The scattered crowd froze at the noise, heads snapping up like birds startled from reeds. A gap yawned open at the center of the city wall, the stone face peeling like a mask.

Medith stepped beneath a steel cable. A handle hung from it, the kind that wakes hidden gears. She gripped it and yanked. “Wuu—wuu—wuu—” The cable screamed and hauled her up into the gap like a fish on a line.

“Medith!” Gasps burst like sparks. The others took three steps in one and leapt to the line, riding after her in a clatter of boots and wind.

“What kind of device is this?” Delaia stared, mouth slack. The lift was a miracle: twenty meters gained in under ten seconds, up a slick wall like glass.

In other words, with this thing, Sia City’s wall of despair was a stage prop. In under a minute, a hundred men could crest the battlements like a tide.

“Clear the civilians! Kasda! Now!” Delaia’s voice was tight as a drawn bow. Then she seized a handle and shot upward, cloak snapping like a banner.

...

What is this thing? The thought hit before breath returned. Medith stood before a colossal iron door, rooted like a tree in frost.

The gate rose five meters tall, skin silvery-white. In its heart sat a vertical, uncanny eye, five hues braided through it—black, green, gold, orange-red, water-blue. A piece of the pupil was missing, a neat diamond recess, as if something had been plucked out.

The eye felt wrong, like a chill finger tracing the spine. Gooseflesh rippled along Medith’s arms.

“This is...” Awe roughened Delaia’s whisper. They stood stunned for a long breath, then scattered to take stock like scouts in mist.

A broad passage stretched wide as a riverbed, seven meters across. Near the opening, a bank of steel cable pulleys sat in a row, a spine of iron for the lift.

Medith examined the mechanism. It was a thicket of interlocking parts, a maze where her eyes lost the trail.

Delaia, though, kept praising it under his breath, words clicking like abacus beads. Medith cut in, voice low. “Let’s see what’s behind the door first.”

“Wuu—wuu—wuu—tack—” The rig sang again and spat up a sharp-looking young man. Kasda vaulted off, dusting grit from his sleeves—civilians cleared.

Delaia stepped to the door. He studied left, then right, eyes narrowed like a hawk’s. From his coat he drew a diamond crystal. Its core had long since bled of color, turned dead black. That black matched the eye’s missing piece exactly.

Carefully, he fitted crystal to recess. They married cleanly, a key finding its lock.

“Gaa—thunk—” The great door shivered, then opened slow as dawn. What lay inside lay bare.

It was an empty tract, the ground raw mud and stone, nothing but an open field. It looked made to shelter people, a hollow to weather storms.

Medith swept the place with her gaze, then slipped deeper. A room waited inside, floor stark as a dry lakebed. Along two walls ran trim like the edge of a battlement, but each was capped by a blocked wall.

She pressed one “window” wall. It gave. With a shove, stone slid, and the world outside spilled in—Lachesis’s outer world, crisp as winter air. She even caught sight of rebels chatting as they patrolled. Her heart jumped; she slammed it shut.

“A camouflaged wartime pillbox?” Milia breathed. She tried the wall behind Medith. It lifted like a skylight, smooth as a lid.

“Two emergency emplacements, I’d say.” Medith traced the rooms with her eyes. One linked to the shelter, a firing line for the outer wall.

One linked to the inner wall, a refuge and redoubt for when trouble blooms inside the city. Built to block inner foes and hide civilians, more shield than fortress.

“What a pity. If only Lachesis didn’t disperse...” Delaia sighed, the sound thin as smoke.

The women fell silent. They’d learned a little of Lachesis from Delaia’s lips, and that little weighed like stone.

“Then what’s the point?” Sais folded her arms, fingers tight at her collar like frost clinging to fabric. “It’s for breaking a siege, right? With only seventy-two hours of life, why waste space?”

Medith’s lashes lowered, voice steady before her hands moved. “You’re not listening. It’s to stop enemies inside. If inner foes appear in those seventy-two hours, or if the enemy gets trapped before the wall finishes rising, this is where you live. This is your emergency shelter.”

Sais pouted, a ripple on a pond, and held her tongue.

Kasda looked around, thoughts ticking like rain. “Either way, Lachesis has holes everywhere. Indiscriminate lockdown, no dedicated fire defense, a mess of issues. Calling it a wall on life support isn’t wrong.”

Harsh words, but true. No one quite grasped the purpose of this place.

“I want to know if arrows fired from here still get strangled by Lachesis.” Medith’s eyes were calm, but her pulse ran quick as a stream. The outer room sat on the border of the outer wall.

“That... I honestly don’t know.” Delaia didn’t hide it. He’d bought the thing without a manual. Who knew what it could do.

Medith slipped a bow from Milia’s hands, drew to the ear, and loosed. Then she dropped the panel shut.

“What are you doing!” Delaia flinched. From draw to release was under two seconds. The arrow was gone before minds caught up.

Medith peered through a pinhole in the false wall. The arrow tore the air toward a guard five hundred meters out. “Thud—clang—” The guard was mid-chat when the shaft punched through his chest, then the man behind him, a skewer through two sparrows.

Both bodies flew a few meters and pinned to a wall like moths on cork. Dead was dead.

“Enemy attack!”

“What happened?!”

“A hidden arrow!”

“Shields! Shields!”

The rebels erupted, ants boiling from a nest. They formed ranks and combed the area, but found no source, not even a shadow.

Erig, who rarely showed heat, kindled like dry wood.

“Commander! Borg and the others were shot by a hidden arrow!”

“A hidden arrow?” Erig strode to Borg. He yanked the shaft free. Without that spine, the two men sagged and thudded to the earth.

Their hearts were holed clean through. One shot, cruelly precise.

Erig traced the arrow’s path in his head. It had come from behind them. Worse, it was their own make—Seji’s crest was carved on the shaft.

He crushed the arrow to splinters in his fist. “Damn bastards! Find the traitor who loosed it! I’ll show him what hell is!”

...

“As I thought. No restrictions inside this room.” Joy flashed in Medith’s chest like sun on water.

The others felt three of seven souls fly. Erig’s fury had almost scared them to death. If he learned Medith loosed the shot, if he guessed the thin place in the wall, trouble would flood in.

“In a blink, you not only spotted the arrow Milia seized,” Kasda murmured, staring at Medith like she was a storm on two legs. “You bent the wind as it flew, nudging its angle so the wall wouldn’t take the blame.”

“What kind of demon are you...”

It looked reckless, but she’d counted every ripple. All that in two heartbeats.

That near-feral instinct—Kasda had seen it in only one other. The master to whom he’d sworn by blood: Delaia.