Chapter 19 · The Twelfth Fracture

The voice beneath Riftport spoke her name, and every window in the square shattered at once.

Glass burst outward in glittering sheets. People screamed and dropped beneath overturned carts, market tables, and one another. The black thirteen burned across the flagstones, its hooked lines widening like a mouth. Ash-colored light leaked from the cracks and crawled over Xia Lan’s boots.

“Lan.”

It was her voice.

Not the voice she used now—roughened by smoke, sharpened by too many nights without sleep—but the voice from before. The voice she heard in old recordings she could no longer bear to play. Young. Clear. Almost laughing.

Nolan moved first. His hand closed around the back of her coat and dragged her away from the symbol as a spear of black fire erupted where she had stood.

“Move!” he shouted.

Xia stumbled, Milo clutched against her chest. The boy’s injured arm was wrapped in a strip torn from her sleeve, and his face was gray beneath the soot. He buried his fingers in her collar.

“Don’t let it take me,” Milo whispered.

“It won’t.”

The answer came automatically. Xia’s eyes tracked the square instead of the child.