Mezzo and Silver followed the trail in silence.

At first it was only a few drops of blood on the pale cathedral floor—small, bright, terrible things that looked almost too red against all that sanctified gold and white. Then came more. A smear along the wall. A drag-mark near a side arch. A trembling little trail that led deeper into the older part of the cathedral where the walls were plainer, the lamps dimmer, and the air seemed to hum with something ancient and unfriendly.

There were strands of Celeste’s hair too.

Fine pale-gold threads caught against the stone, clinging to splintered wood and the edge of a cracked rune-plate as if she had been pulled through too fast and the corridor itself had tried to keep part of her.

Silver stooped to look at one and made a face.

“She molts so goddamn much,” he muttered. “You can tell when she’s used the shower for once because the drain gives up entirely.”

Mezzo, to his own surprise, let out a short breath that was almost a laugh.

“Yeah,” he said. “That part’s true.”

The laugh died quickly.

Because the deeper they went, the stranger the cathedral felt.

The air thickened first.

Not physically, not enough to slow movement—but enough to make each breath feel heavier than it should have. Mana clung to the corridor in layers, too dense, too active, too aware. It raised the fur along Mezzo’s arms and neck until every instinct in him screamed that something was wrong. Not dangerous in the normal sense. Worse than that. Sacred in the way storms and graveyards sometimes felt sacred—too large for the body to process without flinching.

Silver stumbled once and pressed the back of his hand to his nose.

When he pulled it away, there was blood on his glove.

He stared at it, then at the corridor ahead.

“This feels wrong,” he said quietly.

Mezzo glanced at him.

Silver swallowed, and for once all the smooth arrogance had gone thin around the edges.

“Too wrong.”

Ahead, through the half-open door at the end of the hall, voices were drifting out.

Two voices.

A man and a woman, by the sound of it.

Only... not quite.

The words were too low to make out clearly, blurred under the hum of the mana in the walls, but the rhythm of them was all wrong. They were not arguing. Not exactly speaking either. It sounded like a conversation held underwater, or a prayer answered by something that had not been invited to the service. One voice deep and resonant. The other higher, softer, but braided so tightly with the first that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

Mezzo’s fur stood fully on end.

Silver wiped the blood from his nose with increasing unease.

Neither of them spoke again.

They reached the door.

Mezzo shoved it open.

The room beyond was chaos held perfectly still.

Scientists slumped where they had fallen. Priests lay asleep on the floor or against the walls, their robes tangled, their tablets scattered. The confession array still glowed in broken pulses around the center of the chamber, and in that center—

Celeste.

She was strapped to the chair, head bowed, hair half-fallen loose around her face, wrists bound in sanctified metal, chest rising and falling in ragged little breaths. Gold light still flickered faintly beneath her skin, running in thin veins along her throat like something trying to decide whether to stay hidden.

The moment Mezzo and Silver crossed the threshold, the voices stopped.

Not faded.

Stopped.

Celeste lifted her head.

Her eyes were gold.

Not bright gold. Not warm gold. The kind of old, molten gold you imagined in crowns dug out of tombs and gods that had never properly died.

She looked at them.

Slowly.

Calmly.

Her gaze moved from Mezzo to Silver and back again, with the detached consideration of someone inspecting animals brought to market. Not fear. Not relief. Not even recognition in the ordinary sense. Appraisal.

As if she were choosing.

The smile that followed was small and terrible.

Mezzo’s stomach dropped.

Silver actually took a step back.

Then, all at once, her eyes snapped back to blue.

The gold vanished.

The strange stillness left her face.

And Celeste went limp in the restraints.

“Celeste!”

Mezzo was across the room in seconds.

He dropped to his knees at the chair, hands already fumbling at the cuffs and buckles, trying to work them loose without hurting her more. Up close he could see the marks the restraints had left on her wrists, the tear-tracks on her cheeks, the little tremors still running through her even unconscious.

“Hey, hey, c’mon, sunshine,” he muttered, voice gone soft with panic. “Stay with me. Stay with me.”

Silver did not come immediately.

He had stopped halfway into the room, staring.

Not at Celeste.

At the floor around her.

At the scientists.

At the data tablets strewn beside the chair like offerings dropped during a religious panic.

His gaze sharpened. He crouched, snatched one up, scanned it, then another.

And then he gasped.

“Evidence.”

Mezzo looked up sharply. “What?”

Silver was already moving through the scattered pile, reading fast, face changing with every line.

“All of it,” he said. “Church records. Transfer orders. Internal contradictions. Hidden inventory. There’s—”

He grabbed one final slate and held it closer to the light.

“There’s a room.”

Mezzo tugged another strap loose. “What room?”

“A secret chamber somewhere in this building. It’s cross-referenced here—vault access, restricted relic holdings, archival concealment orders.” His eyes flashed. “This is where the real evidence is. If they realize this room’s been breached, they’ll destroy it.”

Mezzo stared at him in disbelief.

“Help me get Celeste free,” he snapped, wrenching a sanctified cuff half-open. “Then we go there.”

Silver hesitated.

Just for a moment.

That alone nearly earned him a headbutt.

Then his Arcbracer flared to life.

The signal was bad—distorted and jumping, the projection shuddering in and out as interference from the overloaded cathedral systems rippled through the room. Umbranox’s image appeared in fragments at first, her face breaking into static and silver light before stabilizing enough to be recognized.

At the same time, Mezzo’s comm unit crackled with Arcade’s voice.

“I’m patching the call through,” Arcade said, breathless and rough, still sounding like he’d been dragged through three kinds of nightmare. “Mana interference is chewing the signal, so don’t ask for miracles.”

Umbranox’s image sharpened by half.

Her eyes swept the room once.

Then narrowed.

“Why,” she said, every word sharpened to a lethal point, “is the Knight Commander in a torture device?”

Silver straightened instinctively, as though being caught beside a sanctified interrogation chair with unconscious leadership in it were merely socially inconvenient.

“I can explain.”

Umbranox gave him a look that promised this would not, in fact, improve his day later.

“You will.”

Mezzo finally got the last restraint free. Celeste sagged forward, and he caught her against his chest before she could slip from the chair entirely.

She was warm. Too warm. Her breath hitched once against his shoulder.

Alive.

Thank every strange, broken star alive.

Silver, still holding the evidence slate, looked between Celeste and the glowing map fragment on the tablet.

“The Council is coming here soon,” Umbranox said through the static. “I’ve seen enough to know that much. Whatever you’ve found, be careful.”

Her gaze flicked to Celeste again, and for the briefest second something like genuine concern cracked the iron of her expression.

Then she added, quieter but no less commanding:

“Do not let them take her.”

The signal vanished.

Silver looked down at the tablets, at the marked route to the hidden chamber, then back at Mezzo holding Celeste.

His voice came out lower this time. More strained.

“If we don’t move now, they’ll erase everything.”

Mezzo adjusted Celeste carefully in his arms and shot him a hard look.

“And if we leave her, they’ll kill her.”

For once, Silver did not argue.

They did not have long to themselves before the others caught up.

Bootsteps thundered down the corridor first—fast, uneven, urgent—then the beam of Arcade’s scanner flickered around the corner, followed by Hughes, Lumina, Plum, and the rest of the team in a breathless cluster of weapons, panic, and half-finished plans.

But the moment they reached the interrogation room, they went quiet.

Not ordinary quiet.

The wrong kind.

The kind that dropped when people had seen something they did not know how to say aloud.

Mezzo looked up from where he was holding Celeste against him, one arm under her shoulders, the other braced at her back.

“What?” he asked, immediately suspicious. “What’s up with all your faces?”

No one answered quickly enough.

Arcade, especially, looked terrible.

His fur was still damp with sweat, his pupils too wide, his expression caught somewhere between nausea and dread. He was holding himself very stiffly, like even standing inside this room again hurt.

Before Mezzo could push harder, Silver cut in sharply, seizing the conversation before it could go where he did not want it to.

“There’s a hidden chamber,” he said, holding up one of the recovered slates. “A real one. Beneath the archives, behind a false wall or locked case—somewhere close. If we move quickly, we may still find whatever they haven’t had time to destroy.”

Arcade latched onto that at once, too fast.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Mezzo, get Celeste out. We’ll go to the room.”

Mezzo blinked. “What?”

“She needs to leave,” Arcade said, not looking at her. Not once. “Now.”

Something in his voice made Mezzo’s stomach tighten.

Celeste stirred in his arms before he could ask more.

Her lashes fluttered.

Then she made a tiny, pained sound and lifted her head just enough to mumble, dazed and gentle as ever, “Hi... um... are the questions over?”

Her voice was weak.

Too weak.

Mezzo’s face crumpled with relief and fear all at once. “Aye, sunshine, they’re over. We’ve got you.”

Then he saw the blood.

It was streaming from her nose in a thin, steady line, running over her mouth and chin and down onto his sleeve. More had leaked from the corners of her eyes too, red tears dragged loose by strain and sacred machinery.

Plum swore and dropped to her knees beside them, already digging in her satchel.

“Tissues, tissues—why do I never keep the normal things on top—”

She found a handkerchief at last and pressed it gently to Celeste’s face.

Then she stopped.

Her expression changed.

“Wait.”

Mezzo looked at her. “What?”

Plum stared at the cloth in her hand.

The blood on it was not fully red.

It shimmered.

Only faintly, only when the mana-light caught it, but the sheen across it looked wrong—too dark, too slick, almost like oil dragged over water in a rainbow film.

Arcade saw it from across the room and went rigid.

Silver noticed a second later.

For one heartbeat no one said anything.

Then Silver, far too carefully, said, “Lady Vale might be able to examine that.”

Arcade made a sound in the back of his throat—something small and involuntary—and immediately looked away from Celeste entirely.

He could not seem to make himself meet her eyes.

Could barely seem to look at her at all.

Mezzo noticed that too.

His grip on Celeste tightened.

“What happened?” he asked again, quieter this time. Dangerous now.

Arcade kept staring at the far wall.

“Not now,” he said.

Celeste, still half out of it, turned her face blindly toward Mezzo instead and wrapped her arms around him with weak, instinctive trust. Her fingers caught in his coat. Her cheek pressed against his shoulder.

Mezzo’s tail betrayed him completely and wagged once, hard enough to thump the side of the chair.

Even in the middle of all this.

He looked embarrassed for about half a second, then decided dignity was a luxury for later and scooped her up properly into his arms.

Lumina stood just inside the doorway.

For once, she did not run forward.

Her eyes fixed on Celeste in Mezzo’s arms—on the blood, the limpness, the way Celeste’s head rested against him like she could barely hold it up herself.

Lumina’s hands curled against her chest.

She looked like she wanted to go to her sister.

Mezzo noticed.

His expression tightened, but before he could say anything gentle, another thought cut through.

“Where’s Skye?”

Arcade’s head snapped up.

“What?”

Mezzo shifted Celeste carefully in his arms.

“We saw him. Back in one of the side chapels. Talking to Tamsin.”

Arcade went utterly still.

Then his face changed.

“He what?”

His voice cracked sharp enough to cut glass.

“He’s supposed to be on watch duty!”

Lumina flinched.

“He said he needed to do something,” she said quickly. “I thought he needed the bathroom.”

Arcade stared at her.

“The bathroom?”

Lumina’s ears dipped.

“He looked nervous.”

“He always looks nervous!”

Arcade was already stabbing at his arcbracer, trying to force a call through the cathedral interference.

“Skye, answer. Skye. Skye, if you are doing something stupid and emotionally significant, I swear to every broken circuit in this city—”

Ray caught his wrist.

“Arcade.”

He rounded on her.

“What?”

“His life vitals look fine on my arcbracer,” Ray said firmly. “Relax.”

Arcade looked at her as if she had suggested a nice picnic inside a blender.

“Relax? He is with that asshat. I am not leaving him alone.”

Ray’s grip stayed steady.

“He made a choice.”

“He’s a teenager.”

“He is also one of us,” Ray said. “And right now, Celeste is hurt, the Church is panicking, and there’s a hidden chamber full of evidence they may already be destroying.”

Arcade’s jaw clenched.

Ray softened by half an inch.

“We’ll find him as we go.”

Arcade looked toward the corridor.

Every part of him clearly hated that answer.

Then he growled low in his throat.

“He better not get hurt.”

“He won’t,” Ray said.

She could not possibly know that.

But she said it like a commander anyway.

“All right,” he muttered. “You’re with me.”

Celeste made a tiny sound of agreement and tucked herself closer.

Mezzo took one long look at Celeste’s face, at the blood, at the way Arcade still wouldn’t look directly at her, and whatever questions he had swallowed for the moment hardened into something he would absolutely come back to later.

“Get her to the van,” Arcade said. “Keep her awake if you can. Don’t let anyone official see her.”

Mezzo nodded once.

Then he carried Celeste out of the interrogation room. Plum hesitated, looking torn between the wounded girl and the uncovered conspiracy, but Celeste was breathing, Ray was there, and the others clearly needed someone to read, write, and remember.

So she stayed.

That left the rest of them—Ray ,Arcade, Hughes Lumina, Silver, and Plum—to turn back toward the hidden route.