Chapter 116 The Anchor
ARYA
I let the power build from accumulation of what I was, what the Moonwell had given me, and what Luca poured through our bond with the complete generous recklessness that was entirely characteristic of him.
The woman across the grounds felt it. I saw her expression change.
“Stop her,” she said to the two beside her.
They moved. Sage and Ryker moved faster.
And I closed the seam, reaching through twelve feet of air and pressing my power against the boundary between real and absent that the boundary holds.
The void screamed. The same sound it had made when we’d destroyed the anchors inside it.
The two figures on this side stopped moving as Sage and Ryker reached them. The woman stared at the place where the seam had been with an expression I couldn’t quite name.
“That’s not possible,” she said.
“The Moonborne were always capable of that,” Bardon’s voice came through my comm. “We just didn’t know any of them well enough to study it.”
She looked at me. “You sealed it from the outside.”
“Yes.”
“Without entering.”
“Yes.”
Her expression moved through several things and settled somewhere I hadn’t expected. Not defeat, not anger. Something that looked dangerously close to interest.
“Fascinating,” she said.
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LUCA
I’d known she was going to do something.
The buildup through the bond had been unmistakable. The moment she’d taken my hand I’d given her everything that was safe and some that probably wasn’t, because the distinction between safe and necessary felt fickle when someone was trying to take her.
She’d done something that the Reclaimed’s lead researcher was staring at with the expression of someone who’d just watched a theoretical become real.
Which told me something important about how they’d been thinking about Arya.
They’d wanted her as an anchor. A passive resource something to exploit, not someone to contend with. They’d underestimated what she’d become.
The pack grounds were secured within minutes. The two followers were in custody. The woman submitted to restraint without struggle, her eyes never leaving Arya.
“She’s going to be useful,” I said to Caspian through the comm, keeping my voice low.
“Prisoner or asset?”
“That depends on what she wants.” I watched Arya speak quietly to Helena, who looked a little shaken. “And what Arya decides.”
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ARYA
Elara Voss was not what I’d expected.
She was perhaps sixty, smallish, with hands that bore the particular callouses of long-term magical work and eyes that were constantly processing everything they saw. She’d accepted custody with a cooperation that suggested she’d planned for this possibility and had a response ready.
I met with her that evening at Silver Creek’s secure room, with Bardon and Luca present and Ryker outside the door.
“You planned for capture,” I said.
“I planned for many outcomes.” She sat across from me. She was moving and a lot more animated than Morcadei. “Capture by your people was always a possibility.”
“What was the actual goal today? Seam your way through to me, and then what?”
“A conversation, actually.” She met my eyes steadily. “The fourteen-day message was intended to create pressure. To get you to move publicly in ways that would give us an opportunity for approach. We didn’t intend violence.”
“Your two companions were moving toward me.”
“As a deterrent against interference. Not toward you.” She paused. “I wanted to talk to you, Luna. Not capture you. Despite what your intelligence probably suggests about our intentions.”
I looked at her for a long moment.
“Then talk,” I said.
“The research your people seized—” She glanced at Bardon. “The methodology we’ve been developing. It was for retrieval, not weaponization. People are trapped in the void. Dozens of them. Some imprisoned deliberately, some accidentally caught in dimensional events, some who made choices they didn’t fully understand.” Her voice held something real in it. “My daughter was nineteen.” She paused and breathed out. As though deciding here goes nothing, she continued. “She was in the room when a practitioner’s void containment spell failed catastrophically. She was displaced.” She pinned me with her gaze. “That was thirty-one years ago. I haven’t seen my child in thirty one years.” Her voice broke towards the end. Filled with emotion. The first time her interest had morphed into another emotion.
The room was quiet.
“You’ve been building this for thirty years,” I said. “To get your daughter back.”
“And to get everyone else who’s trapped. But yes.” She looked at her hands. “The Reclaimed started as genuine research. It stayed genuine research, for most of us. The operational aspects. the political maneuvering, the infiltration of your council, that was others. People who wanted to use the research for advantage.”
“And you let them.”
“I needed resources. The academic institutions wouldn’t fund void retrieval work. It was too dangerous, too theoretically uncertain.” Her jaw tightened. “I made compromises. They were easy to make when all I can see is my daughter’s face in my mind. You’d understand if you’ve been looking at it for three decades.”
I heard Luca shift slightly behind me.
“The displaced material,” I said. “The research in the void pocket. The anchor problem.”
Her eyes sharpened slightly.
“You figured out that I’m the solution,” I said. “Someone who can navigate the void without dissolving, because of what I am. Someone who can reach the pocket and retrieve it.”
“Yes.” She didn’t try to soften it. “What you did today, that’s not in any theoretical model we’ve developed. You’re operating in a way that shouldn’t be possible based on how void and reality are supposed to interact.” A pause. “Which suggests your understanding of that interaction is more fundamental than anyone has been working with.”
“What are you asking me for?”
“Help.” The word was simple. “Not as an asset. Not as an anchor. As a person who might choose to retrieve what was lost, if asked correctly, by someone who told you the truth about what it was for.”
“There are dozens of people trapped. Not just your daughter.”
“Yes.”
“And the political faction of your organization—”
“Will not be a problem much longer. There are perhaps a dozen people in the Reclaimed who were primarily there for advantage. Today’s operation was theirs, not mine.” She looked steadily at me. “I’d give them to you. Their identities, their plans, everything. In exchange for—” She stopped. Steadied herself. “In exchange for a conversation about whether what I’m asking is possible.”
I looked at her for a long time.
Then I said “What’s her name?”
She blinked in surprise. “Mira. Her name is Mira.”