# Chapter 15: The Haul

The voices changed things.

Not the plan — the plan was the same. Mere needed an hour, maybe less, to harvest what we'd come for. The moss was here, dense and old and exactly as promising as she'd assessed from twenty feet. The plan was fine. What changed was the math around the plan.

"Could be miners," Devod said. "Old crews come back sometimes. Check their claims, see if anything got missed."

"In a mine that's been closed for the better part of two decades," I said. "Through flooded lower passages. At —" I checked my internal clock, which was approximate at best underground "— roughly mid-morning on a Godsday."

"People work Godsdays."

"Not in abandoned mines they don't."

"Well, we work Godsdays."

He had me there. I turned to Mere, who was already crouching at the water line, examining the moss attachment points with the focused precision of someone who had heard the voices, assessed them as a variable, and filed them under *things Phelan will handle* while she handled the things only she could handle.

"How fast can you work?"

"Same speed. Faster destroys the dampening compounds." She didn't look up. "The cutting technique doesn't care about your timeline."

Fair enough. "Devod, corridor. Same position as before. Anything moves, you tell me."

He nodded and took his station — walking stick up, weight forward, that working stance that had nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with a lifetime of placing himself between cargo and threats. He'd proven the stance worked on mine dogs. I hoped he wouldn't need to prove it worked on people.

Mere's hands moved into the moss, and the world narrowed.

I'd seen Mere focused before — at Thresholds, sorting inventory with mechanical precision; at Brevian's Fine Enchantments during our window shopping, dissecting shoddy enchantment work with clinical detachment. This was different. This was Mere in her element the way I was in mine during deep Flaw Sight work — total engagement, no wasted motion, every action serving the next. She cut at the substrate line with a thin-bladed tool I didn't recognise, angling the edge precisely where moss met stone, separating the fibrous mat without tearing the deeper root structures that carried the dampening compounds.

(*Binding salts. The water bowl, the dog, three weeks of trial and error that she'd done alone before I ever walked into Thresholds. She'd built a localised dampening field from intuition and patience. This is the same principle — the same concept — at a scale that could crack a three-layer curse instead of a simple fear working. What Mere did by instinct, we're now doing deliberately. The binding salts were a sketch. This is the finished drawing.*)

"Hand me the second rod," Mere said.

Devod shifted from his corridor post, rummaged in the collection kit, and held up a thin metal implement. "This one?"

"That one."

He brought it to her. She took it without looking. He returned to his post without comment. More words than they'd exchanged in twelve years, probably, and all of them functional. But functional was more than nothing, and more than nothing was where they'd started this morning.

"What if we took some of the stone too?" Devod said from the corridor. "The moss is growing on it — maybe the stone helps keep it alive."

"The stone is irrelevant to the dampening properties," Mere said. "The substrate is a growth medium, not an active component."

"Right. Just thinking."

He was always thinking. That was the problem and, occasionally, the solution. I'd been tracking his suggestions since we'd entered the mine — a running tally that the noise maintained without being asked. The shortcut through Fenwick bottoms (dismissed). A different entry point through a ventilation shaft (structurally unsound). Stacking the mine dog carcasses as a barricade (impractical and disgusting). Using the light rod at a different angle during harvest (Mere's withering correction had been efficient). Damming the water to access deeper growth (would disturb the substrate). Five ideas so far, all wrong, none malicious. Just a mind that generated possibilities — constantly, involuntarily — with a hit rate that made the volume exhausting.

Mere worked. I watched the corridors. The voices didn't get closer, but they didn't get farther away either.

Twenty minutes in, she had the first application's worth separated and stored — pale fibrous mats laid between dampened cloth in the collection kit, handled with the kind of care that suggested the material would take offence at rough treatment. She kept harvesting. Extra stock, she'd said. Keep it alive, maintain the root structures, don't corrupt the supply by rushing. She didn't know about the second use yet — neither did I, not fully — but her instinct to preserve more than the minimum was the same instinct that had kept binding salts in a dog's water bowl for three weeks. Prepare for the problem you can see, and keep your options open for the ones you can't.

"Mere." I kept my voice level. "The voices are closer."

She didn't rush. She finished the cut she was making, secured the sample, and closed the collection kit with deliberate hands. "Done. Not everything I wanted, but enough."

Enough would have to do.

* * *

They came from the south passage — the connecting corridor that linked the flooded lower levels to the gallery we'd been working in. Five of them, moving in a loose formation that said *organised* without saying *military*. Lanterns, not light rods. Practical clothing. Weapons — short swords, a crossbow, a heavy cudgel. The kind of equipment you issue to people you're paying, not the kind people choose for themselves.

"They must have taken the old tunnel from Fenwick bottoms," Devod said quietly. He'd positioned himself in front of Mere without being told — the same instinct as the walking stick, the same muscle memory. Protection first, questions after.

(*The shortcut. Twenty minutes saved. Subtract the dog fight — fifteen minutes, maybe twelve. Account for loading time at the entrance. If they started from the same place after we left, the timeline fits. The numbers land before I'm finished not wanting them to. Which means Devod's shortcut idea wasn't bad. One for five so far, which is better than I'd expected and worse than Devod would claim.*)

I stepped forward, ring hand at my side, not raised. Reading first. They didn't appear hostile…yet.

The leader was the one on the left — not the biggest, not the one with the crossbow, but the one the others checked with before they settled into their positions. Mid-thirties, weathered face, calm — the adrenaline didn't surprise him anymore. His eyes moved from me to Devod to Mere to the collection kit and back to me in a single sweep. Professional assessment. He was reading me the same way I was reading him.

(*Five. Two with blades forward, one crossbow on the right flank, one with the cudgel hanging back — reserve or rearguard. Leader armed but not leading with the weapon. Issued gear, not personal. Same manufacturer on three of the blade sheaths — bulk purchase. They're on a payroll. Corridor width allows two abreast. Crossbow is the primary threat — range in these confines is irrelevant, the bolt will hit whatever it's pointed at. The leader is the decision point. Resolve him, resolve the fight — or prevent it.*)

"You're being paid," I said. "Not enough to die over moss."

The leader's expression shifted — a fractional loosening around the jaw, the kind of micro-response that said *I agree with you* before the rest of his face remembered the contract. "Walk away. Leave the kit. Nobody has to explain anything to anybody."

"Can't do that."

"Then we've got a problem." He said it without heat. Statement of logistics, not a threat. "Nobody takes anything out of this mine. That's the term. Not some of it, not a sample, not a cutting. Nothing leaves. Those are the terms."

"Whose terms?"

"The terms that pay me on time and don't ask me to think about it." He shifted his weight — still talking, but the body was making calculations the mouth wasn't sharing. "Look, I can see you're not some scavenger picking through ruins. You've got equipment, you've got a plan, you've got—" his eyes flicked to Mere and the collection kit "—someone who knows what she's doing. Which means you know what this stuff is worth. Which means you know someone else thinks it's worth paying my people to make sure nobody takes it."

"Your employer doesn't want the moss," I said. "They want to control who has it. There's a difference."

Something moved behind his eyes. Agreement, maybe. Or just the recognition that I'd read the situation correctly. "Doesn't change things, mate. My contract says no one leaves with materials. I don't have the authority to renegotiate."

"Even when negotiating is the smart play?"

"Especially then." He almost smiled. "Smart plays require permission. I'm not authorised for smart."

I read the moment he decided. It was small — a tightening of the fingers on the sword grip, a shift of weight from back foot to front, a micro-glance to the man with the crossbow that was instruction disguised as acknowledgment. He was going to give the signal. He knew the rational choice and couldn't make it. I knew he was going to fight before he did.

Half a second advantage. In a mine corridor, that's a lifetime.

The fire left the ring before the leader's hand finished rising. Ring-assisted, twelve feet — the working caught the crossbowman in the chest, exploded, and knocked him backward into the wall. The crossbow discharged into the ceiling. Stone chips rained down.

(*Amplified. Same as the first dog — residue pocket feeding the output. Note the corridor section. Don't rely on it repeating.*)

Then it was movement and geometry and the noise stripped of everything except what kept me alive.

The leader and the nearest blade came forward together — coordinated, not skilled — three dozen low-stakes jobs had built the rhythm but not the talent. I put a defensive screen between them and Devod's position — a flat plane of heated air that wouldn't stop a determined charge but would make them choose a different angle. Cost: more than it should have. The residue down here was dense, unpredictable, and every working felt like pushing through mud.

(*Seven percent for a screen that should cost three. The environment is taxing everything double. Adjust.*)

Second working — the leader. Fire at eight feet, the residue neutral this time, neither helping nor hurting. He dodged half of it, caught enough to drive him sideways into the wall. Not down. Hurt, angry, still moving. I closed the distance and put an elbow into his jaw — physical, no magic, just leverage and timing. He went down. Unconscious.

The two remaining blades tried to flank. One went wide, toward Devod's position. The other came straight at me — aggressive, committed, aggressive, committed, forward the only direction that mattered.

I met him with fire at five feet. Close range, ring straining, the vibration starting in the metal. The working landed but cost — I could feel the reserves dropping in chunks now, each working pulling more than the last. The residue was getting denser deeper in the corridor, and every foot of distance added a tax I couldn't predict.

(*Thirty-eight percent. No — thirty-five. Dropping fast. Five workings in and the tank is — *)

The flanking blade reached Devod's position. Devod was ready — not with the stick this time, but with a mine cart he'd dragged across the corridor while I was fighting. The blade hit the cart, stumbled over the wheel assembly, and Devod brought the walking stick down on his wrist. The sword clattered on the stone. Devod shoved the cart forward, pinning the man against the wall.

Not combat. Obstruction. He'd turned the corridor into a loading dock problem and solved it the way he solved loading dock problems — with available equipment and the physics of tight spaces. Mere hadn't needed to move. Hadn't needed to defend herself. Devod hadn't let anyone get close enough to make it necessary.

(*Twenty-six percent. Twenty-five. The fight's over but the math is wrong — five workings plus the screen, residue tax at double rate, defensive positioning costs — I should be at twenty or lower. The numbers don't —*)

I noticed my wrist was warm.

The cudgel man hadn't engaged. He'd watched from the rear, assessed the outcome, and made the intelligent decision to set his weapon on the ground and put his hands where I could see them. Professional enough to know when the contract wasn't worth the cost. I appreciated that. One of us should be thinking clearly.

The corridor settled into the aftermath of violence — groaning, the scatter of dropped weapons, stone dust drifting in the lantern light. Five bandits, none dead, most regretting the morning's career choices.

"Rope," I said. "Carter's pack. Side pocket."

Devod found it without needing to be told which side pocket — an instinct for where things lived in a loaded bag, the same way he could find a spare wheel pin in a cart he'd never driven. He tossed me the coil and I went to work, starting with the two who were still conscious. Wrists behind backs, ankles crossed, the knots Carter had shown me during the packing session — quick-tie cargo hitches that tightened under tension and released with a single pull from the right angle. Not military restraints. Delivery restraints. The kind you used on loads that might shift in transit.

The leader was still out. I bound him anyway — wrists, ankles, rolled onto his side so he wouldn't choke if the jaw swelled. The crossbowman was groaning against the wall, burn marks across his chest, not going anywhere under his own power. I bound him for completeness. The man Devod had pinned behind the mine cart cooperated. Resigned. The morning had gone badly and further resistance would only make the afternoon worse.

Five secured. Weapons collected and piled out of reach. Not going anywhere for hours, and the mine's only other exit was the flooded lower passage they'd come through — not an option with hands tied behind their backs.

The cudgel man watched me tie the last knot with professional interest. "You'll leave us here?"

"Someone will come looking when you don't report back. Your employer seems organised enough for that."

He considered this. Nodded. Fair terms, by the standards of people who tied other people up in mines.

I leaned against the wall and breathed.

* * *

The post-combat assessment was a habit I'd picked up in the Barrows and hadn't been able to shake. Run the numbers. Catalogue the damage. Know where you stand before you have to stand again.

I ran the numbers. They didn't add up.

Five fire workings, one defensive screen, the residue taxing every output at roughly double the standard rate. Call it ten workings' worth of energy at normal cost. At seventy percent starting reserves, I should have been at twenty percent. Maybe lower — the defensive screen was sloppy, the suppression work inefficient, energy expenditure from fighting a three-body problem in an environment that actively works against precision.

I was at thirty-two percent. Maybe thirty-four. Higher than the math allowed.

The bracelet was warm. Not the ambient warmth of metal against skin — I'd stopped noticing that weeks ago. This was active warmth, the kind I'd first felt in the Barrows when the bracelet's steady draw had been pulling from my depleted reserves. The same sensation, the same rhythmic pulse.

Except the direction was wrong.

In the Barrows, the bracelet had been pulling — a faint, steady draw from my reserves into its reservoir. The slow leak I'd noticed at fifteen percent, the one that felt like someone opening a second tap on a nearly empty barrel. It had been drawing from me since the moment I'd put it on. Steadily. Patiently. For days.

Now it was pushing.

(*The draw. The well. The threshold — it filled itself from me, from the overflow, from the reserves I wasn't using when I slept and walked and sat at tables processing curse architecture. It was filling its well. And now that the well is — now that my reserves dropped past — *)

The noise stuttered. Too tired for a clean analysis, too stubborn to stop trying. The data points were there but the connections kept slipping — the constant draw, the reservoir, the warmth, the colour shifts from black to dark red to amber. The bracelet had been charging itself from my natural recovery for days. And when my reserves dropped below some threshold I couldn't identify, it had reversed the flow.

It hadn't been draining me. It had been saving for me.

A wellspring. Patient, autonomous, operating on logic I hadn't written and couldn't fully read. Pre-Compact engineering doing what pre-Compact engineering apparently did — something elegant that I didn't understand and couldn't have designed.

How much had it stored? Was this a one-time release or would it cycle? Was this the original maker's intent, or emergent behaviour of runic architecture old enough to have developed its own habits?

Questions. All of them good. None of them answerable right now, in a mine corridor, with five subdued bandits and the residue making my thoughts feel like they were moving through the same mud as my workings.

I filed it. The noise objected. I filed it harder.

There was still work to do.

* * *

The search was methodical. Securing them had been step one. Searching them was step two — professional habit. You don't leave an information source unexamined, even when you're tired, even when the bracelet on your wrist has just rewritten your understanding of your own equipment.

I went through them one by one, the bound men watching with the dull resignation of people who understood the process. Standard hired-muscle kit. Basic supplies — rations, water, the kind of anonymous operational gear that could belong to anyone doing anything. Nothing personal. No unit markings, no guild tokens, no identifying details on the clothing. These people travelled light and anonymous because someone had told them to.

The leader had payment notes.

Not coins — paper. Folded into an inner pocket, protected from the mine's damp by an oiled pouch. Three documents: a receipt for services rendered, a schedule of regular payments, and a patrol log.

The patrol log was the interesting one. Dated entries going back months — visit frequency, corridor conditions, and in a separate column marked *inventory*, a running tally of moss growth. Estimated coverage. Density assessments. Growth rates between visits, tracked with the kind of methodical attention that suggested someone upstream was reading these reports and making decisions based on the numbers. The language wasn't botanical — the entries used terms like *available stock* and *harvestable volume* — but the data was precise enough that Mere could have used it.

They weren't here to collect the moss. They were here to *monitor* it — keep track of how much was growing, how fast it was spreading, and ensure no one else got to it first. When the numbers hit whatever threshold their employer had set, a proper retrieval unit would come in and strip the site clean. The patrol team was the eyes. The retrieval team was the hands. Efficient. Compartmentalised.

The payments were consistent. Regular amounts at regular intervals. Not a one-time job fee — an ongoing contract. These bandits had been walking patrols through a supposedly abandoned mine on a schedule, reporting growth numbers to someone who cared enough to track ghostveil moss by the square foot but careful enough to never touch it themselves.

The company name on the payment notes meant nothing to me. *Greenvale Provisions.* It sounded like a grocer. It probably wasn't.

I pocketed the documents and turned to Devod.

"Mean anything?" I held out the receipt. Not because I expected anything — because Devod was standing there, and I'd learned, grudgingly and recently, that other people sometimes carried useful data I didn't have.

Devod looked at the paper. His expression changed.

Not surprise — recognition. The immediate, certain recognition of a man seeing something he'd seen before in a different context. He took the receipt, held it closer to the lantern, and read the company name again.

"That's one of Ned's ghost vendors," he said. "He told me about three of them."

The noise stopped being tired.

"Ned tracked companies that appeared in Compact supply chains but didn't seem to do anything," Devod continued. He spoke the way he spoke about mine corridors — with the quiet authority of someone who'd absorbed information through repeated exposure without realising he was studying. "Shipping manifests that didn't match delivery records. Purchase orders from companies with no physical address. Vendor contracts that activated for one quarter and then vanished. He called them ghost vendors because they existed on paper and nowhere else."

"And Greenvale Provisions was one of them."

"Second one he found. Showed up in a requisition chain for — I don't remember. Something the Compact was buying through three intermediaries when they could have bought it directly for half the cost." Devod handed the receipt back. "Ned was worried. He filed reports. Four months later, the curse hit."

He said it simply. The connection between filing reports and being cursed wasn't subtext to Devod — it was the sequence of events as he understood them, laid out without editorial comment because he wasn't the kind of man who editorialised. Ned found problems. Ned reported problems. Ned got cursed. The order mattered.

(*The Compact classifies the curse as unbreakable. The Compact controls the assessment process — eleven days instead of four to six weeks. The Compact's shell companies are paying people to patrol growth sites and track inventory — monitoring the moss so a retrieval team can strip it when it's ready. The same organisation that says the curse can't be broken is actively controlling access to the materials needed to try. This isn't incompetence. This isn't institutional inertia. This is a supply chain. This is enforcement. How far up does — how long has — *)

The noise ran the implications without resolving them. Too many threads, too little data, too much exhaustion. But the lattice was tightening. The shape was becoming visible.

I pocketed the evidence and looked at Devod, who was watching me with the patient expression of a man who'd delivered his information and was waiting to see what I did with it.

Two for ten. The ratio was adjusting.

* * *

The retreat was tense in the way that retreats are when you've won the fight but haven't won the safety. The bandits were secured — binding cord from their own supplies, arms behind backs, the cudgel man cooperating with the resigned professionalism of someone filing an insurance claim. They weren't going anywhere. But we didn't know if five was the whole crew, and every minute in the mine was a minute closer to finding out.

Mere carried the collection kit herself. She'd refused help twice — once from me, once from Devod — with the same flat look both times. The moss was her responsibility. The handling mattered. The temperature mattered. The light exposure mattered. She was not going to hand irreplaceable biological material to someone who might jostle it.

Devod walked point, walking stick tapping the floor in a rhythm that was half navigation and half nervous energy. He'd been suggesting things again — an alternate route through the east ventilation shaft (sealed twenty years ago), using the mine cart rails as a guide back to the main corridor (the rails diverged in three places), sending the cudgel man ahead as a scout (I'd stared at him until he withdrew the suggestion).

We were forty yards from the main gallery when the ceiling spoke.

It started as a sound — not a crack, not a groan, but a deep structural complaint that resonated through the stone the way a tuning fork resonates through air. Something fundamental was unhappy. The fighting had done something to the corridor's integrity — fire workings in a confined space, residue destabilisation, the physical impact of bodies hitting walls. The mine had been closed for the better part of two decades. The supports had been adequate for years of nothing happening. Five minutes of violence had changed the engineering.

"Stop," Devod said.

We stopped. Not because Devod had authority — because the sound was still happening, and the dust was falling from above in a steady stream that meant *something is moving up there that shouldn't be moving.*

Devod's eyes tracked the ceiling — not panicked, not scattered, but focused in a way I hadn't seen from him before. He was reading the supports the way Mere read moss and I read magical workings. His domain. His expertise.

"The third timber," he said, pointing with the stick to a crossbeam twenty feet ahead. "See how it's bowed? Load-bearing. It's been carrying the weight from the gallery junction above us. The fighting shifted the stone — probably the fire working that hit the wall. The weight transfer changed."

"Can we get past it?"

"Not with it holding what it's holding. If that timber gives, the corridor drops eighteen inches of ceiling on us." He looked left, looked right, looked at the timber again. Then he looked at the mine carts pushed against the wall — the same carts he'd used as a barricade during the fight, now sitting uselessly in the corridor behind us.

"What if we—" he started, and I braced myself for idea number ten.

"The wheel jack," he said. "From the rear cart. It's a screw jack — they used them to lift carts for axle repair. Six-inch throw, base is solid iron." He pointed the stick at a loose beam half-buried in rubble against the near wall — old mine timber, probably dislodged years ago. "That beam beside the third crossbeam, jack underneath to push it up against the ceiling. Two points of contact instead of one. Shares the load long enough for us to pass."

I looked at the crossbeam. Looked at the dust. Looked at Devod, who was already moving toward the cart with the purposeful stride of someone heading toward a problem he already knew how to solve — not in mines, but in narrow streets and overloaded wagons and infrastructure that was never quite built to handle what was being asked of it.

He had the jack free in fifteen seconds. Dragged the loose beam into position beside the failing crossbeam in under a minute — close enough to share the load, offset enough to brace a different section of ceiling. Set the jack underneath, base on the floor, head against the beam's underside. The screw mechanism turned with a grinding reluctance that said *this hasn't moved in a decade* and then caught, bit, and started lifting. The loose beam rose until it pressed flat against the ceiling stone, and the crossbeam beside it groaned — the sound of weight redistributing, shifting from one point of failure to two points of adequacy. Devod adjusted the jack's angle — a fractional shift, reading the load transfer the way I read magical flows. Feeling for the point where the weight settled.

The dust stopped falling.

"Go," Devod said. "Quickly. And don't touch the walls."

We went. Mere first, collection kit clutched to her chest. Me second, watching the ceiling with the resigned attention of a man who understood that all engineering fails eventually. The timber held. The jack held. Devod's reading of the load-bearing architecture held.

He came through last, walking backward, watching the jack until he was past the danger point. The timber shifted behind him — a settling sound, not a failure. The corridor didn't collapse. The jack had bought us thirty seconds we needed and would hold for maybe five minutes more.

Two good ideas. Two out of ten. And the two had been worth all eight.

(*The process isn't inefficient. It's a search algorithm. Ten inputs, eight are noise, two are signal. Same as Leon's four hundred inputs — volume produces results when precision isn't available. Devod doesn't have precision. What he has is volume and the willingness to be wrong nine times for the privilege of being right once. The ratio isn't a flaw. It's a method.*)

Mere was looking at Devod again. Not assessment this time — or not only assessment. Something was being filed in her catalogue that didn't fit the existing model, and the data points were accumulating faster than she could process them. The walking stick against the mine dog. The position between her and the bandits. The jack under the timber. More data. More inconsistency. Still not processing. But the catalogue was getting heavy.

* * *

The main gallery opened around us like a held breath releasing. Wider corridors, higher ceilings, the structural anxiety of the lower passages replaced by the merely unsettling ambience of a mine that had been abandoned for a decade and a half.

"Wait," Mere said.

She'd stopped at a row of ore carts along the east wall — the old extraction carts that had been sitting in the gallery since the mine closed. The carts were full. Not of ore in the raw, commercial sense, but of something that made Mere crouch and examine the contents with the same focused intensity she'd given the moss.

"This is saturated," she said. "Completely saturated." She picked up a fist-sized piece and held it toward the dim light. Dark stone, unremarkable to look at, but — even without functional Flaw Sight, I could feel something from the piece. A density. A weight that wasn't physical. "Magical ore that's been sitting in high-concentration residue for over a decade. It's absorbed — it's *overflowing* with stored magical essence. This would be extraordinary for forging. For inscription work. For any kind of magical tooling."

(*Carter's forge. The inscription channels on the focusing ring. The knife set he was building. Material like this — saturated, dense, charged with a decade of accumulated magical energy — would be raw stock worth more than the moss and the verdenshade combined. And it's sitting in abandoned carts because nobody's been down here to realise what two decades of magical saturation does to common ore.*)

"How much can we take?" I asked.

"We can't take it all. Not with the cart loaded and the moss to protect." Mere sorted — testing pieces, discarding some, selecting others with a method I couldn't follow but trusted implicitly. "Thirty pieces. Maybe thirty-five if Devod can manage the weight distribution."

"I can manage the weight distribution," Devod said. He went straight to the cart, assessing the axle, the load balance, the clearance through the exit corridor. His domain again.

They worked together for ten minutes — Mere selecting, Devod loading, the first sustained cooperation I'd seen from them that lasted longer than a single exchange. Still not warm. Still functional. But the function had a rhythm now that it hadn't had at fifth bell this morning.

I stood guard and did financial mathematics.

(*Thirty pieces of saturated ore. Market value — unknown, but Carter would know. Several pieces to Carter as a gift. Repayment for the ring. Like Leon and the wine — I don't carry debts. The rest — can't sell through normal channels, the Compact would notice. Through Leon's contacts? Through Carter's network? The question isn't whether this ore has value. The question is whether I can realise the value without drawing the attention of an organisation that's already paying people to strip this mine bare. But the math — the house math — the ore changes the numbers. Not enough to reach 1,300. But enough to shift the timeline from "thirteen years" to something that starts with a smaller number.*)

The cart was loaded. Devod checked the balance twice, adjusted a wheel chock, and declared it sound. Mere's collection kit was secured separately, wrapped in dampened cloth, positioned where the vibration from the cart's movement would be minimal. She'd insisted on the placement. Devod had accommodated without argument.

We started toward the exit.

* * *

The road back was three hours of earned exhaustion.

Devod drove. Mere sat with the collection kit in her lap, one hand on the moss wrappings, adjusting for every bump in the road. I sat in the back with the ore and watched the mine entrance shrink to a dark point and then disappear behind the tree line.

Nobody spoke for the first hour. There was nothing to say that the silence didn't say better — we went in, we got what we came for, we fought for it, we nearly got buried, and we came out with more than we expected. The silence carried all of that without requiring anyone to perform the social ritual of discussing it.

Mere and Devod had exchanged more words today than in twelve years. Not resolved — started. She'd watched him put himself between her and the bandits. She'd watched him read a mine ceiling the way she read botanical specimens. She'd handed him tools and he'd handed them back and at some point during the ore loading, they'd developed a wordless efficiency that looked like memory — like something the bodies remembered from before the ultimatum, before the twelve years of distance, before the unsent gifts that Devod kept in a box that I knew about and Mere didn't.

Not resolved. But the door was open, and neither of them had closed it.

I'd trusted other people's knowledge when my own tools failed me. Flaw Sight was useless in the mine — the one ability I'd built my professional identity around, offline and irrelevant. Mere's botanical expertise had harvested the moss. Devod's structural knowledge had saved us from a collapse. His commercial knowledge had identified the Compact's procurement front. My contribution had been violence, which was useful but insufficient, and the willingness to let other people be better than me at things I couldn't do.

That last part was new. I wasn't sure I liked it. But the moss was in the kit and we were alive, so the results spoke for themselves.

The bracelet was warm on my wrist. Still pushing, or cycling, or doing whatever pre-Compact engineering did when it decided to be helpful without asking permission. Another question for another day. Another thread in a growing lattice of things I didn't understand but was learning to work with.

Drenwick appeared on the horizon as the afternoon light softened toward evening. The city looked the same. The case had changed.

Layer 1: the ghostveil moss, harvested, secured, carried in Mere's careful hands. A dampening agent to suppress the degradation curse long enough to crack it. Solution confirmed.

Layer 2: the forge-and-redirect technique, proven in the Barrows, refined through the bracelet's focusing matrix. A method to feed the stabilizer false data until it consumed itself. Solution ready.

Layer 3: the dead man's switch. The anchor bonded to Ned's drifting life-force signature. Still unsolved. Still waiting for a concept I didn't have yet.

Two out of three. And the evidence in my pocket — payment notes, patrol logs, shell company, Ned's ghost vendors — meant the Compact's involvement went deeper than institutional pressure. They weren't just classifying curses as unbreakable. They were controlling access to the materials needed to break them — monitoring growth sites, tracking inventory, sending retrieval teams on a schedule. The kind of systematic operation that doesn't exist without someone senior enough to authorise it and someone careful enough to maintain it.

The lattice was tightening. The shape was becoming clear. And somewhere in the gap between Layer 2 and Layer 3, between the technique I had and the concept I needed, the solution was waiting.

I just couldn't see it yet.

(*Two for ten. The shortcut and the jack. Devod's ratio, not mine. But on a day when Flaw Sight was useless and combat magic cost double and the bracelet did something I didn't authorise — on a day when the only things that worked were other people's knowledge and my willingness to use it — two for ten felt like better odds than I deserved.*)

The cart rolled toward Drenwick. Mere's hand rested on the moss. Devod hummed something tuneless. The bracelet pulsed against my wrist — patient, steady, full of questions I'd answer tomorrow.

Tomorrow. Today had been enough.
