The plan wasn't a plan. It was a suicide note, and Rowan was making them all sign it.
He stood before them in the crevice's stale gloom, his face all harsh angles in the weak light. He'd just finished sketching out a nightmare—a desperate scramble across a plaza of teeth and sorrow, a dash into the temple's weeping throat. A few hours, he'd said, his voice like stones grinding together.
A few hours until they died.
Nora let out a sharp, bitten-off sound, half-laugh, half-sob. "You're insane," she breathed, but there was no heat in it. It was just a fact. Ezra felt something cold and heavy settle in his gut, a dread so complete it felt like acceptance. This was it. This was how it ended.
But Rowan wasn't looking for their approval. He was taking stock. His eyes, which usually held the fierce, calculating focus of a wolf, now held the bleak, empty glare of a butcher counting cuts of meat. They swept over the group and landed on the ones who had stayed silent, who huddled in the shadows with their secrets held tight to their chests.
"We can't go in blind," he said. The words were flat, absolute. They sucked the last bit of air from the cramped space. This wasn't a leader rallying his team. This was a commander sizing up the last few bullets in his clip, knowing they weren't enough. "The temple's heart will be worse. I need to know what we are. All of it."
He started naming them, each one a hammer blow. "Nora. Fire." She flinched, as if the word burned. "Cassian. Blood." Cassian's jaw tightened, a vein throbbing at his temple. "Soren. Shadows." From the dark, a low, humorless chuckle. "Ezra. Light." Ezra's own light flickered weakly inside him, a guttered candle. Then Rowan's gaze, heavy and pitiless, pinned the rest. "The rest of you. This is it. Your last chance. If you've got a trick, a spark, anything… you spit it out now. Not when you're screaming. Not when your silence gets the person next to you torn apart."
The silence that followed was worse than any monster's roar. It was the sound of ten people holding their breath, holding their secrets, clinging to the last private things they owned in this world that wanted to devour them all. You could feel the fear, thick and sour in the air.
Rowan's patience, always a thin veneer, snapped. "Give me detail," he growled, the sound scraping up from his chest. "How does it work? How do you use it?" His eyes landed on Rin. "Starting with you."
She didn't look at him. She stared at a crack in the wall, her chin lifted, her posture so rigid it looked painful. Her silence wasn't just secrecy. It was a challenge. A stupid, prideful, infuriating challenge. In the face of their shared, screaming terror, her quiet felt like a slap.
Soren moved.
It wasn't like a person moving. It was like a shadow detaching itself from the wall and becoming a storm. One second he was leaning, a portrait of coiled indifference. The next, Rin was slammed against the stone, the thud of her body hitting rock making them all jump. Soren had her pinned, his forearm a brutal bar across her throat, not quite choking, but promising it. His face was so close to hers their breath mixed—his hot and angry, hers coming in ragged, shocked pulls.
"Open your mouth," he whispered. The whisper was a thousand times more terrifying than a shout.
This wasn't about Rowan's orders anymore. This was Soren. This was the boy who'd slept in the ashes of his home, who carried a graveyard in his soul. He had nothing left to lose but his rage, and it made him beautifully, terribly simple.
Rin's eyes, wide and white-rimmed, finally showed real fear. She tried to hold his gaze, to find that cold pride again, but it was crumbling under the raw, unhinged hatred in his.
"You think your little secret is so special?" he hissed, spit flecking her cheek. His free hand came up, his thumb hovering a millimeter from her eyeball. She froze. "You think your pain is a precious jewel? I bathe in the screams of my dead every night. I have nothing. So you will tell me what that flute does, or I will take your eyes as a down payment. I will break your fingers one by one until you sing for me."
He meant it. Every word. In the scorched, hollowed-out place where his heart used to be, her suffering was just another currency. The rest of them watched, paralyzed. This was the ugly, real face of their desperation.
A tear, fat and furious, rolled down Rin's dusty cheek. The dam broke. Her lips trembled.
"Sound," she choked out, the word mangled. "It's… sound. Music. It can… make a shield. Make things stronger." Her eyes, wild and ashamed, darted across the group, searching for something, someone—and landed, for a fractured, heartbreaking second, on Cassian.
He was watching. His face was a blank, icy wall. No recognition. No pity. Nothing. Oh, Ezra thought, a cold understanding dawning. It's him. Her history is with him. And he doesn't even care.
"Or," she sobbed, the humiliation complete, "a high note… it can shatter things. Stun. For a second." She was giving up her soul's last refuge. Soren held her there a moment longer, letting her feel the full weight of the violation, then shoved away from her with a sound of disgust.
She slid down the wall, a crumpled heap, clutching the bone flute to her chest like it was a murdered child.
Rowan gave a single, curt nod. A tool had been cataloged. He turned his merciless eyes to the next silent face.
But before he could speak, a voice, thin and strained, came from behind Milo's spectacles. "Mine… mine isn't a weapon." Milo was shaking. He pushed his glasses up, his hands unsteady. "I call it Strategic Acuity. It's… it's like seeing the world as a clockwork. All the gears, all the tension. I can't see the future, but I can see… what's about to break. The path of least destruction." He looked directly at Atlas, his eyes huge behind his lenses. "If he sees a death… a fixed point… I can't stop it. But I might… I might be able to see how to stand so the falling rock misses your head. So the blade cuts your arm, not your throat."
The confession sucked the air from the room. He wasn't offering salvation. He was offering a gruesome, mathematical chance to survive a prophecy.
"You and Atlas," Rowan said, his voice low with a new, fierce intensity. "You're tied together now. He sees the trap. You find the way out."
Into the terrible, heavy silence that followed, Ezra heard his own voice, small and far away. "Milo." The strategist looked at him, his face pale as paper. "Atlas saw me die." Ezra's throat was tight. He could still feel the phantom shatter of the vision. "Can you… can your power stop that?"
Everyone stared at Milo. The weight of the question—a life, a friend's life—dropped onto his narrow shoulders. His analytical armor, his precious logic, shattered. He looked from Ezra's frightened, hopeful face to Atlas's hollow, knowing one.
"I…" Milo's voice cracked. He looked down at his own hands as if he'd never seen them before. "The variables… a personal death… it's a knot." He sounded like a lost little boy. "A different kind of math. The knot is so tight. I can't… I can't promise it."
It was the worst answer. It was the honest one. It was no answer at all.
Nora, her fear finally boiling over into a sharp, protective rage, exploded. "And what about them?!" She jabbed a finger at Lyn and Dav, the two youngest, who were pressed together, their faces slick with silent tears. "No resonances! No tricks! They're just kids! They shouldn't even be here!"
Before Rowan could answer, a shadow shifted at the back of the crevice. Kiva slipped back into the group, her movements faint as a sigh, her gaze fixed on the floor, a ghost returning to a house about to burn down.