Page 35 of Orc’s Bones

Two down. Three more.

I moved toward the west wall.

“I know what the bones know. I was exiled for saying so. The argument isn’t the problem.”

I reached the west wall. Pressed my palms to it.

The west wall’s founding resonance was different again — denser, the Varyn lineage alcoves running three columns deep on this side, the connection between the array’s central anchor and the wall’s own lineage structure so direct that the activation sigils in the wall practically answered back when I started writing the third anchor frequency.

The array was in every wall in this room. Malverek hadn’t installed an array in the founding chamber. He’d converted the founding chamber into the array. The walls were the outer ring. The Varyn anchor at the center was the keystone. And everything I was doing was threading the counter-resonance barrier into a structure that had been saturated with his work for months.

It was going to hold. The fidelity gap he’d left in the stabilization solution was real. The barrier would find it.

But I needed the last two anchor points, and Thruk was standing with the array’s partial activation running through his blood, and the longer Malverek held that activation, the harder the hold would be.

“Thruk.” I kept my palms on the wall, kept writing the third anchor. “How long can you hold.”

“As long as you need.”

Not bravado. Information. I heard the array in his voice — tight with it — and the strain wasn’t winning.

“The answer to your offer is no,” I said, pressing the west wall. “You built yours on bones you took. Anything I built on the same foundation would carry the same flaw.”

“Then build it differently,” Malverek said. “With consent. With documentation. With the sacred rules changed through proof rather than bypassed through force.”

“That’s what I was trying to do. They exiled me for it.”

“And you’re standing in the founding chamber of the institution that exiled you, trying to preserve the system that institution runs on.” His voice carried no contempt — only the flat assessment of a man presenting a contradiction. “Do you understand the irony?”

I pulled my hands from the west wall, the third anchor set.

I moved for the north wall.

“Wait.”

Malverek’s hand dropped. The array’s partial activation didn’t stop — but it shifted, redirected, and the pull on Thruk’s blood reduced by a fraction. Malverek stepped toward the center of the outer ring, and for a moment the array surrounded him on all sides, the outer ring and the Varyn anchor and the wall-signal all feeding into the same node, and I realized he’d positioned himself there deliberately.

He was inside the array.

“If you place the last two anchor points,” Malverek said, “the barrier will collapse the outer ring from the east inward. The replication sigil will destabilize. The Varyn anchor will survive — as she told you it would — but the work I’ve done in these walls for three years will be undone.” He held my gaze. “I know that. I have always known that this was a possible outcome. I built the system knowing that if Xya Wyth came back to the Dominion, she might be able to dismantle it.” He said it like a man laying down a final card. “I brought her back. You know that too.”

“Stop.” He said it to Thruk. Not a command — an invitation. “Ask her if she knows why I built the archive relay to read her analysis specifically. Ask her why the message in the founding wall was addressed to her by name. She knows what I told her in the Archive. She hasn’t told you all of it.”

Thruk looked at me.

The look he’d given me in every room we’d been in — direct, complete, carrying a real question.

“He wants you to ask me — because if you ask me we stop moving and he gets more time and the partial activation continues wearing on your blood.” I pressed my palms to the north wall. “I’ll tell you everything after. Right now I need the fourth anchor.”

“Then place it,” Thruk said.

He turned back to Malverek and stepped forward and the certainty in how he moved — the absolute claim of someone who had made his decision and was executing it — was the most attractive thing I had ever seen in my life and I was keeping that observation in reserve.

I started writing the fourth anchor.

Malverek let Thruk close the distance. He stood in the center of the outer ring and let Thruk walk toward him through the array’s field, which meant Thruk was walking through the full force of the partial activation at close range, which meant every step was the array pulling harder on his blood.

He kept walking.