Chương 39: Chapter 38: The Better Plan

The warm air outside the manor carried the sharp tang of scorched grass and blood-dried stone. Silk moved through it in silence, her blade already drawn, her battered armor catching the midday lights in uneven flashes. She had counted the guards on her route without meaning to and found gaps in their patrol wide enough to walk through unnoticed. She was furious. Not at Hephryx. She was furious at herself.

She had drawn on him in front of witnesses, in front of guards, in front of people who could have ended her with a word, and she had accomplished nothing. He'd walked away wearing his coat like nothing had happened. She had bled for it and gained nothing. This time would be different. One swing. Across the throat, before he could weave a solution, before the void could swallow him whole and spit him out three feet behind her.

She only needed the one moment where his guard wasn't up, and she would take it even if it killed her. It probably would kill her. For a moment, that didn't matter. Then Lucien's face came to mind. She couldn't leave him alone. Not after they had spent so long surviving together, only to finally reach a point where they had a chance to disappear. She couldn't throw that away. She couldn't make him lose her. But if she left with him, she would lose her only opportunity to reach Hephryx. This was her only chance.

She didn't know which choice would hurt more. The gates rose ahead, iron and pale stone stark under the harsh afternoon glare, answering her question. She quickened her pace, her boots silent on the gravel, her whole body narrowing into a single, uncomplicated purpose for the first time in longer than she could remember. Then the world turned green.

The veins came up through the ground without warning, wrapping around her ankles like something alive and starving, and the last thing she registered before the light swallowed her was the gate receding.

Elma felt Silk arrive before she saw her. The tether snapped taut, and green light unspooled across the courtyard grass in a violent, unspent flash beneath the bright afternoon suns. It was the first time she had teleported another person. For the past five minutes, she had sat perfectly still, reaching through the Shepherd's Veins until she could feel Silk's presence, holding onto that connection before pulling her across. Silk hit the ground running, then faltered.

Her gaze snapped across the courtyard, confusion flashing through her eyes as the impossible relocation caught up with her. A heartbeat later, she was already reorienting, already sprinting back toward the gates before her knees had fully remembered how to hold her weight. Elma moved faster. She compressed her Field down to a tight radius around Silk's frame and slammed a Barometric Coffin shut around her.

Silk's stride broke mid-step, her whole body locking as though she'd run headfirst into a wall built from nothing.

"Let go of me."

"No."

"Elma—" Lucien's voice, cracking somewhere behind her.

"Silk, what the hell is the matter with you, you'll die—""It's my only chance," Silk said, still straining uselessly against the pressure.

"He's leaving. He's leaving right now, I will never get another—""It's not your only chance," Elma said.

"You don't know that," Silk gasped, running out of breath on the last word.

"I do." Elma held the pressure a moment longer before easing it enough that Silk could breathe without the coffin cracking her ribs.

"We know where he works now. Valerius forced it out of him in front of Nina. If you go after him now, unprepared, you'll be dead before the suns set."

"I can manage—""But if you wait, we have his location. We can uncover how deeply he was involved in the attack on the estate, because I know he's hiding more than he's admitted. Then, when he's isolated, we take him." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"How do you know?" she asked at last.

"How do you know he's involved?" Elma didn't answer immediately.

"I'm not telling you why," she said.

"But I know." Silk searched her face, looking for hesitation, for uncertainty, for any crack she could pry open. She found none.

"Why," Silk said, "would you want to kill him."

"He tried killing me first."

"That's not the reason."

"It's the only one you're getting." A long silence stretched between them, broken only by Lucien's uneven breathing as he hovered a few feet away, clearly uncertain whether interrupting would help or make things worse.

"Help me investigate him," Elma said finally.

"When the time comes, I can help you reach him." A pause weighted just enough to sound like reassurance.

"I could try to teleport you there directly, if it comes to that. But it's better we go in ready than on an impulse that gets you killed for nothing." Some of it was technically true. She simply didn't mention that she had never once willed the green veins to take her anywhere outside the estate, that she had no idea whether she could do it.

"You're four."

"I'm four, strong, and smart," Elma said.

"My plan was still better than yours, and I'm the only one with a lead. Those are the only things that matter."

"They do. But still, working with you could get me in trouble."

"I won't allow it," Elma said.

"I protected you back then, didn't I?"

"Do you need something from me, Elma Altheris? Just because I helped your maid get better with a blade that doesn't make us friends. I don't need you sticking out your neck for me every time I mess up."

"Then stop messing up," Elma said with the flattest stare she could muster. Silk studied her for a long moment, the kind of look that felt like being weighed on a scale Elma couldn't see the units of.

"Fine," Silk said at last.

"I'll help with your lil investigation. But if you're lying to me—""I'm not." Silk didn't look convinced. But she nodded, once, and Elma released the last of the pressure holding her in place. Silk staggered a half step before catching herself, her hand flexing at her side as though checking that her body still answered to her. Lucien kept staring at her, his expression betraying the anger he refused to voice. Silk didn't meet his eyes.

She stared down at the floor instead, blinking rapidly, as if the cracks beneath her feet were suddenly the most interesting thing in the world. Christa arrived at a run, her silk robes tangled around her legs, her face carrying the same raw, unguarded terror Lucien's had a few minutes before. Her eyes found Elma first. Held there for one breath, two, then they moved past her, landing on Silk, and everything about Christa's posture changed at once.

"You're safe." Christa closed the distance in three strides and pulled Silk into a hard, desperate embrace, her hands fisting in the fabric at Silk's shoulders as though she might vanish again the moment she let go.

"You absolute fool, you complete—do you have any idea what could have happened? Do you know what he would have done to you?" Silk stood stiffly inside the embrace, her arms not quite returning it, not quite refusing it either.

"I am aware, my lady."

"Don't 'my lady' me right now." Christa pulled back just far enough to hold Silk's face in both hands, scanning it with the cataloging urgency of someone checking for damage.

"You scared me half to death." Elma watched the exchange from a few paces back, and found she had nothing in her frameworks that accounted for it. She had understood Silk as Lucien's guard. A weapon assigned to a useless noble, valuable only for her edge and her silence. She had not accounted for this—Christa's hands on Silk's shoulders with the particular, practiced worry of someone who had done this before, many times.

Silk endured the fussing with visible discomfort, her jaw tight beneath the metal guard, her shoulders drawn up toward her ears. It made her look, even for a moment, entirely human. Elma's gaze shifted to Christa. Sable could appear at any moment. That thought alone was enough to move Elma's feet before she'd finished deciding to move them. She continued forward, some half-formed intention driving her that she hadn't fully examined. She stopped two feet away. Christa turned toward her, blinking in surprise.

And found she had nothing. The words she needed didn't exist in any language she'd been taught. She opened her mouth and closed it again, the silence stretching long enough that Christa's expression shifted from surprise to something gentler, something that looked dangerously close to hope. Elma tried to force something out, anything. Even a simple request. Tell the maid to leave. But even those few words felt buried beneath a mountain of invisible words, layers of explanations, and feelings she had no name for.

She searched for them and came back with nothing but silence. Movement, at the edge of her vision. Elma turned her head, and the half-formed moment with Christa dissolved instantly, replaced by something colder and more familiar. Rita was crossing the courtyard, moving with the quiet, unassuming pace of someone with nowhere urgent to be—except her path curved wide around the manor's main entrance, hugging the edges of the grounds the way someone did when they didn't want to be seen from the windows.

The hidden exit. She had been walking free for far too long. Elma's earlier hesitation folded itself away without ceremony, tucked back into whatever compartment held things too complicated to deal with tonight. There would be time for Christa. There would not always be time for this. She looked once more at Silk—steady now, folded into Christa's orbit—and then she turned, and walked quietly toward the path Rita had just taken.