Chapter 135 Ch 135
Mara felt Nyx's second message arrive like a cold hand around her heart, two words pressing through the framework with the particular urgency of something sent fast because there was no time to say more.
She was standing at the twenty second anchor point when it hit her, her hand already pressed to the convergence thread, already halfway through laying the seal that would protect this junction from the Fluid's marking. She finished the seal before she responded to the message, because stopping in the middle of a seal was worse than not starting one, and then she pulled back and looked at Zevran, who was three steps away watching the surrounding threads for movement.
"Vrel knows Nyx is feeding us information," she said.
Zevran did not look surprised. "How long do we have before they move on the twelfth point tonight?"
"Vrel told the gathering the twelfth would be marked tonight," Mara said, reaching through the framework to feel for Isla's presence, finding it at the northern cluster where Isla and Luna were working through the thread junctions at the pace Mara had set. "If she knows we are aware, she will move earlier than planned. She is patient but she is not slow."
She pushed her awareness through the framework, feeling for the eleven already-marked points, tracing their locations against the map she had built into her understanding of restructured reality. Eleven marked. Thirty six to seal. She had sealed eight since they split. Isla and Luna had sealed five between them. The transformed Unreal, still shaky from its forced memory crisis but functioning, had sealed four.
Seventeen sealed. Nineteen remaining.
"Nyx," Zevran said.
"I know," Mara said.
Because Nyx was still inside the Fluid's space, and Vrel knew, and the question of what Vrel intended to do with that knowledge was not a comfortable one to sit with.
She sent a message back through the framework, short and direct.
Stay. Keep observing. Do not run unless you have no choice. We are moving.
She did not wait to feel whether Nyx received it. She turned to the next anchor point in the sequence and moved toward it at a pace that was not quite running but was very close, Zevran matching her stride for stride, the framework pulsing steadily beneath their feet as restructured reality continued its quiet, organized existence around them, unaware of how urgently people were fighting over its spine.
They reached the twenty third point, and Mara pressed her hand to it, and felt, immediately, that something was wrong.
The thread was not yet marked, but it was warm in the particular way that meant someone had been here recently, had touched this junction and pulled away again, and the faint impression they had left behind was fluid and formless in the way that was distinctive to beings that moved through the framework like water.
"They were here," she said, scanning the space around the convergence with sharp eyes, feeling through the surrounding threads. "They chose not to mark it. They pulled back." She paused, thinking, turning that choice over quickly. "They know we are sealing points. They are trying to get us to move in one direction while they mark in another."
"Which direction do they want us moving?" Zevran asked.
Mara closed her eyes, feeling through the framework instead of thinking through it, following the warmth of recent Fluid movement along the threads, tracing the pattern of where they had been and where the warmth was leading. It was subtle, designed to look like retreat, designed to pull attention eastward toward the points they had recently touched.
But the framework did not lie to her, because she had built it, and what she felt when she pushed past the obvious trail was movement to the west, quick and deliberate, heading toward the cluster of convergence points where three particularly significant threads met, the cluster that, if marked, would give the Fluid disproportionate control over the flow of the framework's central structure.
"West," she said, opening her eyes. "They are not going for the twelfth point they announced. They are going for the western cluster. Three points, all at once, and if they get all three, it does more damage than five individual marks elsewhere."
She was already moving west, and Zevran was already with her, and she was already pushing a message through the framework to Isla and Luna and the transformed Unreal all at once.
Western cluster. Now.