The tower gave them less than ten minutes after the twelfth floor broke.
Lily finished closing the worst of Marcus's reopened wound, though none of them had enough left for comfort. Jack drank from a warm bottle, washed mud from his eyes, and watched the door above them as if it might decide to open on its own.
Dex noticed. "You ever blink anymore?"
"Sometimes," Jack said.
"Good. Hate to lose you to becoming a gargoyle."
Marcus pushed himself upright with a grunt. Gold still flickered in the cracks of his knuckles where Lily's healing had met the new strength in him. "If you're done flirting, open the door. I'd rather know what's trying to kill us than imagine it."
Jack almost answered that imagining it had usually been kinder.
Then he put his hand on the thirteenth-floor handle and pulled.
Dry heat rolled over them.
Heat. Buried heat. Air that had sat unmoving for a thousand years and learned patience from stone.
Beyond the threshold stretched a descending passage inside a pyramid vast enough to swallow the whole tower. Slanted walls rose high overhead, painted with faded processions of crowned figures, river reeds, and long-snouted beasts. Torch brackets burned with thin blue flames that gave no smoke. Sand whispered down the edges of the steps even when no one moved.
Under the dust lay another smell.
Old linen. Old river water.
"That's cheerful," Dex muttered.
Lily's gaze moved over the painted walls. "Don't touch anything unless you mean to."
Marcus snorted. "In this place? I don't mean to breathe."
They started down.
Jack spread his gravity sense carefully. The whole floor felt layered, packed with hidden weight: chambers inside chambers, stone slabs held above their heads, narrow voids beneath the steps, mechanisms sleeping in the walls. The tower had not built a battlefield here. It had built a machine.
Halfway down the first passage, Lily lifted a hand. "Stop."
They froze.
She pointed to a block in the floor that looked no different from the others except for a line of darker dust around its edge. Jack felt beneath it and found a cavity full of tensed stone rods.
"Pressure plate," he said.
Dex took a spent shell from his pocket and flicked it forward.
The instant it touched the block, both walls snapped open with a dry clatter. Darts screamed across the corridor in silver-black sheets.
Jack threw up a narrow gravity plane instead of a wide shove. The darts bent, hissed, and packed themselves into a trembling metal quilt inches from their faces.
Dex whistled low. "Okay. That's new."
Jack kept his jaw tight. Holding them all at once without crushing the walls took more control than force. Sweat ran down his neck anyway. "Move."
They slipped around the hanging cluster. Dex planted two tiny orange-white sparks inside the exposed dart slits as he passed. A second later came two soft pops. Stone coughed dust and the mechanisms died.
"Didn't blow the whole hallway up," Marcus said.
Dex gave a thin smile. "I'm learning."
The passage ended in a chamber ringed by carved pillars. A black channel of water cut across the floor before a second doorway sealed by a slab of red stone. Crocodiles had been painted along the walls in worshipful rows. Their eyes glittered strangely in the blue torchlight.
Jack felt the mass in the water before it moved.
"Back," he said.
The channel erupted.
Mummified crocodiles launched out in bursts of spray and sour rot, linen-wrapped bodies cracking as they landed. Some were the size of dogs. Others were as long as canoes, their jaws packed with yellowed teeth and strips of dried river weed. More hauled themselves over the stone lip of the channel with clawed feet that scraped sparks.
Marcus met the first one head-on. He brought the butt of his shotgun down on its skull, and this time gold flashed with the strike like sunlight forced through dirty glass. The crocodile's head caved in and its wrappings lit from within.
Marcus blinked at his own hands. "Huh."
Three more rushed him.
"Less admiring, more hitting!" Dex shouted.
Dex snapped his fingers toward the floor and dropped a line of small holy blasts between the crocodiles. The explosions came in staggered beats instead of one loud burst. First one, then two, then four, each shoving the next cluster into the last until the whole front rank rolled together.
Jack saw what he was doing and widened gravity under the pile. The undead reptiles slammed into each other, tangled, and Dex triggered the last stacked charge at the center. Gold fire climbed through ancient linen in a sudden blossom.
Lily moved along the edge of the fight with both hands lit, not wasting herself on big flashes. Every time a crocodile slipped past the others, she touched it with a needle-thin spear of light that pierced eye or heart. When one snapped at Jack's leg from the water, she turned and burned a clean hole through its skull without looking twice.
Jack cut down two more with black-gold edged strikes, then felt something in the room shift.
The red stone slab at the far doorway groaned upward on its own.
Behind it waited a burial chamber tall as a chapel. A stone coffin stood upright at the far end, carved with a narrow-faced guardian holding crossed blades. Linen strips hung from the ceiling in curtains. Canopic jars sat in alcoves. Sand drifted across the floor in long curved lines, as if something beneath it had breathed.
The figure in the coffin opened its eyes.
They were not bright. That was worse. They were dull and watchful, like embers banked under ash.
The mummy stepped down from its stone bed without hurry. Gold jewelry clung to the wrappings at its throat and wrists. Its dried face showed through gaps in the linen, the skin pulled tight against the bone. As it moved, the hanging strips around the chamber stirred in answer, lifting from the ceiling like cobras testing the air.
Then all of them struck.
The first bands wrapped Marcus's arms to the pillars before Jack even saw them move. More ripped out of the ceiling and snapped around Dex's chest and throat. The sand at Lily's feet collapsed into a hidden pit lined with spikes of black stone.
Jack cut her free with a gravity slash and lunged for the mummy.
It was already somewhere else.
Not fast. Not exactly.
It had simply stepped to the side before he finished deciding where to strike.
His blade hit empty air.
The mummy tilted its head.
Behind him, the linen curtains hardened into cords and lashed his ankles. Jack broke them with a gravity pulse, but the mummy had seen that too. It raised one hand and the floor ahead of Marcus split open. A crocodile mummy burst from beneath the sand exactly where Marcus would have planted his next step.
Marcus still smashed it apart, but he took the hit badly across the thigh.
"It knows," Lily said, forcing light into the pit to melt the spikes around her. "It's reading us."
Dex fired a blast.
The mummy ducked before his fingers finished opening.
The explosion tore a hole through a pillar instead.
More crocodiles poured from the burial chamber walls, some dropping from niches, some swimming up through hidden water trenches under the sand. The mummy's wrappings snaked across the floor, setting loops and snares, dragging broken jars into the paths of their feet, turning the whole room into a map of the next mistake.
Jack attacked twice more and missed twice more. The thing didn't fight like the faster monsters had. It fought like a trap given a body.
His sword memory stirred coldly inside him.
Not speed, it seemed to say. Commitment.
The mummy watched the start of every decision. Straight attacks were already dead.
"Rotate," Jack said sharply. "Lily, call the floor. Dex, blind it. Marcus, with me."
No one argued.
Lily closed her eyes for half a second, then pointed. "Left side safe. Center sand is hollow. Pillar behind the coffin is loaded."
Dex moved first, weaving through the routes she called. Tiny lights popped from his fingertips and stuck to walls, hanging wrappings, jar mouths, even the backs of charging crocodiles. He wasn't trying to kill the mummy yet. He was planting futures.
Marcus ripped free of the last bands around his arms and bared his teeth. Gold surged rough and hard through him in a not so graceful manner. It didn't have to be graceful; to be useful. He drove straight through the front of the chamber, taking the mummy's attention with a roar and a burning shotgun swung like a club.
The mummy predicted that too.
It drew the hanging linen down in a white storm toward Marcus's face.
Jack changed the rules.
He sent gravity under Marcus's next stride and made the older man lighter by half. Marcus lurched forward farther than any normal step should have carried him, bursting through the wrappings instead of being bound by them. The mummy shifted to evade the new line.
Dex smiled grimly and snapped his fingers.
Two of the lights he'd planted earlier detonated behind the mummy. Precise enough to shove it toward the coffin instead of away.
It still twisted clear of Marcus.
But for the first time, its movement looked forced.
Jack went in.
He let the mummy see one attack: a clean diagonal slash from right shoulder to left hip. Its body leaned away before the stroke could land.
Then Jack bent himself.
Gravity caught his elbow, wrist, and blade in the final fraction of motion and curved the strike through an impossible second path. Sword memory supplied the angle. Divine force sharpened the edge.
Black-gold light carved across the mummy's chest.
The chamber boomed.
The guardian staggered, linen bursting outward. Beneath the wraps Jack saw the dried shape underneath and, deeper still, a dark stone scarab set in its ribs.
"Heart!" Lily shouted.
Every crocodile in the room rushed at once.
Marcus planted himself in front of Lily without being told. He slammed both hands together, and a rough wave of gold burst from him in a wide fan. It was rough, but powerful. The front rank of crocodiles ignited where they stood. Those behind crashed into the burning bodies and piled up hissing.
Dex triggered the rest of his stacked charges.
The chamber answered in a chain of controlled holy blasts; wrappings snapped, side alcoves collapsed, sand geysered upward, and the mummy's own traps shredded around it. Not one blast wasted itself. Each one forced the guardian into the next bad place.
Lily raised both hands and flooded the scarab with hard white-gold light.
The mummy screamed.
It was the driest sound Jack had ever heard, dryer even then the desert air.
Still it moved, dragging itself through burning linen, trying to reach Lily through the last of its animated wraps.
Jack met it in the center of the chamber.
This time he did not swing until gravity had already rewritten the path. His blade flashed low, rose in a curving vertical cut, and split the scarab in two.
The scream stopped.
All through the room, the crocodile mummies collapsed together.
The burial chamber shuddered. Pillars cracked. Blue torchlight snapped out one by one. Sand rushed across the floor as if the entire pyramid had exhaled at last.
"Move!" Marcus barked.
They sprinted for the doorway as the chamber came apart behind them.
Concrete replaced stone in a blink so sharp it made Jack stumble. They spilled onto a stair landing barely wide enough for the four of them, all breathing hard, dusted in linen ash.
The fourteenth-floor door stood already unlatched.
Dex looked at it and laughed once, without humor. "Of course it does."
Beyond waited not a room, but a kill corridor: a narrow bridge over a black depth, pendulum blades sweeping from the ceiling, walls full of arrow slits, and heavy stone jaws that opened and shut across the path in an ugly rhythm.
They crossed it because stopping was worse.
Lily led the timing, eyes narrowed, calling, "Now. Three steps. Down. Jump."
Jack thinned gravity around them so their leaps carried farther and their landings hit softer. When the first wave of arrows came, he bent them just enough to shave past shoulders instead of throats. Dex stacked tiny detonations on the blade chains and loosed them in sequence, slowing one pendulum, then another, then jamming a stone jaw open just long enough for Marcus to shoulder them through. When a ceiling block dropped too early, Marcus caught it with both hands, gold cracking over his arms like lightning trapped under skin, and held until they were clear.
The fifteenth floor waited above that with no pause at all.
Its chambers shifted while they ran: false doors, rising walls, floors tipping into pits of spikes and grinding stone. Sand poured from hidden vents to blind them. Somewhere in the mechanism, counterweights thundered back and forth like giant hearts.
They changed leaders again without speaking.
Marcus broke the first false wall by feel, trusting the rough divine strength in him more than his eyes. Dex threaded holy sparks through the seams of moving stone and blew only the hinges, never the whole structure. Lily found the true path by the thin clean sensation under all the tower's lies. Jack used gravity in smaller ways than ever before; catching a falling slab by one corner to turn it, bending a thrown blade off Marcus's spine, sending a curved black-gold slash through a hand-width gap to sever hidden chains they never even saw.
At the end of it, a final door opened and did not try to crush them.
They entered the next stairwell together and stayed standing only because the wall was there to lean on.
No one spoke for several seconds.
Then Dex slid down to sit on the step and stared at his shaking hands. Small sparks of banked holy light still glowed in his fingertips, waiting for orders. "I think," he said hoarsely, "the tower is trying to build us into something useful before it kills us."
Marcus wiped blood and dust from his mouth and gave a tired grunt. "Then it's doing bad work on my personality."
Lily smiled despite herself. Jack looked at the three of them; at the soot on Dex's sleeves, the new steadiness in Marcus's golden hands, the precise exhaustion in Lily's face; and felt the truth of the climb settling into his bones.
They had stopped fighting like four separate people trapped in the same nightmare.
The tower was still ahead of them. Elena was still somewhere above. The King was still waiting.
But now, when Jack looked at the sixteenth-floor door, he did not feel alone walking toward it.
He reached for the handle.
This time, three hands moved with his.