The rift shattered with a concussive whiplash, tearing apart the vision of the freezing ocean.
The team was hurled from the rift and through the shimmering threshold. They hit the ground hard—no longer the unyielding obsidian of the Floor One plaza, but the smooth, crystalline, gravity-warped surface of Floor Two. The impact rattled Marcus's bones. The translucent stone beneath him hummed with a clear, crystalline tone, and for one disorienting instant, the floor seemed tilted against a horizon that no longer obeyed up and down. Shards of landscape hung suspended at impossible angles. Bridges arced sideways into their own reflections while distant islands drifted lazily across the sky, as though gravity here was merely a suggestion.
Kael gasped for air, clutching his chest. He dragged in the sharp, clean atmosphere, his fingers digging into his fabric right over his breastbone as he waited for the phantom agony of the rift-blade strike to subside. The physical whiplash left his heart hammering in a frantic, double-time rhythm, but his mind remained entirely cold and detached.
He looked at Taryn and Lysara, his investigator brain now armed with the knowledge that a member of their original group was the traitor—and burdened by a fourth name neither of them had spoken since his return. Kaelen. A boy who had died before he could become the kind of climber worth remembering, erased so completely that even the Choir had forgotten his name.
He watched Taryn and Lysara scramble up, their boots skidding across the pulsing blue-violet veins of the crystal landing. Taryn's hand was already fumbling frantically toward her alchemical bandolier, while Lysara brought her staff up to scan the vast, open horizon for immediate rifts. To them, the fall on Floor Fifty was a tragic, insurmountable disaster—a sequence where they had simply failed to protect their comrades from a lethal ecosystem, one loss folded into a longer list of losses they'd stopped trying to fully name. But Kael had just seen the fingerprint of the crime. The missing warden, Voren Klythe, wasn't a fallen hero who had dissolved into the abyss alongside the rest of them; he was the cold, deliberate executioner who had opened a boy from collarbone to sternum and then driven a rift-blade through Marcus's chest while the world screamed, yet never told anyone the truth of what they'd heard.
The team was a broken mechanism. Their history was a lie, and the suspect file was finally open.
Marcus rose slowly, instinct settling him into a left-forward southpaw guard. He suppressed the tremor in his wrist, brushed crystal dust from his cheek, and fixed his gaze on the floating islands drifting beneath the bruised violet sky.
"The perimeter is clear," Marcus said, his calm voice cutting through their ragged breathing. He closed his left fist, hiding the fresh silver tracings mapping themselves deeper into his palm.
"We're on the board. Let's find out where the trail leads."