"I'm leaving tomorrow."
Numanfung said it flatly, standing in the doorway of the northern tower before Shree Yan had even finished setting down the fragment he'd been examining.
"You'll be safer here."
"Two of my men are dead because I came here." She didn't move from the doorway. "Every day I stay, more of your people become targets instead of mine."
"That's not how this works."
"Isn't it?" She crossed the room and picked up one of Fen Lu's transcribed pages without asking, scanning it with the particular speed of someone who'd read considerably harder things under considerably worse light. "You disrupted a ritual in a valley three days from here. Something answered by marking your gate the night I arrived. You believe that's a coincidence?"
"I believe it's connected. I don't believe leaving solves it."
"It removes the bait." She set the page down. "Whatever hunts my bloodline, it isn't hunting yours. Kill me somewhere your father's guards aren't watching, and this problem walks away from your family entirely."
Shree Yan said nothing for a moment, and the silence between them carried more weight than argument would have.
"No," he said finally.
"That's not your decision."
"It's my house."
Something flashed behind her crimson eyes, quick and sharp. "You think I haven't buried people who died protecting me before? I have. I'm considerably better at surviving guilt than you seem to assume."
He almost corrected her word choice out of habit before catching himself.
"Show me the pattern," he said instead. "The marks left on your family's territory. Where, exactly."
She studied him a moment, then pulled a folded map from inside her sleeve, one she'd clearly carried since before she'd arrived, and spread it across the table between the scattered fragments.
Six marks, dated across four months, scattered along her family's southern border.
"These aren't random," Shree Yan said, tracing the dates. "They follow the river."
"They follow more than the river." Numanfung tapped each location in turn. "Every settlement marked here was founded by a family carrying the same inherited echo mine does. My grandmother taught me the old lineages before she died. Small offshoots, scattered generations back, most of them forgotten by everyone but the women who still dream in that bloodline."
Shree Yan looked up.
"You're saying this was never about the throne at all."
"I'm saying whatever wants that ritual completed doesn't need Niang Ming, or your valley, or your tablets," Numanfung said. "It needs blood. Ours. It's been collecting it for months, quietly, in places nobody outside six scattered families would ever think to look."
The room went very still.
"Fen Lu believed we bought time," Shree Yan said, mostly to himself.
"Then Fen Lu was wrong." Numanfung didn't soften it. "You broke one tablet in one valley. This has been happening since before you ever found that valley at all."
He sat with that longer than he wanted to admit needing.
"How many families carry the echo?"
"I don't know exactly. My grandmother named eleven bloodlines before she died. Six are already marked." Numanfung folded her arms. "Which is why I'm leaving tomorrow. Whatever this is, it isn't finished collecting, and I'd rather it collect from a moving target than from six sleeping households at once."
"And if it's not collecting blood at all?" Shree Yan said. "If the marks aren't tribute, but something closer to counting?"
Numanfung's arms uncrossed slowly.
"Counting toward what?"
"I don't know," he said, and the admission cost him something he didn't bother hiding from her. "I assumed, until five minutes ago, that we'd stopped the only version of this that mattered. I was wrong. I don't currently know what I'm wrong about beyond that."
Something in his honesty seemed to land harder than his earlier refusal had.
"You're not going to argue that I'm safer staying," she said.
"No. I don't know that anymore either."
She almost smiled at that, though it didn't fully arrive. "That's either the least reassuring thing you've said to me, or the first one I actually believe."
"Both, probably."
They stood over the map a while longer, neither speaking, the six marked settlements sitting between them like a question neither of them had the shape of yet.
"I'm still leaving tomorrow," Numanfung said eventually.
"Then I'm coming with you."
"Your father won't allow that."
"My father doesn't decide what I do with what I've already learned." Shree Yan folded the map along its existing creases and handed it back to her. "You know the bloodlines. I know the pattern that killed a civilization trying to survive something like this once already. Neither of us solves this apart."
Numanfung took the map, tucking it back into her sleeve without breaking his gaze.
"You argue like someone who's already decided," she said. "Not like someone asking permission."
"I'm not asking."
"No," she agreed, something wry finally surfacing. "I don't suppose you are."
She left without waiting for him to walk her out, and Shree Yan remained in the tower a long while after, the fragment he'd been studying before her arrival still sitting untouched where he'd set it down.
Six bloodlines. Eleven total. Something counting toward a number he didn't have.
He found Fen Lu an hour later and told her everything, watching her expression change from professional interest to something considerably closer to alarm as the shape of it settled in.
"If she's right," Fen Lu said, "then the throne was never the primary mechanism. It may have simply been one collection point among several."
"Can you confirm the pattern from the fragments we already hold?"
"I can try." She was already reaching for the transcribed pages. "Though if this is true, we've been solving the wrong problem since the moment we found that valley."
Shree Yan didn't argue the point. He'd already reached the same conclusion himself, and arguing with something he already believed felt, for once, like a waste of the little certainty he had left.