Wind pressed along the lip of the mountain as if the sky itself had leaned in to listen. The tear in the air was still visible beyond the ridge—a slow, shimmering seam where the old city had stepped back into the world and set its feet on the stone. The clan's terraces clung to the slope: tiered halls with slate roofs, bridges like ribs, banners the color of dusk hanging heavy with new dew. The air tasted clean in a way nothing in the modern world had tasted for a long time, like snowmelt and iron and pine. Mana moved everywhere—visible, for once, the way heat can be seen over rock on a hot day. It pooled in the courtyards, ran in pale rivers down the steps, and gathered thickest in the heart chamber where the altar flower waited.
Inside that chamber, the petals stood open around Mira like the walls of a tall white cup. The lotus altar wasn't stone. It had the grain of something living that had been asked to sleep for centuries and now opened because someone had finally said her name correctly. The petal edges glowed faintly, as if holding daylight even though the chamber had no windows and only ring lamps set into the pillars. Every breath Mira took pulsed light along the veins of the petals and along the thin threads under her skin.
Her skin was no longer ordinary skin. It held light the way frost holds sunrise. The strange heat that had lived under her ribs for months had gone quiet and become something steadier. She was pale to the edge of impossible—paler than hospital sheets, paler than milk, eyelashes white against white. Her hair fell around her shoulders in a clean spill, the color of snow that had never seen dirt. When she opened her eyes, there was a soft, steady shine inside them, not bright enough to hurt, but bright enough to be noticed by anyone who dared to look too long.
She wasn't steady yet. Her hands shook when she tried to lift them; her breath made the floor grit tremble; her body couldn't decide if it weighed nothing or far too much. The chamber felt huge and unfamiliar. The cut stone, the cold, the smell of oil and old incense, the hum of wards along the wall—she sensed all of it as shapes and feelings more than sights. With sight, there were blurs and halos. With something else—the new sense that arrived with the change—there were lines, edges, pulses, people.
Kael knelt outside the circle of petals with his palms braced on the floor. His coat was off, sleeves pushed past the forearms, hair pulled back. He looked like himself and not like himself. Power had come back to him in a rough wave when the city arrived, and it hadn't finished settling. His aura—if it could be called that—was no longer a quiet thing tucked under the skin. It moved like a low storm around him, disciplined by habit and sheer will. It made the dust lift from the stones and then put it back again.
Selina sat cross-legged to Mira's left, the old beads of the clan looped once around her wrist, her thumb ring clicking and then going still when she remembered not to let it reveal her nerves. She had new color in her face. Fine lines near her eyes that city light had carved were already softening in this air. The weight of leadership sat in the set of her shoulders: not arrogance, just the habit of it. Two elders of their clan—a woman with iron-gray hair braided to her waist and a man whose hands were marked by old burn scars—kept the doorway. Everyone else had been sent to the terraces—to hold, to watch, to prepare.
Mira tried to speak and found her voice came out smaller than she expected.
"Selina."
Selina answered right away. "I'm here."
"What is happening outside?"
"The clan woke," Selina said. "The city woke with it. Our people are taking positions. We will keep you safe."
Mira drew breath; the floor flickered. "Are they—does the Red Veil know?"
"They know something," Kael said. His voice was even, but the words carried weight. "The mountain lit. The sky lit. They will come. It will take them time to reach this height, and we will make it take longer."
Mira nodded and steadied her hands on the petal rim. She could feel each point where the lotus touched her palms. The altar was warm. A long hum resonated through it, faintly, like the purr of something enormous sleeping under stone. She tried to stand and failed. Her legs trembled hard enough to make the petal shake. Kael reached in, not to lift her—yet—but to steady her elbow.
She looked at him. The sight didn't give her a clear face, but the other sense did. It mapped him by heat and pressure and the exact way his breath moved the air.
"I can't control it," she said. "When I breathe, the room changes."
"We will teach you to make the breath small," he said. "You don't have to hold the world. Just the next breath."
"That sounds easy," she said, and gave him a thin half-smile that cost less energy than anything else.
"It isn't," he said. "But we will do it anyway."
Selina shifted closer, careful not to cross the line carved into the floor. The line glowed faintly around the base of the lotus. She lowered her voice. "Mira, listen to me. We are going to let a little of the pressure out. Not all. Just enough so your body stops fighting. When it moves, do not force it. Let it run and then settle."
"I don't know how."
"We'll show you." Selina looked once to Kael. "On my count."
He nodded.
Selina placed her hands flat, not on Mira, but on the stone outside the petal. Kael matched her. The awoken wards listened to them like old friends: a slow lift of warmth under their palms, a drop in the pressure around Mira's ribs. Mira felt something loosen inside and then move. It was like water finding a new path. The glow at the petal edges brightened. The hum deepened. Hair along Mira's arms lifted with static. She closed her eyes on instinct and then realized it didn't matter much if they were open or closed. The light was inside her bones.
The first crack sounded like ice under a boot heel, not loud but clear. A fine hairline in the inner shell—she hadn't noticed there was a shell—opened along her chest and crossed to her shoulder. Pain shot through her, clean and bright. She sucked in air; the chamber grit jumped; a ring lamp flickered. Kael's hands tightened on the stone. Selina said, without a waver, "Again. Small. Let it go where it wants. Don't chase it."
Mira breathed a short breath and then a shorter one. The crack widened. The inner shell sloughed away in translucent plates, each thin as a dragonfly wing. They fell like glass snow and dissolved before they hit the floor. Heat ran up her throat and out through her mouth. She coughed once, twice, and a line of thin blood touched her lip and stopped.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"There's nothing to be sorry for," Selina said. "You're not doing anything wrong."
"Hold my sleeve," Kael said, steady, practical. "Not the edge. There."
Mira found his sleeve with her fingers and held. The fabric wasn't rough. The human detail steadied her. She felt the shell let go again—at her shoulder, at her collarbone, at the base of her throat. The shine under her skin stopped being something that fought her and became something that fit. It spread evenly. It made her feel tall and then very small and then just the size she was.
Another crack ran down her spine. She arched involuntarily. The lotus petals moved with her, as if the flower itself had been waiting to stretch after a long winter.
Beyond the doorway, footsteps sounded on stone. A runner paused just outside, then spoke low to the elders. "Messengers from the lower paths. Red cloaks in the ravine. Fifty, maybe more. They have beasts with them and men with rifles. Arthur Halden's guards are among them."
Selina didn't flinch. She kept her eyes on Mira. "We heard," she said softly. "Tell the east watch to hold the ridge. No fire first. Call back if they bring cannon or if the beasts change shape. We'll move the second net as soon as the signal fires are lit."
The runner went.
Mira swallowed. "My father is here?"
Kael answered. "He came with them."
"Why?"
"He made his choice," Selina said. "He is not here for you. He is here for what he thinks you can give him. Don't waste breath on him now. We will deal with him later."
Mira pressed her lips together and nodded. A small piece of the old life—a tiny photo clipped from a magazine, a once-kind look, a blank corridor in a big house—tried to lift in her, and then it quieted. The lotus hum stroked it and set it aside.
The petals shifted again. The glow built. The hum became a note. In the air over the altar, dust motes rose and spun like slow snow in a glass globe. The chamber warmed until the ring lamps went unnecessary and then too bright. The elders at the doorway shaded their eyes.
Selina said, calm, "It's coming."
Kael said, "With me, Mira. On three. One—two—"
Something inside her broke like a tense wire. The world turned white.
The blast wasn't heat. It wasn't cold. It was a flat, clean wave that moved out from Mira's body and touched everything. The ring lamps went dead and then burned back to life. The etched line around the lotus lit and then dimmed to a steady halo. The slabs under the altar shuddered and locked. The wards stitched tighter. The surge shot up the center shaft of the mountain and out into the open day like a silent flare.
Outside, the sky over the mountain changed color. A column of pale light climbed into the cloud like a bone. It didn't explode. It didn't crackle. It simply rose and kept rising, and wherever it touched, all other colors stepped back for a breath. The banners on the terraces snapped out as wind ran ahead of it. The pines on the west face shook. In the valley below, men grabbed at their eyes and cursed and dropped what they were holding because for a heartbeat they saw nothing but white.
On the approach, Red Veil flags folded and fluttered like wounded birds. Beasts—two-legged, four-legged, hard to name in the best of light—threw their heads and screamed. The front rank scattered; the rear rank stumbled. A captain reached for a signal horn and missed his own mouth. Arthur Halden, riding in a black truck behind the first line of men, flinched so hard he hit his head on the window frame. For a blink, the light reached into the cab and showed him his own face reflected in his driver's glass: familiar and not. His eyes were darker than he remembered. The whites were too white. A fine map of gray traced his temple where there had been none last week. He dragged his gaze away and swore.
"What the hell was that?"
No one in the truck answered. The driver had his hands clamped on the wheel and didn't seem to know he'd stopped.
On a lower path, Nora pressed both hands to her chest and said, to no one, "She's alive." Then she said, lower, "She's waking."
She had run since dawn in bad shoes. She had left a message on a number she shouldn't have, then left another message on a different number she should never have saved, then torn up the paper where she had written both numbers down and eaten half the pieces out of pure panic. She had watched the cult's lines move like red ants on a sugar spill. She had watched Arthur's guards join them like a spill of oil. She had been halfway to the mountain with a plan to stand in the road and lie until someone shot her when the light cut the day in half and told her it was too late for clever and too early for despair.
Now she stood under a cedar and tried to breathe in a steady way and could not. She wiped her face with a sleeve and tried to decide if she was going to run toward the mountain and save the girl she had betrayed, or run away and save the scraps of herself she still believed were worth anything. She heard men shouting orders. She heard beasts hitting the end of their leads. She heard one voice—Arthur's—cutting through the noise with money-hard authority.
"Forward! Keep moving!" he shouted. "I want the girl alive!"
Nora laughed once, a dry little laugh that hurt. "Of course you do," she said. "For the first time in your life."
Inside the chamber, Mira sagged forward. The brightness in her chest eased. She felt hollowed out and overfilled at once. Her hands slipped on the petal and Kael had her before she dropped more than an inch.
"I have you," he said.
"I can't feel my legs."
"They will come back."
"I can't hear right. Everything is too loud."
"It will settle."
Selina leaned in to check her face with a careful hand. "Open your eyes for me."
Mira did. The light inside flickered and then steadied. Selina exhaled once, not because she had doubted, but because the body wants what it wants.
"Can you stand?" Selina asked.
"Not yet."
"Then we don't stand." Selina looked at Kael. "Carry her. We're moving to the upper hall. If the Red Veil pushes, they'll aim for a straight tunnel. We won't give them one."
Kael slid his arms under Mira with the ease of someone who had carried her before. She was light. The new light in her seemed to weigh nothing. He lifted; the altar petal flexed and then let go, as if its job had been to hold her through the breaking and not a second longer. He stood, slow, and the room didn't move the way rooms usually move when someone picks up something the room considers important. The room approved.
Selina spoke quickly, practical. "Elder Han, seal the third corridor once we clear it. Move the gate net to the second landing. Send a runner to the east wall with the flare pattern for beasts. Tell them to watch for changes after the first wave. If they see anything with too many eyes, they take them first."
The gray-braided elder nodded and left with the burned-handed elder behind her. Footsteps went soft and fast and then disappeared under the sound of air moving through the mountain's lungs. Selina turned back to Mira and brushed hair from her cheek.
"This will feel wrong for a few minutes," Selina said. "Your body doesn't trust us yet. It will."
"I don't trust anyone," Mira said. The words came out flat. She didn't mean them to bite. They bit anyway.
Selina took the bite and did not flinch. "It's all right. You don't have to trust me to let me help you breathe."
Kael shifted his hold so Mira's head rested against his shoulder. She tasted the clean salt of his skin, the faint smell of pine smoke from and earlier torch, the metal of the ring lamps. He moved as if the weight didn't matter. His breath was slow. His steps were quiet, even when he had to turn sideways to clear a pillar. When a new ripple of energy ran under Mira's skin and out through her fingers, he absorbed it without a wince. It made his jaw tighten; it made the tiny white seam of an old scar on his cheek go a shade paler and then settle.
They carried her through the door and into a long hall where the floor stones had been worn by feet with different ideas of time. The walls showed old carved patterns Mira could not see but could feel by the way sound moved along them. The hall climbed and turned and climbed again. On the third turn, a gust came down the passage and brought the smell of wet earth and men and fear.
"They're on the lower path," Kael said. "Closer than I like."
Selina stopped at a side archway and pressed her palm to a panel. It warmed under her hand. Somewhere inside the wall, something answered. A latch moved. A gate withdrew without sound.
"Short cut," Selina said. "Two levels up. Then we cross."
They went through. The short cut was narrow enough that Kael had to angle his shoulders. The glow from Mira's skin was the only light and it was enough. At the top, the passage opened into the upper hall—long, high, with a row of square windows set low on the mountain side. Through the nearest, Mira felt—and almost saw—the sky: pale, washed by the white flare. The air from the window was so clean it made her nose ache along the old fragile places.
Selina went to the sill and looked out long enough to be sure the nearest ridge was clear. She pointed with two fingers. "Move along the windows. Keep low. If they brought rifles up this far, they'll try for a line of sight."
Kael nodded. He kept to the wall and went quick. Mira felt the pulse under her ribs sync to his steps. At the second window, they heard the first true clash: a deep, dull thud from the east slope, then a cry, then the layered noise of many men trying to shout instructions over their own fear.
Mira shut her eyes and the world didn't go dark. It filled with lines—not pictures, exactly, but the same information another way. She knew where Selina stood behind them, weight forward on her left foot as she checked the angle again. She knew where the elders were three corridors back, hands on mechanisms older than memory. She knew where in the valley a man with a radio had dropped to one knee because his hand wouldn't stop shaking. She knew where Arthur was because the line that connected them tugged in a way no other line could.
"Kael," she said.
"I'm listening."
"My father is near the ravine. He's—he's angry. He's also afraid. Not of them. Of me."
Selina glanced back. "We expected that."
"He wants to take me," Mira said. "He keeps thinking the same thoughts in circles. He sees money. He sees a cure that is not a cure. He sees himself walking into a place where everyone has to bow. He doesn't see me at all."
"Then we will make him see," Selina said. It wasn't cruelty. It was a plan.
A flare popped white over the east wall. A moment later, another popped farther down. Kael looked toward the ceiling, as if he could see through stone. "The beasts changed," he said. "They're splitting the ground. They'll try to open a line."
"Move," Selina said.
They reached the end of the hall and a wide intake shaft where old air wells drew drafts up from inside the mountain. The shaft walls were ribbed; the air sang down them in a low steady note. A narrow bridge crossed it. Kael's foot hit the first plank and the whole bridge answered with a hollow thrum. He stopped.
"Wait," Selina said. "Listen."
The shaft note changed. It went higher, as if a hand had closed over its throat. Under their feet, the bridge hummed once—a warning. Selina's head lifted; she looked to the ceiling and then to the far arch. "They're using sounders," she said. "The cult has them now. They're trying to find hollows."
"I can jump it," Kael said.
"With her in your arms, you can't risk a slip." Selina moved to the left side of the shaft and pressed her fingers into a notch. A second bridge—stone this time, narrow but real—slid out of the wall like a tongue. She exhaled, short. "Go."
They crossed. The stone bridge slid home behind them and the bridge they hadn't taken shuddered and fell into the dark like a peeled scab.
"Good choice," Kael said.
"Not a choice," Selina said. "Luck I remembered where the notch was."
Mira tried to smile. It made her face hurt. She closed her eyes again and followed the lines. The light inside her, which had been a constant glow since the flare, started to collect in her hands as if the body had decided to put it somewhere safe. She didn't know what she was supposed to do with it, only that she shouldn't let it spill by accident.
They reached the far end of the upper hall and came to a door so plain it could have been a storage closet. Selina opened it and the world changed scale. The new space was high and round and open to the sky in a circle at the top. Wind spun down through the opening in a slow column. This was the Sky Hall. It had no seats, no altar, just the ring of dressed stones and the circle of light at the top and a floor so smooth it looked wet. The air in here felt honest. It didn't carry echo. It carried truth.
"Here," Selina said softly. "If it has to happen, it will happen clean."
"What will happen?" Mira asked.
"You'll release again," Kael said. He didn't make it a promise. He made it a fact. "The first flare told them where to look. The next will tell them where not to stand."
Mira swallowed. "I don't want to kill anyone."
Selina faced her squarely. "Listen to me. You are not a weapon. You are not a cure. You are a person. What leaves you will be what you decide it is. If you decide it is warning, it will be warning. If you decide it is a shield, it will be a shield. If anyone dies, it will be because they chose to stand in a place where they used the lives of others as a tool. Not because you wanted it."
"That's a heavy thing to put on me," Mira said.
"It is," Selina said. "But it's the truth."
Kael set Mira down on her feet and didn't let go until her knees agreed to act like knees. She swayed; the floor steadied her; he took one step back but kept his hands up, ready. Selina stood to the side and watched her face for signs she knew how to read that Mira didn't.
"Tell me when," Kael said.
"I don't know if I can start it," Mira said. "It feels like the tide. It goes where it wants."
"Then we will ask it," Selina said. "Not command. Ask."
Mira drew a small breath. Then another. She set her feet the way Selina had shown her the night before all of this had become too big: one foot a little forward, knees soft, ribs free. She looked up through the circle of sky and looked down again because the blue was too much.
"I'm afraid," she said.
"I know," Kael said.
"I don't want to be a god," she said.
"You are Mira," Selina said. "That is enough."
The lines inside Mira shifted. The light she had held in her hands rose—slow and firm, like water being pulled by the moon. She felt it touch her chest and then the center of her throat and then the place on her brow where a pulse had lived since childhood. It hurt and it didn't. It was cold and it wasn't. She took one more breath and said, low, "Not to kill. To stop."
The Sky Hall answered. The ring stones warmed under her feet. The wind that fell through the circle at the roof slowed, as if someone had put a hand into it and cupped it. The light in Mira stood up.
Outside, the Red Veil had regrouped. The captains had shouted men back into lines and beasts into harness. Someone had found a way up the second path and thought themselves clever. On the third ridge, a squad laid down fire in a test pattern and watched for a return shot and saw none. Arthur stepped out of the truck and looked up with his chin lifted, as if the mountain were a man he could stare down.
"Forward!" he said again. "Do not stop for anything!"
The second flare came without sound. There was no flash this time, no bone-white column. It poured over the slope like clean rain and left the world brighter where it passed. Every bolt, every buckle, every rifle sight caught the wet of it and felt wrong in the hand. Every beast threw its head and backed. Every man who had come to the mountain with a mouth full of hate found that for one long breath he could not remember the word he had planned to use to make himself big.
On the front right, a Red Veil officer raised a hand to signal and saw his own hand as if for the first time—every scar, every old burn, every ragged cut fought for coin. He lowered it again without meaning to. The beasts broke their harnesses and ran. The line shattered into five, then ten, then a scatter of halves.
Arthur saw the line break and did not think about his men. He thought about his daughter. He thought about the light like money. He thought about the way his throat had felt tight in the clinic last week and the way his chest had hurt when he climbed the stairs last night and how it hadn't hurt like that when he was twenty-five and standing in a hotel hallway promising to call back and forgetting to call. He thought about getting to the center of the mountain and putting his hand into the same bowl where she had put hers and feeling whatever she had felt. He turned to shout for his driver and found the driver on his knees with his hands over his ears.
Arthur ran.
Nora watched him go. She put her hand over her mouth to keep a sound from coming out and then let it come anyway. It wasn't a sob. It wasn't a laugh. It was the sound of a truth that had been waiting a very long time finally finding air.
"Coward," she said softly. "You don't even know what you're afraid of."
Inside the Sky Hall, Mira's light slowed and spread thin—wide as the hall, then wider. It pressed to the walls and held. It did not burn. It did not cut. It coated. It settled. It made every edge honest. For a moment, Kael could see the exact line of Selina's jaw in that light, the exact set of her mouth, and the exact way her eyes softened when she looked at Mira and tightened when she listened for footsteps in the far hall.
Selina took one long breath and let it go. "Good," she said quietly. "That's good."
Mira's knees failed. The light dropped out of her fingers and went dark. The world went gray.
Kael was there before she knew she was falling. He caught her under the arms and lowered her carefully until she sat with her back against his chest and her legs folded to the side on the smooth floor. She tried to say something and couldn't. It wasn't that her mouth didn't work. It was that the body had decided words could wait because breathing could not.
Selina crouched in front of them. Her face was steady. Her hands shook. She put them flat on the floor until they stopped. Then she touched Mira's cheek—not lightly, not too hard—just enough to say I'm here without taking anything away.
"Listen," Selina said. "The first wave is over. You stopped them. They will come again, because that's what they are. But you are not alone now. The clan is awake. We will take the next wave. You will rest."
Mira got enough breath for a word. "Nora?"
Selina blinked once, surprised by the name in that moment, and then nodded. "She's below. I can feel the pull of her. She hasn't chosen where to stand. She will have to do it fast."
"Father?"
"He ran," Kael said, dry. "He will return when someone else has done the work and try to take credit. Or try to buy the result."
Mira closed her eyes. The light behind the lids was dim and honest and not frightening, like the glow behind a child's nightlight. "I need to sleep," she whispered. "But I feel like if I sleep, something will happen to you."
Kael's voice was low and near. "We will stay."
"People keep saying that and then they leave," she said. The words were too soft to carry far; they carried far anyway.
Selina leaned closer. "Look at me."
Mira forced her eyes open.
"I am not leaving you," Selina said. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't make it a vow like something out of a drama. She made it a fact. "If I have to move to stop the people below, I will leave you with Kael, and when I take one step away from this circle, I will plan the step I take back. That is how I will do it. That is the only way I will do it."
Mira nodded once, a small jerk, as if the neck muscles had remembered their job late.
Footsteps approached outside the door—running, then slow, then running again. A young voice called from the hall. "Lady Selina!"
"Here," Selina answered.
A clan runner slid to a stop at the threshold and didn't cross it. "The Red Veil pushed on the east wall and broke their own line. Beasts turned on them. The first rank is down the slope or in retreat. The lower path is a mess. There's another group on the south cut, but they're slow. The air nets held."
"Casualties?" Selina asked.
"Three with breaks, one with a head hit. No deaths. On our side."
Selina nodded once. "Good. Move the west watch to the south cut. No one leaves the ridge. No one chases. We hold."
"Yes." The runner looked at Mira, then looked away fast as if he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to see and was ashamed of his own curiosity. He went.
Silence filled the Sky Hall again. The wind came back through the circle in the roof. It smelled like rain even though there were no clouds inside the circle of sky.
Mira's head tipped back against Kael's shoulder. She was heavy and not heavy at the same time in his arms. He set his cheek against her hair for a breath and then lifted it because he didn't trust himself not to make that a habit.
"You did well," he said.
"I don't know what I did," she said.
"You made a decision," Selina said. "That is everything."
Nora reached the second terrace with her lungs on fire and her hands open to show she carried nothing worse than fear. Two guard novices moved to intercept her with spear staves set low across the path. Their faces were too young for the day.
"I need to see Selina," Nora said. "Or the man who doesn't talk much. Kael. Please. Tell them Nora is here and she is done lying."
The novices looked at each other the way boys look at each other when someone's mother uses their full names. One said, "Wait here."
"I'll wait," Nora said, and did, and tried not to cry from simple exhaustion and failed, and wiped her face with one hand and didn't apologize.
The novice ran the message. It took a long two minutes to reach the Sky Hall. When it reached the door, Selina listened. Her jaw tightened. She looked to Kael.
"She came," Selina said.
"She would," Kael said.
Mira heard the name and lifted her head. "Let her in," she said.
Selina didn't say no. She also didn't say yes. She looked at Mira, looked at the door, and chose the harder thing. "Bring her," she told the runner. "Slow. Through the inside hall. Search her at the bridge. If she breathes wrong near the nets, bind her hands."
When Nora stepped into the Sky Hall, she looked smaller than she had ever looked on a city street with a tote bag and a list of complaints. She took two steps, stopped dead at the sight of Mira, and covered her mouth and cried without sound. For a moment, she was only a woman seeing a girl she had once thought of as a neighbor and now saw as something else, and all her beliefs tore down the middle.
Selina said, even, "Speak."
Nora lowered her hands, took a breath that hitched, and spoke. "I told them where you were. I told them you had help. I told Arthur when the night van came and when the car circled and when the clinic lights stayed on too late. I kept telling myself I was doing it to keep an eye on him because he was stealing from the hospital and because your doctor was a crook and because someone had to know, but the truth is I wanted to be part of something big. I wanted to be useful to someone important. I told myself it was for you. It was never for you. I am sorry. I know sorry is nothing today, but I am saying it anyway."
No one answered at once. The wind answered for them for a while, then remembered it was only wind. Nora swallowed and squared her shoulders like a person about to take a slap.
"If you are going to cast me out, do it clean," she said. "If you are going to keep me, tell me what to do and I will do it and I won't ask for your forgiveness again. I don't deserve it."
Mira licked dry lips and found a corner of voice. "You will not tell them anything else."
"I won't," Nora said. "I swear it."
"You will not run back to them when you get scared."
"I won't," Nora said again. "I am done with them."
"You will not decide for me what I am," Mira said. "And you will not tell me I am a god or a cure or a saint. I am a person. If you forget that, you will leave."
Nora nodded, hard. "Yes."
Selina watched her face and saw the guilt settle into something that wasn't going to vanish when the fear did. She inclined her head once. "You can stay. You will help the west watch move supplies. You will not carry a weapon today. You will learn to stand behind a wall when someone tells you to stand behind a wall. If you cross a line, I will put you out and I will not be gentle."
"Thank you," Nora whispered. "I won't cross it."
Kael said nothing. He watched Nora the way a man watches a door that has been opened and closed too many times and cannot be trusted to latch. He didn't hate her. He didn't forgive her. He placed her in the world as a factor and would move around her until she proved she could be moved with and not against.
Mira's head felt too heavy again. She let it rest and watched Nora through the new light that didn't live in her eyes but in the space behind them. Nora looked like herself and also like someone who had finally run out of clever stories and wanted a plain one. Mira found that she could live with that.
The hall trembled just enough to bring everyone's eyes to the roof. A dull boom rolled through the stone from far below. Selina stood immediately.
"Second wave," she said. "They found the south cut. They won't stop there."
Kael shifted under Mira and rose in a single clean motion with her in his arms again. He looked at Selina. He didn't ask permission. He asked for a place.
"East wall," Selina said. "I'll take the south cut. Keep her in the shadow of the parapet. If the sounders start again, move her out of the hall."
Kael nodded. He looked down at Mira and said, in a voice that was not pretty and was not soft and was exactly what it needed to be, "We will never let them use you again. Not your body. Not your blood. Not your name. Not for coin. Not for prayer. Not for anything."
Mira found the breath for one answer. "Okay."
Kael carried her back through the door. Selina took two steps after them and paused and looked up through the circle of sky as if she were measuring it for later. She spoke to it like a person speaks to a weather report.
"Hold," she said. "Just hold."
Then she went to war.
They moved Mira to the east parapet—a low wall with a narrow walk behind it where the mountain fell away into a view of terraced roofs and pine spires and the long drop to the ravine. The wind brought the smell of raw dirt where the south cut had crumbled and the metal smell of torn weapons and the very human smell of fear-sweat and adrenaline. Clan archers moved along the steps with calm, simple efficiency. No one shouted for show. Orders were short and clear.
"Rope there."
"Hold fire until mark."
"Down."
Kael set Mira on a folded cloak against the wall so that if she slumped she would meet cloth and not stone. He kept one hand on the wall and one on her shoulder. He watched the ridge line without blinking.
"You can go," she said. "I can sit."
"I'm here," he said. "I can watch and sit at the same time."
A shadow moved at the far edge of the parapet. The burned-handed elder stepped into view, nodded to Kael, looked once at Mira with a human look that had nothing to do with worship, and then turned his eyes outward and stayed there.
Below, the Red Veil tried a second push. It looked better than the first. They'd learned that a straight line up the slope got cut in half by their own panic, so they moved in a shallow V with shields held above their heads and beasts leashed between squads. It would have looked organized from a distance. It looked smaller up here. The mountain made small things small and big things honest.
A red-cloaked figure at the point of the V raised a hand and threw something that burned the air red. The wind grabbed it and threw it back at them. The line faltered. Kael watched their feet.
"Wait," he said under his breath. "Wait."
The front rank stepped into a patch of dirt that looked firm and wasn't. The ground had been loosened hours ago by clan hands and a long iron tool. It gave in a way that didn't look like giving until the weight of five men asked too much at once. The front rank went down to the knees. The rear rank stumbled. The beasts screamed. Kael lifted two fingers.
"Now," the burned-handed elder said.
A dozen archers loosed at once. The arrows didn't kill. They pinned. Cloaks pinned to ground. Straps pinned to leather. The beasts pulled and found that pulling made pain. They backed. The line opened like a book dropped flat.
Mira watched and tried not to shake. The light inside her wanted to stand again. She held it with her jaw clenched. Her teeth chattered anyway.
"Breathe," Kael said. "Don't push it. Don't call it. If it comes, we will use it, but we're not asking it to now."
She nodded. She looked down into the ravine without looking, the way she had started to be able to do. She found a line of men moving along the lower path fast—too fast. They were Arthur's guards. She knew the shape of their discipline. She knew the sound of their boots. She knew the way they didn't look at one another because they didn't need to; they had trained together long enough that they could feel where the next man would be without turning their heads.
"Arthur went left," she said. "He's taking the old mining cut."
Kael turned his head a fraction. The burned-handed elder grunted, not surprise but acknowledgment. "Selina will meet him there," the elder said. "She sees three lines at once."
At the south cut, Selina stood behind a wall of stacked stone with three clan spears at her back and a boy with a horn who looked like he wanted to be thirty and was not. She had taken her scarf off and tied it around her arm. Her hair was braided tight to the base of her neck. She scanned the cut once and then didn't look at it again because she knew it was a trap and the trap would spring whether she watched it or not. She looked at the line below instead. She saw Arthur turn. She moved two pieces on an invisible board and didn't wait to see if they landed where she wanted. She put her hand on the horn boy's shoulder and said, simple, "When I say blow, blow. When I say stop, stop. If you do anything else, I will throw you into the snow."
"Yes, Lady," the boy said, serious as a bell.
Arthur reached the bend where the cut narrowed. He signaled with two fingers and went forward, fast, head down, the way a man goes through a door he believes belongs to him. Selina said, "Blow."
The horn shouted once, short. The men in the narrow turned their heads by habit. It was enough. The clan net dropped from the parapet above and closed like a fish trap. Arthur ducked on reflex and rolled forward and came up in the pocket of clear ground Selina had left because she had read his habit after five seconds of watching him run. He stood and found himself ten paces from a woman whose face he did not know and whose gaze made him feel, for a dangerous second, like a schoolboy late to a lesson he had insisted wasn't worth his time.
"Arthur Halden," Selina said. "Stop."
Arthur smiled. It wasn't a sane smile. It was the smile a man makes when the last plan left to him is not really a plan. "You're in my way."
"No," Selina said. "I am in the way of the thing that eats you. That is not the same."
He moved his weight to his back foot as if to spring. She shifted her spear an inch. He stopped without meaning to. He saw his own hands and realized they were shaking. He hated that more than he hated her. He turned his head sharply to look toward the east wall and the pale glow he could see along the parapet and he felt the tug again under his ribs—blood and something else—and for one honest beat he understood that the thing he had come to take was not his by any law he had ever lived under.
"I'll be back," he said, because when men like him had nothing else, they had threats.
"I know," Selina said. "Bring better men, and leave them alive."
He backed, then turned, then ran, and no one stuck a spear in his back because Selina didn't waste iron on the wrong lesson.
On the east parapet, the second push broke and ran. The beasts fled first. The men followed. The Red Veil officers tried to make a square; it fell apart. The valley took them back the way mountains take everything back that isn't nailed down. The sky over the ridge stayed pale instead of darkening, and that did more to break them than any thrown fire would have.
Mira let her head fall back against the wall and closed her eyes because keeping them open took more work than she had to spare. The light inside her dimmed to a little steady ember. It would build again. For now, it made warmth in her throat and behind her sternum and at her wrists where the skin was thin.
She heard Nora's voice from farther down the walk, arguing in a small tired way with the burned-handed elder about whether she could carry water skins up the steps. The elder said no. Nora said, "I can do this much." The elder said, "You can do it from the second terrace." Nora said, "Fine," and went. That was a better answer than a speech.
Kael took a breath and let it out. His shoulders were lowered. His jaw wasn't tight. He reached for the canteen and held it to Mira's mouth. She drank, three small sips, then stopped and breathed.
"Selina?" she asked.
"She's good," he said. "The south cut is closed. Your father is not getting through today."
Mira nodded. The nod was a thread of motion. It was enough.
Kael set the canteen aside. He looked at the valley, at the place where the Red Veil had run, at the places where they had stopped and were gathering themselves again. He looked at the sky. He looked at the line of the old city's roof and the way the light lay along it—clean, precise, like something that had been stored with care and taken out with respect. He looked down at Mira, at the white lashes on her white skin, at the faint glow that made her look both far and near.
"I'm going to say this once now," he said. "I will say it again when you forget, and I will say it again when you remember, and I will say it again when you don't need me to say it because it's what I was made to do."
She turned her head a fraction toward him.
"We will never let anyone use you again," he said. "Not the cult. Not your father. Not men with coins. Not men with prayers. Not those who want to dress you in a legend that hurts you to carry. If they come, we stand between you and them. If they push, we move them. If they hold on, we break their hands. If you fall, we pick you up. If you want us to go, we go. If you want us to stay, we stay. I am not asking anything from you for this. I am telling you what I am giving."
Mira's throat closed. It had nothing to do with light. She swallowed and found a voice that did not feel like it would bear the weight and made it bear it because she had learned in one morning there were things she could do that the body had never practiced.
"Okay," she said. "Stay."
"Good," he said.
Selina came up the steps then, not out of breath, not hurrying, but with purpose in every step. She looked over the wall, assessed, and then looked down at Mira and let her face soften for three heartbeats before she set it back into the shape the clan needed. She knelt and touched the stone with her palm and then touched the back of Mira's hand in the same way.
"It's done for now," she said. "They'll regroup beyond the bend. They'll bring new friends tomorrow. They'll try sounders again and smoke and maybe gas if they're foolish. We'll be ready."
Mira nodded. "Nora?"
"Carrying water and not getting in the way," Selina said. "That's a start."
"Father?"
"Gone," Selina said. "He will talk. He will plan. He will cry to men who like to hear their own answers. He will return when he thinks the cost has changed."
Mira's breath shivered once. "I'm tired."
"You're allowed," Selina said.
Kael lifted her again, and the world shrank to the size of his breath and the slow thud of his heart against her shoulder and the rough weave of the cloak under her hands. He carried her back through the cool hall and down one stair and along a short corridor to a room that had been hers two centuries ago by a different name. The bed was low and simple. The window looked at the east face. The walls had been washed clean this morning by hands that had known exactly where dust hides.
He set her down. Selina pulled the blanket up. The fabric was soft in a way that meant old, not expensive. Mira closed her eyes and opened them again because there was one more thing the world was going to do whether she was ready or not.
Below the ridge, the Red Veil's camp muttered and licked its wounds. In a tent with a red seam down the center, an officer wrote three reports at once and hated them all. In a truck that smelled of sweat and plastic, Arthur Halden made three phone calls that went to voicemail and one call that connected and started with the words, "You told me this would be easy." On a different path, half-hidden by rock, Harland watched through binoculars and tried to decide which way the wind would blow his luck and his lies next.
Farther out, beyond the second valley, beyond the ridge where the pine stunted, a dark shape roosted on a standing stone that had not been there last week. It opened one eye. The eye was older than the stone. It saw the white flare that had left its trace on the sky and lifted its head and listened the way hunters listen when the ground under their feet starts to hum. It would come later. It was only guessing at the trail now. It was patient.
In the small room with the east window, Mira's breath evened. The glow under her skin dimmed to a rest state. Her hands relaxed where they had gripped the blanket, and a fine dust of the last inner shell flaked from her fingertips and vanished before it hit the pillow. Kael sat on the floor with his back to the bed, one knee up, hand resting on it, watching the door and the window in turns. Selina sat in the only chair with a ledger open—not the old hospital ledger, a new one they had found in a cupboard with paper that had yellowed slowly and well—and wrote three neat lines.
— Awakening flare, controlled.
— Second release, nonlethal. Shield, not blade.
— Hold the mountain. Teach breath. Guard names.
She shut the book. She looked at Mira without letting her eyes shine, because Mira needed rest, not worship. She looked at Kael and nodded once. He nodded back.
Outside, the last of the white light left the sky and the color came back. The city that had stepped back into the world held its breath and then let it go, like a swimmer who had reached the surface and found air.
The world knew now. The Lotus Flame had awakened.
And for the first time since she had opened her eyes in a hospital under bad lights and a good nurse's hands, Mira slept without the feeling that someone was about to open a door without knocking.