Page 22 of Orc’s Bones

I turned.

Thruk was already looking at me. He’d read it in my face before I said it — that absolute attention, not needing the words to know the words were going to be bad.

“The Varyn anchor.” I looked at him directly. “It’s gone.”

His jaw set.

The ink in his arm went from live to cold in the space of a second. I could see it — the shift as the connection he’d been holding since the Crypt fight registered the absence of the anchor at the other end.

A link had been cut.

“He has the relic.”

Silence.

Then from the doorway, Varek: “How long until he can use it?”

I looked at the ledger in Lyssa’s hands, at the three entries, at the Varyn anchor notation at the bottom.

“I don’t know. But he’s been in the lower stacks tonight, which means the relay in the Archive case was not the only trap. He was waiting for us to be occupied.” I set the research case on the table. “We’ve been playing his sequence. Every move we’ve made tonight has been a move he planned for.”

“Then we stop playing his sequence.” Thruk moved toward the door — not hurrying, the controlled certainty of a man who had already arrived at the decision and was now simply in the execution of it. “We go down tonight. Not tomorrow. Now.” He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me. “Can you build the counter-resonance barrier in the lower levels without the full research set?”

“I have what I need.” I touched the research case. “I always have what I need.”

He turned and walked out.

I picked up the research case.

Lyssa caught my arm as I passed.

She didn’t speak. She held on for a moment — her ink-stained hand on my forearm, brief and firm — and then let go. Four years she hadn’t seen me. Tonight I’d walked into her Archive and found it compromised and she’d given me full access anyway and she was standing there with a ledger showing the thing she’d spent her career preventing had happened on her watch.

She wasn’t apologizing either.

I gave her a nod and followed Thruk out.

SIX

XYA

There was something we needed to say before we went down. We said it on the Bone Bridge.

Twenty minutes. That was the window — and I was standing there watching the last of the light leave the grave fields.

From up here, the hum pressed up through the railing bones under my palms. The grave fields spread below in a ring so wide the outer edge dissolved into the failing light — the Dominion’s mass uncatalogued dead, generations of ordinary people who hadn’t had bloodlines significant enough for the Warline Crypts, laid into the earth until the ground was so dense with accumulated resonance that the soil itself had changed. Not directed. Not the clean lines of the Crypt system or the organized hum of the Archive. This was diffuse and massive and old, the way deep water was massive — not threatening, not controlled, simply present in a quantity that dwarfed everything the Dominion had built above it.

Thruk stood to my left, close enough that I was aware of him without looking.

We’d been up here for twenty minutes and neither of us had said the thing we’d come up here to say. That was the problem with the Bone Bridge — it gave you perspective, which was useful, and it gave you the full picture of what was at stake, which made the words heavier to start.

I put my hands flat on the railing and looked down.

“Malverek’s argument is ideological. That’s the part I haven’t said to you directly yet and the part that matters most.”

Thruk was quiet. Waiting.

“He doesn’t want to destroy the Dominion. He wants to prove it’s a system that anyone can operate. That the lineage-locked power the Crypts run on isn’t sacred — it’s infrastructure. A set of mechanisms that can be understood, replicated, and redistributed.” I kept my gaze on the grave fields below. “His system — my framework finished and extended and turned toward a different goal — is designed to demonstrate that.”