# Chapter 18: The Walk-Through

I stood up too fast and regretted it immediately.

The guild planning room tilted — not the sickening vertigo of the crash, just the mundane protest of a body that had spent fourteen hours on hardwood and was now expected to function vertically. My knees objected. My spine offered a counter-proposal involving continued horizontal existence. I ignored both, because Ned Floundry's curse didn't care about my knees and neither did the timeline.

(*Reserves: thirty-five percent. Up from thirty when I woke. Climbing, but slowly — the bracelet's reservoir is recharging faster than I am, which is either reassuring or insulting depending on how you frame the relationship between a man and a piece of pre-Compact jewellery that's better at recovery than he is. Migraine: fading. Flaw Sight: tested it on the ward-work around the planning room window — lattice resolved cleanly, no doubling, no drift. Coordination: stood up, didn't fall down. Low bar, but cleared.*)

The frustration was the worst part. Not the physical limitations — those were arithmetic, recoverable, a deficit with a known trajectory. The frustration was that my brain had the entire execution architecture mapped. Three layers, three solutions, one sequence. Leon's diagrams sat on the table in clean ink, every contingency branch drawn out, every energy budget calculated. The solution existed. It was complete. It was elegant, if I was being honest, which I tried not to be about my own work because honesty in that direction led to complacency.

And my body was a thirty-five percent charged instrument being asked to execute a hundred percent plan.

I flexed my fingers. Steady enough. Rolled my shoulders — tight, but functional. The bracelet sat warm against my wrist, the stone a tired amber that was slowly deepening toward the colour I'd learned to associate with operational readiness. Not there yet. Getting there.

Mere was watching me from the doorway. She'd returned from Thresholds twenty minutes ago with the altered preparation at seventy percent and a look that said she'd already catalogued my physical state and was waiting for me to catch up to her assessment.

"The observation needs to happen today," I said.

"I know."

"Ned's last symptom cascade was four days ago. Motor control in the left hand. The intervals are shortening. Next one could be tomorrow. Could be the day after. Every hour we wait —"

"I know," she said again, in exactly the same tone, which was Mere's way of telling me that repeating established facts was not a productive use of either of our time.

She was right. She was usually right about things like that.

"I need the resonance data before I can finalise the altered concentration," she said. "The base preparation is at seventy percent. The remaining thirty percent is calibration — recalibration speed, grip tolerance, bond weakness threshold. I can have it finished within two hours of receiving the data."

Two hours. Plus travel time. Plus the observation itself. Plus whatever margin my body decided to impose between intention and execution. The Compact's forty-eight-hour window was ticking. Ledger was managing Calla's confidence, but confidence was a consumable resource and we were spending it faster than we were replenishing it.

"Now, then," I said. I grabbed Leon's diagrams and folded them into my coat pocket with the careful precision of a man handling something more valuable than the paper it was drawn on. "We go to Ned's. I map the anchor's resonance. You take the data to Thresholds. I come back here and brief the team."

Mere picked up her satchel — already packed, I noticed, because of course it was — and we walked out into the afternoon.

* * *

The Floundry home was in the upper guild quarter, a twenty-minute walk that my legs turned into twenty-five. The afternoon light was sharp and clean in a way that made me squint, which I told myself was the light and not the lingering migraine remnants that the thornwell root hadn't quite finished killing.

I spotted Cass from half a block away.

He was positioned on the far side of the street, three doors down from the Floundry residence, leaning against a stone pillar with the practised ease of a man who wanted to look like he wasn't working. He was absolutely working.

(*Cassius Rykhard. Same tailored doublet. Different position than the guild encounter — he's not making an approach, he's making an observation. Sightlines: clear view of the Floundry front door, peripheral coverage of both approach angles. Duration: the stone pillar has a café beside it with outdoor seating. He's been there long enough to finish a cup of something. Professional surveillance, not improvised. The mine bandits didn't come back. Five men sent to monitor moss growth, none returned. The Compact knows the moss was harvested. They're watching to see what happens next.*)

I didn't slow down. Didn't speed up. Didn't look at him longer than the half-second it took to file the relevant data. Mere walked beside me with the focused disregard of someone whose attention was already on the work ahead, not the man across the street. Whether she'd noticed him and dismissed him or simply hadn't registered him as relevant was unclear, and I didn't ask, because asking would have told Cass we'd seen him.

The observation clock and the Compact clock were the same clock now.

Calla opened the door before we knocked. She'd been watching from the window — the curtain was still swaying. She looked thinner than five days ago, which was a detail I noticed and wished I hadn't.

"He's worse," she said, by way of greeting. She stepped aside.

The stairs creaked in the same places they'd creaked on my first visit, but the house felt different. Quieter. The children were somewhere else — school, maybe, or a relative's. The absence of their careful, too-old silence was somehow worse than the silence itself.

Ned's room smelled like clean linen and failing biology. Calla kept the space immaculate — fresh sheets, open window for air circulation, a glass of water on the bedside table positioned precisely where a functional hand could reach it. The precision was an act of war against entropy, and entropy was winning.

Five days since I'd sat in this chair. Five days since brown eyes had tracked me across the room with lucid awareness behind them.

The eyes still tracked. That was the first thing — his gaze found me when I entered and followed me to the chair. But the tracking was slower now, a half-beat delay between my movement and his response, as though the signal had to travel through something thick. His skin had gone from yellowed to grey-yellow, the colour of old candle wax. The hair loss had progressed past thinning into patches. His breathing had developed a shallow, catching quality — not laboured yet, not quite, but the space between not-quite-laboured and actually-laboured was a gap that could close in days.

His right hand lay on the blanket. The left — the one that had lost motor control four days ago — was curled against his chest in a position that looked involuntary. He couldn't straighten it. He couldn't write with it. The scraps of paper that had covered the bedside table on my last visit were gone. Not because they'd been cleaned up — because there was no point in having paper beside a man who could no longer hold a pen.

(*Voice went first, then hearing, then motor control progressing left to right. Organ function is next on the sequence. The healers said "beginning to fail" six days ago. Beginning has a middle and an end, and the intervals between cascades are shortening. Two to three days until the next one. Possibly less.*)

Mere set her satchel down quietly and positioned herself at the foot of the bed, out of Ned's sightline but within mine. She had a notebook open and a graphite stick ready. No preamble. No emotional response to the deterioration that would have made most people flinch. She was here to work, and the work was how she honoured the severity of what she was seeing.

I let the bracelet's focusing matrix engage.

The stone warmed. Flaw Sight sharpened — the familiar transition from general awareness to directed perception, the world's magical architecture snapping into resolution like adjusting the focus on a lens. The bracelet's filter stripped the background noise, and the curse's lattice bloomed into visibility around Ned like a cage made of poisoned light.

I kept it brief. Controlled. The temptation was there — the lattice had complexity that pulled at the analytical machinery, connections and sub-structures that invited deeper analysis — but I'd been down that corridor several days ago and it had cost me fourteen hours on a floor. Today was about data extraction, not exploration. Surgical, not investigative.

"Anchor recalibration speed," I said, watching the third layer pulse. "Point seven cycles per interval, decaying. It was point nine when I first observed."

Mere wrote.

"Grip tolerance — narrowing. The validation window has contracted by approximately twelve percent since Thursday's observation. The anchor is compensating for drift by tightening its parameters."

She wrote, and I heard the graphite pause for a fraction of a second before resuming — she was already running the concentration calculation in her head.

"Bond weakness threshold — the margin between current signature match and validation failure is approximately eighteen percent. At current drift rate, natural failure in ten to fourteen days. We need it to fail tomorrow."

I pulled back. Clean disengagement — no spiral, no corridor extending, no hyperfocus taking the reins. The stone dimmed. The room returned. Reserves had dipped maybe five percent, which was manageable. More than manageable. I'd spent more than that standing up this morning.

Mere's notebook already had numbers in the margins that I hadn't given her — derived values, preparation parameters extrapolated from the three data points I'd provided. She'd been translating raw observation into applied chemistry before I'd finished speaking.

"Two hours," she said, closing the notebook. "The altered concentration needs to target a drift acceleration of point four cycles minimum to outpace the anchor's recalibration ceiling. The preserved root structures give me the precision. I'll have it ready."

She picked up her satchel, nodded to Calla — who had been standing in the doorway, watching with the particular stillness of a woman who didn't understand the technical details but understood urgency — and left for Thresholds.

I stayed a moment longer.

The promise note from five days ago was gone from the bedside table, but Calla would have put it somewhere. She put everything somewhere. I picked up the graphite stick originally from Mere's satchel — she'd left it — and tore a corner from the paper wrapping of the medical kit in my coat.

*We know what to do. Tomorrow morning.*

I set it on the bedside table where the scraps used to be. Ned's eyes tracked to it, then back to me. The half-beat delay. The awareness behind it.

The first note had said *I see what they missed.* This one said *we.* That was the difference five days had made.

I left.

* * *

Ledger caught me in the guild hallway on the way to the planning room.

"How is she? Honestly," I asked, meaning Calla, because the question about Ned answered itself.

"Holding." Ledger's voice was neutral in the specific way that meant he was being precise about a word he'd chosen carefully. "The Compact's visit shook her. Not the offer — she expected an offer. The implication. They came to her home. They sat in her kitchen. They used her children's names."

I filed that. Using children's names wasn't negotiation. It was cartography — mapping the pressure points for later use.

"The qualification inquiry is moving," Ledger said. "Slowly, because I'm managing the pace. But it's on record and it doesn't expire."

"Tomorrow morning," I said.

Ledger read my face the way I read magical lattices — with the quiet efficiency of long practice and a focus that said assessment wasn't his job description — it was his nervous system. Whatever he found there satisfied him.

"I'll be at the Floundry home by seventh bell. If the Compact sends another representative, they'll find me in the kitchen instead of Calla."

He left. Unhurried, economical. No wasted words, no wasted motion. Ledger trusted the chain the same way I did — because the links held weight.

The planning room had been transformed since I'd left it that morning. Leon was already there, seated at the table with my diagrams spread before him, annotating margins with his particular brand of dense, angular handwriting that looked like architecture and read like prophecy. He'd added energy-budget overlays to each layer in a different colour of ink — blue for reservoir, red for personal reserves, green for bracelet buffer.

"You look terrible," he said, without looking up.

"I looked worse this morning."

"That's not the reassurance you think it is."

Jonael arrived ten minutes later carrying a canvas sack that clinked like a field kit. Water skins. Ceramic light rods. A medical kit that was either Carter's work or Carter-adjacent. "For tomorrow," he said, setting the sack by the wall. "Room logistics. I'll have the Floundry bedroom staged by seventh bell — light sources positioned for sustained work, water for everyone, clear floor space for equipment. Anything else?"

"Compact blockade," I said. "If Cass shows up —"

"No one gets through the door." Jonael said it the way he said most things — flat, certain, the verbal equivalent of a locked gate. He'd met Cass exactly never, but he'd met the concept of someone who needed to be kept out of a room, and that was sufficient.

Devod arrived next, slightly out of breath, carrying a paper bag from what smelled like a bakery. He'd been running errands all day — Devod's perpetual motion directed at whatever needed doing next. He set the bag on the table, opened it to reveal four meat pastries and a bread roll, and said, "Eat something. All of you. I don't trust any of you to have eaten today."

He was right about at least three of us.

Mere returned during the second pastry. She set her satchel down, pulled out her notebook, and said, "Altered preparation will be complete within the hour. The drift-acceleration parameters are tighter than I'd like, but the preserved root structures give me the precision margin I need. I've set it to finish at Thresholds — Devod, I'll need someone to collect it by seventh bell tomorrow."

Devod nodded. The fact that she'd addressed him by name and given him a specific task registered in the room as the quietly significant thing it was.

"Right," I said, and stood at the head of the table with Leon's annotated diagrams in front of me. "Here's how we break an unbreakable curse."

I started with Layer 3 — the anchor — because that was Devod's concept and it was the foundation everything else rested on.

"The anchor is a dead man's switch keyed to Ned's life-force signature. It verifies the signature before delivering the kill trigger — because a kill mechanism without verification fires into whoever's nearby, and the person who built this curse was too precise for collateral damage. The keying is both the safety and the constraint. Devod figured this out."

I looked at Devod. "Idea number seven, if I recall."

The room shifted. Not physically — the air changed. Leon straightened in his chair. Jonael, who had been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed in his default posture of alert readiness, uncrossed them.

Devod went still.

Not frozen. Still. The particular stillness of a man who'd heard something he'd been waiting years to hear and was taking a moment to let it land. His hands — which were always moving, always tapping or adjusting or reaching for something — settled on the table and stayed there.

Jonael looked at Devod with the quiet reassessment of someone recalibrating a classification. He'd known Devod as Mere's estranged father, the carriage driver with ten ideas. Now one of those ideas was the foundation of saving a man's life.

Mere didn't speak. I watched her anyway — old habit, constant habit, the cold-read apparatus that ran whether I wanted it or not.

(*Her shoulders shifted. Fractional — two degrees, maybe less. Her chin came up by a similar margin. These are not dramatic tells. These are the physical manifestations of an emotion she won't name and may not have categorised yet. Her father's idea. The man whose absence she's built her model of the world around. The man she classified and filed and closed. His concept — not his brute force, not his charm, not his persistence, but his actual thinking — is the foundation of the cure that saves a man's life. She's processing. She'll process it later, alone, in the specific silence she keeps for things that don't fit her existing architecture.*)

(*And underneath the cold-read data, something I can't quite file. Something about watching her discover that the person she thought she knew is someone else.*)

"The concept is this," I continued. "You don't pick the lock. You move the door frame. The lock is still locked. It's just not locked to anything anymore." I pointed to Leon's diagram of Layer 3 — the anchor, the signature bond, the recalibration mechanism. "The kill switch needs to verify Ned's signature before it fires — that's the safety mechanism. It has to know it's hitting the right person. The curse is already changing Ned, which means his signature is drifting, and the anchor keeps recalibrating to track him. It's fast enough to keep up. What the moss does — at the altered concentration — is suppress the resonance between the anchor and the signature. It doesn't hurt Ned. It doesn't speed up the curse. It blinds the anchor. The tracker loses the signal it's following, over-corrects, loses it again. Each correction widens the gap until the anchor can't verify the target at all." I let that settle. "The kill trigger fires. Finds nothing it recognises. Dissipates harmlessly. Layer 3 neutralised without ever touching it directly."

Leon nodded. He'd been there when the concept clicked in this same room, two days ago. His nod carried the weight of someone who understood not just the theory but the elegance — a ward-cracker recognising lateral thinking at its finest.

"Layer 2," I said, moving on because the moment needed to breathe and the best way to let it breathe was to stop holding it. "The stabiliser. It monitors the degradation curse and repairs damage — any conventional dissolution approach gets patched faster than it can do harm. The brute-force method would give it four hundred things to fix, and it would fix all four hundred. So we don't fight it. We weaponise it."

I tapped Leon's red-ink overlay on the second diagram. "Forge-and-redirect. Same technique I used on the death ward in the Barrows, adapted. I feed the stabiliser false crisis data — forged signals that tell it Layer 1 is collapsing catastrophically. The stabiliser panics. It dumps repair energy at emergency speed into a degradation that isn't actually failing. The repair function overloads its own channels and tears the system apart from the inside. I did this to a death ward. Now I do it to something more complex while two other interventions are running."

(*Reserves math: Layer 2 costs twenty-two to twenty-eight percent. Bracelet precision for two-second injection windows. Sub-second timing per injection. Fifteen minutes sustained. If the bracelet reservoir holds, I land at thirty-five to forty-one percent after Layer 2. If it doesn't — contingency branch, and not the comfortable kind.*)

"Layer 1 is the simplest step," I said. "Standard ghostveil moss at normal concentration creates a dampening field around the curse. Thirty to sixty minutes of suppressed magical activity. During that window, conventional curse-breaking cracks the weakened outer layer." I paused. "Also the step where I'll be running on fumes. Minimal bracelet assistance. Mostly personal reserves. The simplest part of the plan at the lowest point of my capacity."

The room absorbed this.

"Roles," I said. "Leon — external stability monitoring. You're the only person in this room with the technical background to read whether the working is cascading correctly or going sideways. If Layer 2's weaponisation starts feeding back instead of forward, I need to know before it reaches critical. Fifteen-second warning minimum."

Leon nodded. "I'll need line of sight on the full lattice. Positioning matters."

"We'll work it out tomorrow. Jonael — logistics, security, and room management. The Floundry bedroom needs to be staged for sustained precision work. Light, water, clear space. And if Cass or any Compact representative approaches that house while I'm wrist-deep in a three-layer intervention, they do not get through the door."

"Understood," Jonael said.

"Mere —" She looked up from her notebook. "Both moss applications. Timed precisely. Standard concentration for Layer 1 dampening, altered concentration for Layer 3 drift acceleration. You're also monitoring Ned's physical state throughout — if the cascade triggers a medical crisis before the cure completes, we need to know."

"I'll have both preparations staged with timed-release parameters," she said. "Ned's vitals baseline established from today's observation. Any deviation beyond twelve percent of baseline, I flag it."

"Devod." I met his eyes. "Support. Whatever needs doing. If we need something from outside the room, you move. If we need a pair of hands, you're there. If Jonael needs reinforcement at the door, you back him."

Devod nodded. Steady. Present. The man who'd carried supplies between two buildings for two days without complaint, who'd driven a cart for three hours each way and navigated a mine from memory and knocked a mutated dog sideways with a walking stick without thinking about it. He was there because the work needed people, and he was people who showed up.

Mere confirmed the altered preparation would be ready within the hour. She was standing closer to the table than she'd been in any prior meeting — not at the edge of the room, not in the doorway, not positioned at Mere's usual calculated distance from the group. She'd moved inward. Professional, precise, engaged with the logistics. But the spatial shift was there, and I noticed it because I noticed everything, and because the things I noticed about Mere had started occupying a category that my filing system hadn't had to build before we met.

* * *

The team dispersed into their separate evenings. Leon heading home to his rooms above the chandler's, where he'd spend the night going over the energy-budget overlays one more time because that's what Leon did. Jonael already mentally staging a bedroom he'd never seen. Devod heading to Thresholds to check on the altered preparation — or to be near his daughter's work, which was the same destination by different math.

Mere walked with me.

We took the long way through the guild quarter and down toward the docks, because neither of us suggested the short way and the silence that filled the gap was comfortable enough to keep walking in. She carried the resonance notes and preparation calculations in her satchel. I carried the diagrams and a tiredness that had settled into my bones and wasn't leaving until the job did.

The dockside at dusk smelled like river water and fish residue and the mineral tang of the old mill, which had been running since before I was born and would be running after I was dead. My shack resolved out of the evening light the way it always did — small, square, stubbornly present on its quarter-acre between the river and the mill road.

I hadn't planned this. I hadn't planned for anyone to be walking beside me when I arrived at the place where I slept, which was different from the place where I lived, which was a distinction that existed only in the drawings pinned to the wall inside. In four weeks of guild work and five weeks of Mere, no one had been inside the shack except me and occasionally Ledger, and Ledger had the discretion to assess the space and say nothing about it.

I opened the door.

The shack was what it had always been — one room, generous if you considered it a sleeping space and depressing if you considered it a home. Cot against the wall. Table. One chair. A shelf with Gavren's herb parcel and a few books and the lockbox that contained the arithmetic of my ambitions. No decoration. No personal touches. Nothing that said a person lived here beyond the minimum requirements of continued biological function.

And on the far wall, pinned with four tacks that I replaced every third month because the river damp ate the metal, the house plans.

(*She's going to see the shack. She's going to see the gap between the drawings and the reality. The man who plans five rooms and a workshop with warding anchors and a kitchen facing east lives in a box with a cot and one chair. Every copper goes to rent, food, guild dues, and the lockbox. The place where I sleep is an afterthought. It's always been an afterthought. That was fine when no one was looking. Now someone is looking, and the gap between what I'm building toward and what I'm standing in is—*)

Mere walked past me into the shack.

She didn't look at the cot. She didn't look at the bare walls. She didn't scan the room the way Ledger had — clinical, cataloguing, forming conclusions about the man from the space he inhabited. She walked past all of it as though the room's contents were noise her filter had stripped automatically, and stopped in front of the drawings.

Her hand came up. Not touching — hovering, the way she hovered over a bookshelf when she was reading the organisational logic before she rearranged it. Her eyes moved across the plans with the focused, systematic attention she gave to everything that had structure.

"The kitchen faces east," she said.

"Yes."

"The load-bearing wall between the workshop and the main room — is that structural or can it be relocated if the workshop dimensions change?"

I stared at her. This was not the reaction I had predicted. I had run the scenario — her entering the shack, seeing the poverty, the spartan functionality, the confession of someone who invested nothing in his present because his present was a holding pattern for a future he couldn't afford. I'd predicted embarrassment. Possibly pity. Possibly the particular silence that came when someone recalculated you downward.

"Structural," I said, because she'd asked a question and the question had an answer. "The foundation anchors for the warding system run through it. Moving it would mean re-routing the entire warding infrastructure."

"Then the workshop ventilation needs to account for the fixed wall's position. The current drawing has the primary vent on the west face, but if the wall stays, the airflow will dead-spot in the northeast corner. You'd need a secondary vent or a redirecting baffle."

She was redesigning my house.

She was standing in my shack — in the one room that represented everything I hadn't achieved yet, every copper I didn't have, every year of sleeping in a box between a river and a mill — and she was redesigning my house. Not the concept. Not the dream. The *structure*. She'd looked at the plans and seen a building that needed engineering, not a fantasy that needed indulging.

(*You predicted wrong. You predicted she'd see the shack — the gap, the poverty, the man who doesn't invest in himself. She didn't see the shack. She saw the plans. Her pattern recognition locked onto the structure before the context registered, because structure is what she sees, the way you see flaws and Leon sees systems and Devod sees— She saw the future. Not the present. You read everyone. You predicted her reaction based on seven weeks of data and a classification system that has never been wrong about anyone. It was wrong about her. The cold reader who reads everyone got read instead, and the reading was—*)

(*Something that doesn't have a category. Something the filing system wasn't built for. Something.*)

"The drainage grade on the east side," she said, still looking at the plans. "What's the soil composition? If it's the same clay they use for the canal lining, you'll want a French drain system along the full eastern perimeter, not just the kitchen outflow."

"I — haven't tested the soil yet. I don't own the land yet."

"When you do," she said. Not *if*. When.

I sat on the cot because my legs suggested it and because the chair was occupied by a woman who'd moved to it without asking, pulling it closer to the wall to study the plans from a better angle. I hadn't offered the chair. She hadn't needed me to.

She stayed.

Neither of us addressed it. She didn't announce it — didn't say *I'm staying* or *it's late* or any of the social scaffolding that people used to frame a decision they'd already made. She just didn't leave. She looked at the plans for a while longer, made a comment about the bathroom placement in revision six that suggested she'd read the drawings closely enough to identify the revision sequence, and then opened her notebook to check the altered preparation's timing calculations one final time.

From the cot, I watched Mere work by the light of the ceramic rod she'd pulled from her satchel. The plans were on the wall. The diagrams were in my pocket. The bracelet was warm, the stone shifting closer to amber with each hour's recovery.

Tomorrow the math would either work or it wouldn't. The moss was prepared in both concentrations — standard for dampening, altered for drift acceleration. The bracelet's reservoir was recovering but not full. The team knew their roles. Leon would watch the lattice. Jonael would hold the door. Mere would time the applications. Devod would be there.

The noise was focused in a way that wasn't calm and wasn't anxious. Every thread pulled to a single point — the three layers, the three solutions, the one sequence. Not scattered. Not spiralling. Converged. The way light converges through a lens, not to spread but to burn.

(*Tomorrow.*)

Tomorrow.
