By midday the canyon widened into a throat of sun where heat pooled and waited for travelers to forget they were water. The walls went from bone to rust to that black glass sheen that comes when some old burn has been so hot the rock learned how to be mirror. In those mirrors, they saw themselves as taller and thinner and less certain. Jax scuffed at the track with his heel. "Prints," he said. "Ours and theirs and someone who refuses to be either." Kara knelt. "Boot with a split sole," she murmured. "Weight uneven—right hip favors. Carries left." Ronan sniffed like a creature that still trusted its nose more than its instruments. "He smells of mint and guilt." "University," KrysKo said. They followed without hurrying. Haste is a flag; patience is an eraser. The track led them to a bench cut into the wall where someone had once considered the view worth carving a place to sit. The view now was ash and the suggestion of a river that would be beautiful if you forgave it for killing your friends. A man sat on the bench as if he'd been waiting not long and forever at the same time. He wore a Warden's jacket without the Warden's spine. His hair had committed to gray and then abandoned the project halfway. He held his hands in his lap like someone who wanted the world to notice they were empty. "Don't shoot," he said to people who didn't carry guns in the way gun people mean. "We prefer knives and sarcasm," Jax said. The man startled a laugh he hadn't known he had. "Good," he said. "Then we'll get along until we don't." Kara didn't sit. She stood in that way that makes men more honest or more violent. "Name." "Rheel," he said. "Professor Rheel if you're feeling nostalgic. I taught field theory before field theory began to eat my students." Ronan tilted his head. "And now?" "Now I ferry messages between people who don't exist," Rheel said. "And I plant cache stones for hands I hope are kind enough to find them." KrysKo didn't like him. That was useful. "Why call us?" he asked. "Because you're listening," Rheel said. "Because the bells lied for you and you didn't thank them." He looked past KrysKo at the blades that were not visible and saw them anyway, the way some people see a river even after it's gone underground. "And because you are the thing the Council fears most." "A student who passes exams?" Jax offered. Rheel's mouth flickered. "A variable," he said. "You were designed to answer a question. You discovered you were also a question." "What's the message," KrysKo said, because patience should not be wasted on performances. Rheel's hands stayed in his lap. "The Vulture is not a person," he said. "He is an office. The office is older than any Warden rank, older than the University's founding myth. The Council of Shadows is not a conspiracy. It is an organ—like a liver. It removes what the University can't afford to admit it ate." Kara's mouth did a quiet thing that might have been anger discovering that the word for itself could be smaller than it wanted. "And the outpost?" "Surgery," Rheel said softly. "Badly done." Ronan's eyes had not left the man's hands. "Why show yourself to us." "Because I'm tired," Rheel said. "And because you are not the only variable. There is another message carrier. A girl. Younger than you. The Council took her two nights ago when she reached the outer wards. She carries the second shard of your name." "Where," KrysKo said, and didn't have to raise his voice to make the word go into the rock and come back. Rheel lifted his chin toward a notch in the ridge where the canyon yawned into a high bowl as if it had swallowed a sky and forgotten how to give it back. "Bell-house," he said. "Old one. The bells there aren't bells. They're doors." "And the Council?" Jax asked. "Already inside," Rheel said. "With their key." KrysKo looked toward the notch and felt the old lines in his forearms warm as if his blood had bronze in its mind. [Advisory: stacked threats; environmental advantage unfavorable. Allies: three. Unknowns: multiple.] The voice inside him waited for him to decide which part of himself to feed. He looked back at Rheel. "Why help us." "Because I used to teach," Rheel said, and now the tired leaked through the gentleman. "And when you teach long enough, you begin to love what learns more than what orders." He stood and the jacket fell wrong on his shoulders and made him look like a man wearing a younger man's story. He reached under the bench and drew out a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth. He did not hand it to KrysKo. He placed it on the stone between them, the way you put bread down between hungers. "Almanac," he said. "For bells. Which tones ring which doors. Which doors go down instead of out." "Why not keep it," Kara said. "Because I am not brave," Rheel said without apology. "And because I have a niece." He turned away as if the conversation had been a weather that passed, and when he was ten steps out into the glare he lifted a hand and waved once, the way men do when they hope the people behind them will not shoot them in the back. They didn't. The bundle held exactly what he'd said: a book bound in some flexible composite that didn't care about water or fire, its pages etched with diagrams of bells that were not circles but spirals, and notes in an elegant crabbed hand that labeled certain frequencies with words like threshold and bleed and do not without a reason you can live with. Jax made a noise that could have been respect. "There's a map in here," he said, tapping a diagram where four bells formed a square around a word old enough to have worn out two languages. "If we ring the wrong tone, we open a pit and dump ourselves into Architect plumbing." Kara traced a line with her nail. "And if we ring the right one." "We open a door the Council thinks only they can open," Jax said, and his grin had the smile of a man about to date a lock that thought itself undateable. Ronan looked toward the notch. "We don't have their key," he said. "We have ours," KrysKo answered, and the bronze in his arms agreed in the manner of metal: by not arguing. They reached the bell-house at the hour the canyon decided to be an oven. The structure rose from the rock like an apology for a church—four pillars grown from Architect lattice, a roof that had once been crystalline and now was a geometry of wrecked grace, and in the center a frame that held three bells that weren't bells—rings of alloy and something not alloy, humming just below hearing. The floor bore the scars of feet and fire and the administrative impatience of people who had used this place to do things they had no poet for. Two Wardens stood at the entry, bored and therefore dangerous. They wore the cloaks smart people wore to hide the fact that they were scared. Behind them, in the shadow of the frame, movement said council in the same way chess says queens. KrysKo didn't walk straight at the door. He walked along the wall, head tilted like a pilgrim making sure his prayer was facing the right god. "Jax," he said, the word passing for a cough. "Door one on tone minus three." "Copy," Jax murmured, and set his tuner to something that made the air taste like copper. Kara slid left into a shadow that had waited all its life to hold her and found a panel the almanac had suggested might be there. It was. It bore a symbol that was not a symbol but a memory. She touched it, and the ring nearest her dropped a half tone and the space in the middle of the structure changed its mind about being there. The Wardens at the door felt the shift as a tickle under the tongue. "Maintenance," Jax announced, striding forward with the outrage of a man ten minutes late to a bureaucracy. "You lodged a Bell-3 resonance deviation. You'll have collapse on your hands and then you'll have a report and I don't know which is worse." One Warden reflexed into indifference. The other reflexed into suspicion. He put out an arm. Jax handed him a slate that said exactly what it needed to say in glyphs that looked official from a distance and threatening up close. Meanwhile, Ronan walked up the right wall in plain sight, because sometimes the best stealth is audacity. He reached the lintel, pressed his palm to a node, and smiled with all his teeth when it warmed. KrysKo went under the bell frame. He didn't touch the ring. He breathed with it. [Resonance lock: available. Bell 2 at drift 0.11—correctable.] "Morgan," he whispered, and the voice that had allowed him to give it that name said, You have three doors. Which one do you love enough to pay for. "Down," he said. "To where the Council keeps what it doesn't want sung." He raised his hands and the bronze in his arms flowed to his skin not as weapon but as tuning fork. He extended them like a man feeling rain arrive, and he hummed. The note was not of his throat. It was a thing in his ribs. The ring answered and dropped a quarter tone, and the floor became a promise. The Warden with suspicion realized too late that this was not maintenance. He reached for a horn. Ronan fell behind him like a cat falls behind a bird and the horn never had a chance to meet lips. Kara stepped into the doorway and set a vial on the threshold and broke it with the heel of her hand; smoke in a thin sheet whispered across the floor, too low to notice unless you were running. It made runners honest by making them slower. The Council inside moved as if they had been waiting for the scene to take its place on their stage. Two figures in dark, one in gray, one in the ridiculous theater of a vulture mask. The mask inclined. "Prototype," the Vulture said, voice silk with iron under it. "You ring very pretty bells for a boy who forgot who built his hands." KrysKo didn't answer with words. He answered with the note. The floor opened like a book that had been too long closed. A stair waited the way some animals wait—for foot and fate. Jax whooped softly. "That's my feral librarian," he breathed. "He opens all the best forbidden sections." "Go," KrysKo said. "Kara, with me. Jax, seal behind. Ronan—" "I know," Ronan said, and smiled with one corner of his mouth at the mask. "I've always wanted to argue with a bird." They moved. Down, into stone that had been taught to be a hallway. The air cooled in that way that means you are entering a throat. Bells above clanged now not as doors but as alarms, tones clashing, harmonics biting. The stair turned twice and delivered them into a chamber that had the personality of a ledger. Racks of slates. Shelves of mirrored plates. A cot. A girl on it, half-conscious, wrists bound in a restraint made of material that doesn't have a name if you weren't invited to its christening. Kara moved faster than thought. Salts under the nose. Cut the left restraint. Pressure on the radial nerve. "Hey," she said, voice the soft steel you give to people coming back from a shore. "You're safe." The girl blinked. She was younger than any of them should have been allowed to be. She looked at KrysKo and recognition hurt her eyes. "You're—" "Yes," he said softly. "What did they make you carry." She lifted her right hand, palm inward. Under the skin, something glowed like a coin. Jax arrived at a run that tried not to be a run and failed. "Embedded wafer," he said with awe and rage. "These saints." He had a tool for it because he had a tool for everything. Kara held the girl's shoulder and murmured nonsense that meant sense. KrysKo stood in the doorway and the bronze stood with him, not as threat but as answer. Steps on the stair. Two Wardens, then three, then the kind of silence that means more than three. Ronan's voice from above, cheerful, terrible: "Your math is wrong," and the sound of a body meeting a banister. The Vulture's voice followed, soft and patient and close enough to smell. "Come now, KrysKo. You don't actually believe in escape. You of all our little sons should know there is only delay. Come upstairs. Bring the children. We will write a better ending than the one you keep rehearsing." Jax lifted the coin from under flesh with precision that would have made a jeweler weep. Kara sealed the wound with a paste that stung enough to make the girl swear and therefore live. KrysKo chose a door that hadn't been drawn yet. He put his palm to the far wall and asked the bells below for a note the almanac hadn't listed because maps are always honest until they're not. [Resonance request: nonstandard. Risk: structural instability—moderate. Reward: egress vector—unknown.] He hummed. The wall said yes in the language rock uses when it agrees to be river again. It softened. It moved. It opened into a narrow, wet dark that smelled like old iron. "Out," KrysKo said. Jax went first with the slate-light held low. The girl second, knees steadying under orders. Kara third, one hand on the girl, one free for the vial she would need if the dark had teeth. KrysKo last, and as the passage took them he let himself look once back up the stair where the mask stood, polite as sin. "We'll talk when you have a face," KrysKo said. The Vulture's laugh was gentle. "I have many. Choose one. I wear yours most nights." The passage bent, hip-narrow and shoulder-scraping, and dropped without steps. They slid, not falling, guided by slime that had the decency to be old. It spat them into a culvert where the old river thought about starting over. Above, bells receded. Behind, voices turned to echoes and then to the sound air makes when it forgets you. They stood, wet to the thigh, filthy and grinning and terrified. Jax held up the coin he'd lifted from a child like a trophy he hated. "Second shard," he said. "Your name is nearly yours." The girl wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "My name is Tamsin," she said. "I am not a shard." Kara hugged her once and then squared her shoulders. "You're not," she agreed. "But you carried one. Let's make it worth the ache." KrysKo looked down the culvert where the dark turned a corner into another dark. The wafer in his pocket and the coin in Jax's hand hummed to each other with the small, intimate joy of things separated too long. [Assembly possible. Warning: assembly broadcasts.] He nodded to the warning. He nodded to the joy. "We move," he said, and they did, into a dark that felt less like a threat and more like an invitation, because some doors you open with bells and some with the fact that you are not done yet.