The giving way did not arrive as a collapse.
It arrived as a surrender.
Marikka felt it before Aurelian actually slowed down: a minimal variation under his skin, a rhythm that stopped trying to compensate. Not sharp pain. Something worse. The moment a mechanism stops correcting itself and decides to let go.
She stopped abruptly.
Cedric took two more steps, then came back. This time he didn't ask anything. He simply looked at Aurelian, and in his gaze was the same intuition he had had in front of the receipt table: this is not a negotiation.
Aurelian offered a half-smile that didn't reach his eyes. He tried to speak. Nothing came out.
Marikka supported him more firmly. Under her fingers, his body no longer vibrated in disagreement: it vibrated empty. Like a seal that has lost the text it was meant to adhere to.
She guided him toward a recess between two buildings. The air was calmer there, the stone less traveled. Marikka leaned her hand against the wall: the vibration was dense, ancient, full of slow passages. A good place to fall without being seen.
Aurelian slid to a sitting position.
His breathing became short, irregular. Marikka felt the trace on his neck react: it didn't burn, it didn't pulse. It opened. As if something that had been forcibly held together had stopped obeying.
Cedric knelt in front of him. "Tell me what to do."
Aurelian shook his head, slowly. Once. Then twice. His hand sought Marikka's and squeezed it with sudden, desperate strength.
It was not pain.
It was urgency.
Marikka closed her eyes for an instant and did the only thing she knew how to do when the world became too much: she listened with her skin.
The stone beneath them. The distant metal. The wood of the closed doors. Everything vibrated according to different rules, but there, at that spot, there was a peculiar friction. Not magic. Not cult. Service.
She opened her eyes and pointed up the street.
Cedric followed the gesture and understood. "No."
Marikka looked at him. Yes.
"No," Cedric repeated, louder. "After the table? After that... they've already seen us."
Aurelian coughed. The sound got stuck in his throat, but his body reacted anyway: a violent jolt that made the trace on his neck vibrate like a fresh wound.
Marikka felt the signal with brutal clarity.
They had no time.
She stood up and carefully lifted Aurelian, as one lifts an ancient book that has begun to lose its stitching. She took a step toward the indicated street. The vibrations immediately changed: more orderly, tighter. Not like the Athenaeum, but enough to recognize the kinship.
A House of Seals.
There was no sign. There was no need. The metal of the doors was polite. The stone, treated not to respond too much. Marikka felt an internal presence even before knocking: not someone waiting, but someone who was ready.
Cedric hesitated for only an instant, then knocked.
The door opened almost immediately.
Inside, the air was colder. Still. The vibrations were clean, reduced to the essential. Not silence. Control.
A woman looked at them without surprise. Simple clothes, hands marked not by physical labor but by repeated contact with ritual surfaces: wax, lead, thick paper.
"He's unstable," Aurelian said, in a thread of voice that didn't sound like his own. "I shouldn't—"
"—be here," the woman concluded. "I know."
She pointed to a bench. Not wood. Smooth stone.
"Sit him down."
Marikka did. As soon as Aurelian's body touched the stone, the trace on his neck reacted as if it had recognized a compatible context. It didn't close. It anchored.
Aurelian groaned softly. Not in pain. In guilty relief.
The woman turned to Marikka. Her gaze was not inquisitorial. It was practical.
"Name," she said.
Marikka did not answer.
The woman tilted her head. "Alias, then."
Marikka felt Serian stir in the case. A slow, heavy tremor. Not alarm. Warning.
Cedric took a step forward. "It's only temporary. We need to—"
"—stabilize," the woman said. "Or lose him. The two things cost differently."
Marikka stretched out her hand and touched the edge of the bench. The stone responded with a precise vibration: time granted, not free.
She wrote in the notebook:
COST?
The woman took a thick sheet, placed it on a low table. She did not push it toward them.
"Intervention registration," she said. "Minimal. Incomplete, if you prefer."
Marikka felt the grid beneath Arcanum react. Not strongly. Sufficiently.
"And him?" Cedric asked.
The woman looked at Aurelian. "He will hold. He will not return to how he was."
Aurelian opened his eyes. He met Marikka's. His gaze was lucid, present, and for the first time since they had left the Athenaeum, there was no strategy inside.
Only a simple truth.
Do it.
Marikka closed her hand into a fist. Her numb index fingertip responded with a delayed vibration, as if the city were still taking measurements.
She did not sign.
But she placed two fingers on the table.
The sheet vibrated. The stone beneath the bench responded. The trace on Aurelian's neck stabilized into a new, imperfect, compatible form.
Serian trembled. This time in pain.
The woman nodded. "It is done."
Marikka withdrew her hand.
She felt the immediate cost: a weight on her shoulders, as if something had settled there without asking. Not a wound. A dependency.
Cedric watched Aurelian breathe more regularly. Then he looked at Marikka. "What did you give?"
Marikka shook her head.
She didn't know yet.
But as they left, she clearly felt one thing: the grid beneath Arcanum had closed a parenthesis.
And when systems close a parenthesis, they always do so to open another.