Karz looked up at him, terrified and ashamed at once. "Did it follow us here?"
"No," Rayleigh said, and he made it firm enough to hold onto. "The cord carried a signal. That's all it did. The thing itself is still in the route."
Karz gripped the answer like a handhold.
Airmid finally took the paper from him. "That's enough. You did well."
"I need to see Lott." His voice cracked around the name. "Please. I know you said slowly, but if I don't see him, my head keeps telling me the wall copied him and he's still down there."
Airmid looked at him for a long moment.
Rayleigh could see her weighing the risk against the harm.
Meeting too soon might trigger backlash; waiting too long might let the route's tricks keep gnawing at the boy's mind.
"Briefly," she said. "No sudden movements or shouting. If either of you starts to come apart, I end it."
Karz nodded so fast he nearly made himself dizzy.
They brought Lott in a few minutes later, in a chair, wrapped in a blanket, one of Airmid's assistants at his side.
The moment the two boys saw each other, the whole room seemed to draw tight around their silence.
Lott's lips parted, but nothing came out. Karz looked afraid to blink.
Rayleigh stepped back without being told. This part wasn't for the Guild.
Karz reached out first.
Lott caught his hand in both of his own, and the two of them just sat there shaking, alive enough to hurt and relieved enough to make the hurt worth carrying.
Airmid watched their pulses and their breathing and didn't interrupt. Eina turned her face away for a moment and blinked hard.
After a while, Lott whispered, "I heard you behind the wall."
Karz squeezed his hand. "I heard you too."
"It wasn't me."
"I know."
Small words, yet, they did more than any report could.
Rayleigh left the room quietly as Finn followed him out into the corridor.
For a few steps, neither of them said anything.
After that room, the Guild passage felt too ordinary, with its clean lamps and the distant shuffle of clerks.
Eventually Finn crossed his arms and leaned a shoulder against the wall.
"The third rhythm summons the figure," he said.
"Looks that way."
"And the route sent that rhythm through the cord after we removed Karz."
Rayleigh pinched the bridge of his nose. "Which means it wanted to scare us, or bait us into summoning the figure somewhere stupid, or find out whether we understood what it was."
Finn stayed calm, but his eyes had gone hard. "If there's intelligence behind it, then it's testing our reactions."
"Yeah. And we're testing back."
A small nod. "Then we should make sure our answer feeds it bad information."
Rayleigh looked at him. This was exactly why Finn was dangerous.
"What kind of bad information?"
"Let the remote tester answer the first rhythm, the one that opens the crack. Let it think we're still cautious, still curious. Don't use the third. Don't let on that we know what it means. If something's listening, it'll expect us to call the figure once we've learned the rhythm. So we disappoint it."
Rayleigh smiled faintly. "That's a very polite way of saying we should lie to a tunnel."
Finn's mouth curved. "If the tunnel is listening, then it's already entered negotiations."
That answer was good enough to make up for the lost sleep.
...
The remote tester came together in the forge that afternoon.
It was an ugly little box: a weighted base, a protected striker inside, three replaceable marker cores, and a cord long enough to set it off from around a corner.
Welf and Tsubaki built the body between them, which kept the room mostly quiet apart from tool noise and the occasional low correction.
Rayleigh preferred it that way. After the last few days, constant joking would have felt forced.
Welf worked with a fierce kind of focus.
The design was his in a way the first markers hadn't been.
Rayleigh had handed him the spiritual requirements in plain language: the box had to knock out a chosen rhythm, hold a thread he could sense through, and last long enough to report whether the wall answered.
Welf had taken all of it and turned it into metal. He adjusted the weight twice, changed the hinge after testing the striker, and reinforced the base after Gareth wandered past once and asked, casually, whether it could survive being thrown.
By the time the sun dropped low, Welf's hands were black with soot, but his eyes were clear.
Hephaestus came to inspect the result, she didn't praise it right away.
She picked the box up, tested the weight, checked the hinges, went over the casing the way only a goddess of the forge could.
Welf stood stiffly beside the table, pretending not to care while caring so much it practically radiated off him.
At last she set the box back down. "It's rough."
Welf's face fell for half a breath, until she went on.
"But it understands its job. Today, that matters more."
He looked away, ears red. "I'll make the next one cleaner."
"I know."
That simple answer hit him harder than any speech could have.
Rayleigh filled the internal markers one by one, then tested the remote trigger. The striker knocked against the plate inside the box.
Two taps. A pause. Three taps.
In the forge it sounded harmless, which somehow made it worse.
Welf wiped his hands on a cloth and stared at the box. "So that opens the crack."
"According to Karz."
"And the third rhythm calls that thing."
"Yes."
Welf's jaw worked. "Are we building a weapon for it?"
Rayleigh understood the fear underneath the question. It wasn't only about the box. For Welf, anything he made that something terrible could turn and use carried the long shadow of the Crozzo name.
"No," Rayleigh said. "We're building a tool that lets us choose when we take the risk. The wall already knows how to knock. We're not handing it a new power. We're handing ourselves some distance."
Welf looked at the box again, still unhappy.
Rayleigh let him stay unhappy. Some discomfort earned its place. It kept people honest.
After a while, Welf nodded. "Then don't let it use my work better than we do."
"I'll do my best."
"Do better than that."
Rayleigh met his eyes and found nothing childish in the demand. "All right. I will."
Tsubaki, who'd stayed quiet through most of it, settled the finished tester into a padded case.
"Good. Now would the two of you stop staring at it like it's about to grow teeth. If it does, I'm smashing it with a hammer."
Nobody laughed out loud, but the tension eased a little. That was enough.
...
The test happened after sunset.
Finn picked a different entrance from the last two probes, an old suspected outlet near a collapsed wine cellar that Astraea Familia had marked back during the Great Feud.
The Guild had cleared the building above it quietly, using maintenance as the excuse.
Ganesha Familia held the perimeter. Once they were down in the basement, no one said a single name.
The wall at the back of the cellar looked like nothing at all: cracked brick, dry mold, old water stains. Rayleigh could feel it, though.
The same wrong pressure sat behind the stone, faint but waiting.
Finn gave the signal.
Rayleigh linked to the thread inside the tester from behind a stone pillar.
"Ready," he said.
Finn pulled the cord.
The box knocked. Two taps. A pause. Three taps.
For a few seconds, nothing.
Then the brick wall inhaled.
Dust slid inward through cracks that hadn't been there a moment before.
The tester's first core flickered but held. Rayleigh felt the route stir around the rhythm, not fully awake, just enough to register the knock and reach back through the stone.
The wall opened halfway. No voice came through, and somehow that was worse.
Ryuu's ash flowed into the gap and drifted slowly back. "Empty space behind it. Air moving downward."
Riveria kept her voice low. "Nothing alive nearby."
Alise checked her charm and gave a small shake of her head.
'Cold.'
Finn didn't step forward. He only studied the opening. "We don't enter."
The wall seemed to wait.
Rayleigh fed a little more power into the tester, letting the first core brighten as though the team were still poking at the crack with clumsy curiosity.
He wanted the passage to see hesitation and interest and nothing sharper than that.
The second core trembled. Something inside the route touched the signal.
Rayleigh felt it slide over the core like a tongue running along metal, hunting for the exposed line that Welf's first design had left it.
This time the thread sat deeper.
The contact points were small and reinforced and unpleasant to chew through.
The thing tried anyway.
The first core dimmed. The second held. The third sent a clean pulse back into Rayleigh's senses, carrying the direction of the pressure.
He caught the angle and marked it on the board beside him without a word.
The pull didn't run straight through the opened wall. It curved left. Toward the old canal.
Finn saw Rayleigh's hand move over the board and understood. He waited two more breaths, then gave the signal to pull back.
Gareth hauled the tester free with the secondary cord.
The wall snapped shut the instant the box left the stone, fast enough that the edge would have taken a hand clean off.
Alise's expression darkened, but she held her tongue until they were back past the cellar's outer room and the sound-dampening field had come down.
"It wanted us to walk into the wrong opening."
Rayleigh set the tester case on a crate and opened it.
The first core had been drained almost empty, the second was damaged, and the third still pulsed with the direction he'd copied.
"Looks like it. The visible door was bait. The real signal came from somewhere else."
Finn looked at the marked angle. "Old canal route?"
Ryuu nodded slowly. "The abandoned shrine I mentioned sits near that line."
Kaguya's eyes sharpened. "The one with the wet stone smell, after the fight."
Alise stared at the closed cellar wall for a long moment, her anger reined in tight enough to be useful. "Then that's where we go next."
"After we prepare," Finn said.
This time she didn't argue.
The wall had tried to lead her by the nose, and if there was one thing Alise hated more than waiting, it was being played!