The door behind Mireya opened with the slow confidence of someone who didn't expect resistance.
A hinge whisper. A breath. Then footsteps—soft, measured, careful.
Not a guard on patrol.
A handler.
Mireya didn't turn.
Not yet.
She kept her hand on the iron door in front of her—the one stamped with the Confessor mark—and held her Silence tight to her skin so her breathing wouldn't betray her. The corridor lantern burned steady, warded flame that didn't flicker for nerves.
Behind her, the footsteps stopped.
Close enough to feel in the air.
A voice spoke, low and calm.
"Asset."
Mireya's stomach dropped.
Not because of the word.
Because of the tone.
Familiar.
Ministry-clean.
She moved before the voice could say her name.
Mireya yanked the iron door open and slipped inside, using the door itself as a shield. She slammed it shut without sound—Silence swallowing the impact—then threw her weight against it.
The space she'd entered wasn't a room.
It was a stairwell.
Stone steps spiraling down. Cold air rising. A faint smell of wax and metal.
Sublevel.
Mave.
Mireya forced her breathing steady and started down.
Behind her, the iron door handle rattled—muted but urgent—then stopped, as if whoever stood outside had decided breaking in loudly was not the plan.
Good.
Let them be patient.
Patience could be punished.
Mireya descended until the lantern light faded into a lower glow—blue lamps set into the wall like eyes.
She paused at the bend.
Listened.
Micro-sounds: a drip. A distant hum. A soft scrape that could have been cloth… or a blade settling into a sheath.
Then, through the bond, something slammed into her hearing again.
A crash.
Steel. Shouting. Crowd roar.
Stellan.
The cross-feed was back—harder than before, like the Concord had decided separation meant sharing more, not less.
Mireya's head throbbed. Her Silence wavered.
She clenched her jaw and steadied it.
If she lost control again, the tinnitus would drop her and she'd die on these steps.
Mireya closed her eyes for a heartbeat.
And made a decision.
If the bond was going to shove Stellan's world into hers, then fine.
She would shove back.
She reached for Stellan's hearing—through the thread between them—and opened it, deliberately.
Stellan was in the fish square when Mireya's corridor hit his ears.
Not the crowd. Not steel.
A drip.
A faint hum.
Stone breathing cold.
For half a second, it disoriented him so badly his footing slipped in the mud. Someone bumped his shoulder. A guard shouted.
Tess grabbed his sleeve, sharp. "Hey—focus!"
Stellan bared his teeth. "I am."
He wasn't.
He was hearing two places at once.
He forced his mind to sort it.
Crowd noise in his own ears.
Dungeon quiet in Mireya's.
He tasted nothing—Rellune's buffer was long gone—but his Pulse-sight flared and steadied him. Warm beats, hollow beats, a guard captain's rhythm tightening.
Mireya's corridor was quiet enough to hide in.
That meant she could be killed in it.
Stellan's jaw clenched.
He grabbed Tess's shoulder and leaned close, voice low. "Keep them loud. Keep them mad."
Tess's eyes flashed. "That's the plan."
Stellan stepped back and lifted Pulse-sight again—short burst—reading the nearest patrol.
Then he did something he'd only done in practice.
He pulsed inward.
Not outward toward enemies.
Inward toward her.
He found Mireya's signature like a cool line in his chest—a silver absence, clean and sharp.
Then he pushed.
A handoff.
Two seconds of his read—his Pulse shimmer—into her eyes.
Mireya's vision snapped sideways.
Stone steps vanished.
For two brutal seconds, the world became rhythm.
Wards throbbed in the walls like veins. Blue lamps hummed. The Confessor marks on the stone pulsed faintly, alive.
And ahead, on the next landing, a thin line of magic lay across the stair like a string.
Trap.
Not mechanical.
A ward trip that would scream into the palace if broken.
Mireya didn't have time to think.
She stepped over it.
Silence held.
Then the Pulse-sight vanished and her normal vision slammed back in with nausea like a fist.
Mireya gagged once, hard, and swallowed it down.
The stairwell spun.
She gripped the wall and forced her feet to move.
"Again," she whispered into the bond.
Not a plea.
An order.
Stellan tasted bile in the back of his throat as the handoff rebounded.
Not because he'd eaten something.
Because Mireya's nausea hit him like it was his.
The bond was punishing them for using it deliberately.
Too much load.
Too many channels.
Stellan's breath came short for a beat. He forced it even.
Around him, the crowd surged. Someone threw a fish. A guard shouted. Steel flashed.
Tess ducked a swing and spat, "This is getting fun."
Stellan barely heard her.
He was listening for Mireya.
Her corridor.
The drip. The hum. The quiet scrape.
And then—through her ears—he heard it.
A bowstring tightening.
Not a loud creak. A tiny, controlled pull.
The sound was behind her.
Stellan's skin went cold.
"Mireya," he hissed into the bond.
At the same time, Mireya's hearing shifted.
She wasn't hearing the corridor anymore.
She was hearing Stellan's battle.
Metal clash. Boot thud. A short grunt of pain.
It layered over her staircase like a storm.
Mireya's head throbbed. Her Silence threatened to unravel.
She forced it tight again.
Then she reached.
She grabbed for Stellan's hearing like it was a rope and pulled it into her head.
The world flipped.
For half a second, the corridor became louder in a different way—cleaner, sharper.
She caught it.
The bowstring.
A breath held.
A tiny click—arrow nock.
Mireya moved on instinct, dropping low and rolling to the side of the stairwell just as the arrow snapped past where her head had been.
It struck stone with a dull thunk.
Mireya stayed crouched, heart hammering.
Then the nausea hit.
Harder.
She gagged, couldn't stop it this time, and vomited onto the steps—hot and sharp and humiliating.
Her Silence flickered with the heave.
She bit down and forced it steady again, wiping her mouth on her sleeve without looking.
No time.
No weakness.
She stood, shaky, and kept moving down the steps.
Above her, another arrow thunked into stone.
The attacker was patient.
They weren't trying to kill her fast.
They were trying to herd her.
Mireya's throat went dry.
Into the lab.
She moved anyway.
Stellan felt her vomit through the bond and nearly dropped to one knee.
Not from sympathy.
From the sudden wave of nausea punching his gut in the middle of a riot.
He swallowed hard and forced his legs to keep working.
A guard lunged at him with a baton.
Stellan caught the baton, twisted, and shoved the man back into the crowd.
Tess saw his pallor and snapped, "You're fading."
Stellan's jaw clenched. "Not now."
He pulsed inward again—quick, brutal—and handed Mireya another two seconds of Pulse-sight.
Not for traps this time.
For people.
To see what moved wrong.
Mireya's vision turned to rhythm again, and she saw the attacker above.
A human beat, steady and trained, but wrapped in a thin shell of ward-magic like oil on water.
Not edited.
Armored.
A palace hunter.
She didn't try to fight upward. She didn't have time.
She dropped deeper.
The stairs ended at an iron door.
Two ward locks.
Mireya's fingers shook as she worked them.
Pick in. Twist. Feel.
Her Silence tried to hold the tiny clicks.
Her stomach churned again. The bond tugged and tugged—cross-feed, strain, punishment.
The first lock gave.
She moved to the second.
A shout from above. Boots on stairs.
Close.
Mireya's breath hitched.
Stellan heard it through her ears like it was his own panic.
The bond flared, feeding him her fear in the middle of the riot.
Stellan swore under his breath.
He shoved through the crowd, grabbing a guard's belt and yanking him off balance—creating a spill of bodies.
Noise rose. Guards shouted. The captain screamed orders.
Good. Keep them looking out.
Keep them loud.
Mireya's second lock clicked.
The iron door opened.
Cold air breathed out, smelling of herbs and metal and something sweet that made Mireya's stomach turn.
She slipped inside and pulled the door almost closed behind her—leaving it a finger-width open to hear.
Micro-sounds: a room. Spacious. Quiet.
Too clean.
Mireya took three steps in, and the floor changed from stone to polished slate.
Then her vision caught on something in the blue lamp light.
A table.
Not a dining table.
A laboratory table.
Two chairs bolted to the floor on either side.
Iron rings mounted to the chair arms—restraints.
Labels etched into small plates beneath them.
Mireya didn't need Stellan's Pulse-sight to read words.
But the moment she looked, the bond cross-fed so sharply that Stellan saw it too—through her eyes, uninvited.
SILENT.
PULSE.
Stellan went still in the middle of chaos, as if the riot had dropped away and left him alone in his own skin.
Mireya's throat went dry.
Because the lab wasn't built to hold prisoners.
It was built to hold them.