Chapter 26 · The Inspector's Heart

The maintenance shaft groaned around them.

Metal ribs shuddered overhead. Dust sifted through the seams in pale, glittering streams, catching in Lio's lashes and the blood drying beneath her nose. Somewhere above, the courier station collapsed another level. The impact traveled down the shaft as a deep, rolling boom.

Mara flinched but did not stop climbing.

“Keep moving,” she said. Her voice carried a faint copper resonance now, as if a bell had been struck inside her throat. “If the whole district is coming down, I’d rather not be under it.”

Lio gripped the ladder with one hand and pressed the other against her ribs. Oro’s presence burned beneath her skin, vast and coiled, but unnervingly quiet. That silence frightened her more than its snarling ever had.

Behind them, Cael missed a rung.

His boot slipped. His shoulder slammed into the shaft wall, and a black flare exploded from his chest. The darkness was not shadow. It crawled out between the buttons of his ruined coat in thin, veinlike threads, then vanished beneath his skin.

Lio twisted around. “Cael.”

“I’m fine.”

“You just tried to fall through a ladder.”

“Then the ladder should have been more convincing.