rembered being fur.
She blinked at the cavern with both hands up over her eyes and made a small unhappy noise at Dani’s moth-light, which was the dimst light in the room.
She had no clothes.
She had exactly two assets to her na and they were her tunnel sense and the fact that she could not see.
Right now she was using neither because she was trying to wave at him, walk toward him and shield her eyes all at once, which ant she walked into Troy.
"Augh," said Mona, the first word any of them had heard her say.
Troy turned around very fast and faced the wall.
Soren already had his jacket off.
He got it onto her shoulders from behind before she could find him by frequency and hug sothing.
He took the tinted lenses out of his own field kit, the ones the Bureau issued for surface-glare drills, and he put them on her face himself because she clearly wasn’t going to manage the arms.
The light stopped hurting her. She went still under his hands.
Then she found his frequency at arm’s length and bead at him through the glasses with her whole dirty face and said, "Augh," again, warr this ti.
"She’s naked," said Maren, from the floor, still catching her breath.
◆◆◆◆
He felt the shift before he turned around.
Three of them.
He felt three separate pulls go tight at once, the bond-lines lighting up.
Soren knew without looking what the system was about to tell him because he could feel it in the lines.
"He gave her his jacket," Selah said.
She was looking at the jacket the way she looked at things she was deciding whether to freeze.
"He’s never given his jacket," said Maren.
"You’ve never been naked in a hole," Soren said, which was true and did not help.
Yara hadn’t said anything.
Yara had co back to standing in the woman-shape, silver hair, red eyes, and she wasn’t looking at Mona at all.
She was looking at the spot on Soren’s frequency where a new line now sat, a fourth weight on the leash she thought of as hers.
[DING! — Obsession Index: Selah 66 → 68/75.]
[DING! — Obsession Index: Maren 55 → 57/75.]
[DING! — Obsession Index: Yara 73 → 75/75. CAP REACHED.]
[DING! — Pack Obsession aggregate has entered restructuring threshold. Hierarchy resolution required.]
He read the last one standing in a collapsed cavern with a half-dressed dirt humanoid beast holding his sleeve in both fists and three bonded entities deciding what to do about her.
Sowhere a long way down, under all of it, the thing that had pulled its hand back out of the glove turned its attention toward the new line on his leash.
The Quill, dead in his bag, scratched once.
One line, in the third hand.
He didn’t read it yet. He already knew it wouldn’t be a warning.
"Up," he said. "We’re going up and Mona, hood stays on."
"Augh," said Mona, delighted.
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