The planning happened around the breakfast table, because it was the only table Willowbrook had.
Kael unrolled a sheet of paper across the porridge bowls. Ren had drawn the map from memory the night before: the service door, the corridor, the passage behind the main hall, the stairs going down. At the bottom of the stairs sat a square with a thick black line across it.
"The door," Kael said.
"Mana lock. Iron. New mortar around the frame." Ren touched the black line. "I can't break it. I can't pick it. Oshi's wire won't work on threads."
"It won't," Oshi agreed from the end of the table. He sounded slightly offended on the wire's behalf.
"Then how do we get in?"
"We don't. Not yet." Ren looked around the table. "We watch someone else open it."
Silence.
Mira put down her spoon. "You want to sit on the stairs of a secret prison and wait for the jailer."
"Yes."
"And then what?"
"Then I see the key pattern. A lock like that is threads pulled in a certain order. If I watch it once, I can learn it."
Kael was looking at him the way he had after the fifty-seven seconds. "The way you learned Empty Palm."
"The way I learned Empty Palm."
Fen wrote something in the notebook. Nobody asked what.
The problem was that nobody knew when the jailer came.
That problem solved itself at noon, when Valerius walked through Willowbrook's front door for the second time in his life.
He did not look around the training hall this time. He came straight to Ren.
"A girl was moved into the main academy last night," he said quietly. "From Fenwick. Outer Ring, same intake as you. Her name is Maren."
Ren went very still.
He remembered the river bank. The girl who talked to things no one else could see. The one-second silver-white glow at the altar, and Father Eddan looking up from his ledger for a long, long moment before he wrote anything down.
"Transferred where?"
"That is the problem. Nobody transfers from Fenwick to us. Ever. And she was not put in the dormitories. Two attendants took her to the east wing after the last bell. I was on night duty in the courtyard." Valerius paused. "I saw them go down."
"Down."
"Down." He studied Ren's face. "You are not surprised."
"No."
"I thought you might not be." Another pause. "The transfer order came from the Festival office. I saw the seal on the attendant's paper. White and gold."
White and gold robes. Rings on every finger.
Ren filed it carefully and did not let it reach his face.
"Why are you telling me this?"
Valerius was quiet for a moment. "After the arena, I asked what you were. You said someone who doesn't stay down." He looked at the floor. "I have been asking myself the same question since. I did not like my answer. I would like a better one."
He left before Ren could reply.
Ren turned to the others. "They only brought her in last night. They'll come back for her tonight to connect her."
He did not say: to lay her on a bed and run a thread from her chest into a copper pipe.
He did not have to.
At dusk he went to the World Tree, because he always did.
He sat on his root and pressed his palm to the bark. The rot had crept into a new section of the eastern roots overnight. He could see the threads moving, slow and patient, the way they always moved.
"There is a new one," the tree said. "I felt her arrive. Faint, but there."
"Her name is Maren," Ren said. "I'm going tonight."
"To free them?"
"To see."
The heartbeat moved through his hand. Slow. Tired. Still holding.
"Then see clearly," the tree said. "And come back to me, boy. The last one who went to see did not."
He took his hand off the bark and did not answer.
They went at the first bell of the night. Earlier than before. Ren wanted to be in position before anyone else was.
Oshi's field had changed over the past week. It no longer hung around him like fog. It pulsed now, tight and deliberate, and when he held it at full strength Ren could stand inside it and feel his own presence go quiet, like a room after the door closes.
Four feet. They stayed inside four feet.
Lira had not come. One of her beetles had. It rode on Ren's collar, small and dark, and Lira had explained with total seriousness that it would tell her if anything went wrong, and that it had volunteered.
The service door. The wire. Last time it had taken forty seconds. Tonight it took thirty-one. Oshi had been practicing.
The corridor. The passage behind the hall. The stairs.
They crouched at the top of the lowest flight, pressed into the angle where the wall met the steps, and waited.
The World Tree's heartbeat moved slowly in Ren's chest. Down here, this close to the pipes, he could feel something else beneath it. A steady pull. As if the building were breathing out through a straw.
Somewhere far above them, the second bell rang.
Then footsteps.
Three sets. Two heavy, sharing a weight between them. One light and unhurried, the step of someone who had walked this path many times and no longer thought about it.
Ren opened his Insight.
The attendants came first, carrying a stretcher. Their mana was ordinary: warm, dull, C-Rank at most. On the stretcher lay a girl with river-bank hair, her eyes closed, her hands folded on her chest by someone else.
Maren.
Behind them came the third figure.
Ren looked at it with the clearest eyes in the city and saw nothing.
Not darkness. Not suppression like Oshi's, which felt like a lamp turned low. This was absence. Where the figure's mana should have been, there was only a smooth, closed surface, like the outside of a sealed jar. A grey hooded cloak. No face he could see from this angle. Just someone of middle height, moving calmly down the stairs, less than six feet away.
Oshi's hand closed on his sleeve. Hard.
Anyone above C-Rank, we leave. Immediately. No arguing.
That had been the agreement.
Ren did not move. He could not. Not yet. He needed thirty more seconds.
The figure stopped at the iron door and removed one glove.
Rings. On every finger. Some of them stacked, catching the lamplight.
Ren's breath stopped in his chest.
The bare hand touched the iron, and the lock woke. Ren watched it with his whole attention. Thread by thread, the woven structure came apart: the third thread first, pulled left. Then the seventh, turned under. Then the first and fifth together, released in a single motion, like a knot untied from the inside. Eleven movements in all. Four seconds.
He took in every one of them. He saw it the way he had seen Kael's palm: completely, already knowing the shape before it finished.
The door swung inward.
Dim green light spilled out. The attendants carried Maren through. The figure followed and did not close the door behind them.
From the stairs, Ren could see straight down the long room. The rows of beds. The copper pipes along the ceiling. The threads above each chest, fine as spider silk.
And the far left bed.
Small. Dark-haired. His family's way of taking up less space than anyone expected.
He could see her face now.
He had drawn that face from memory when he was twelve. He had gotten the nose wrong. He had gotten the mouth wrong. It did not matter. He would have known her with his eyes shut.
Yuna.
His hand was pressed against the stone step, hard enough to hurt. He made his fingers loosen. Slowly. Deliberately.
Then his sister opened her eyes.
Not slowly, the way sleepers wake. All at once, as though someone had called her name.
She turned her head on the pillow. Past the attendants. Past the hooded figure. Straight down the length of the room, through the open door, up the dark stairs, to the exact place where Ren crouched hidden inside four feet of silence.
She looked at him.
Her eyes were not silver anymore.
They were black. The same slow, living black as the rot in the World Tree's roots, moving in threads across the place where the silver used to be.
Her lips moved. No sound. Just the shape of three words he had heard once before, from a tree, in an empty square.
Give me time.
At the iron door, the hooded figure went still.
Then, very slowly, it began to turn around.