The pack got there in nine minutes.
Dani came with a terminal and no shoes. Maren came with her fire already up. Joan came dressed, because Joan slept in a way that assumed the worst. Mona rode in Maren’s jacket with her nose out.
They found Yara standing in a hole.
She’d opened Selah’s seal. Not broken it. Opened it, folded the ice aside into two clean walls, and gone down into the shaft with the empty chain still in her hand.
"That’s my plug," Selah said.
"I’ll put it back."
"That took eleven minutes and most of my blood sugar."
"Selah." Yara looked up out of the hole. "Please put a wall around this yard. Now. As thick as you can make it and I don’t care what it costs you."
Selah stopped talking and started building.
◆◆◆◆
Soren went down the shaft.
The bottom was a chamber older than the academy, dry, cold, with anchor points cut into the rock at four corners and chains running from each of them into the middle.
All four chains were closed.
That was the part his brain kept refusing.
Not snapped. Not filed through, despite a season of grooves. All four loops sat there intact, still fastened, still holding the exact shape of the thing they’d been fastened around.
The thing was gone.
"It didn’t break out," Soren said.
"No."
"It got smaller."
"It went thin." Yara’s voice was wrong. Flat and quick, no music in it. "It made itself thin and it poured out through the loop and it went down, master. Not up. Down. Through the floor of this room and into the rock and it kept going."
"How far down."
Yara didn’t answer.
◆◆◆◆
"Yara."
"I’m counting."
"Count out loud."
"I don’t want to."
He turned her around by the shoulder, which he had never once done, and she let him, which was worse.
Her face was wrong too.
He’d seen every expression this creature had. Worship. Appetite. Delight. Boredom. The flat thing she did when she talked about killing. He’d been building a catalogue for a year and there was nothing in it that matched what was on her face in the bottom of that hole.
"You’re frightened," Soren said.
"Yes."
"You’ve never been frightened."
"I know."
◆◆◆◆
"Explain."
"That piece came off my mother," Yara said. "I told you that on the seal. I didn’t tell you the rest."
"Tell me the rest."
"It’s not a piece of her the way a finger is a piece of you. It’s a piece the way a scout is a piece of an army." Her hands closed on the empty loop. "It doesn’t think. It doesn’t plan. It has exactly one function and I have kept it chained in a hole under a school for a very long time so it could never perform that function."
"Which is."
"Going home," Yara said. "And reporting."
The chamber was very quiet.
"Reporting what," said Soren.
"Where I am."
◆◆◆◆
Up top, Selah’s wall went up around the east yard with a sound like the world’s largest window freezing.
Down in the hole, Yara kept talking, fast, in a register Soren had never heard from her.
"I left," she said. "That’s the part nobody in this world understands, because there’s nobody in this world old enough to understand it. I was hers. I was made out of her, master, the way a wave is made out of an ocean, and I was supposed to stay in the dark under everything and be one more mouth on the same body."
"And you didn’t."
"I found a boy through a hole in the veil and I left." Her voice cracked. "I took a wolf’s body and I walked around up here in the light for a year and I let people call me by a name. I have been playing house on top of my mother’s chest for a year, and the only reason it worked is that she doesn’t come up and she had no reason to look."
Soren looked at the four closed loops.
"And now something crawled home and told her."
"Now something crawled home and told her exactly where I live," Yara said, "and who I live with."
◆◆◆◆
"Okay," said Soren.
"Don’t say okay."
"Why not."
"Because you say okay when you’re about to do inventory and I need you to understand there is nothing to inventory." She turned on him. "This isn’t a committee. You can’t buy her. You can’t hang her in a hearing room. There’s no shell account and no procedural map and no oil can. She is the thing all the shadows in this world came off of and she has exactly one opinion, which is that everything that came off her should come back."
"How long has it been gone?"
"I don’t know." Yara’s hands closed on the loop. "That’s the answer I’ve been avoiding since I put my hand in the ice. The well’s read empty since the break. Selah said so in the autumn and I heard her say it and I filed it as good news."
Soren went very still.
"The tunnels," he said. "The second anchor. The empty one with the fresh polish."
"Yes."
"Maren said it didn’t feel asleep. She said it felt moved out."
"Your fox," said Yara, "is better at my job than I am."
"She wants you back."
"She wants me back and she wants you deleted." Yara’s hands were shaking. "Because I didn’t just leave, master. I stole. I opened a door I was forbidden to open and I took a soul out of another world and I built it a life, and to her that’s not a romance, that’s a theft with legs, walking around wearing a jacket and telling me to sit down."
◆◆◆◆
Soren stood in the bottom of the hole and did the thing he always did, which was run it.
A year of enemies, all of them manufactured. A curriculum. Bought offices and leaned-on committees and a monster on a schedule, every crisis sized to teach and never to kill, because the woman running the program loved him and had done the reading.
And now, for the first time since he’d opened his eyes in this world, something was coming that she hadn’t arranged.
"Yara."
"What."
"How long have we got?"
Yara looked up out of the hole, at the sky, at nothing.
"She’s slow," she said. "She’s older than motion. She’ll take her time, and she’ll come up through everything, and we’ll know because the shadows will stop obeying the light."
"Guess."
"I’ve been alive since before there was weather, master. I don’t guess, I wait."
"Then wait out loud."
Yara looked at the four closed loops.
"Weeks," she said. "Maybe less. She’ll come up through the rock and she won’t hurry, because nothing that old hurries, and every shadow between here and her will go quiet in front of her the way a street goes quiet in front of a landlord."
"That’s not a number."
"No," Yara said. "It isn’t."
She dropped the empty chain on the stone.
"But master," she said, "I’ve spent a year manufacturing crises for you because I thought a peaceful life was a waste of what you are."
Her red eyes came up, and there was nothing playful anywhere in them.
"I’d like it noted that I’ve stopped finding that funny."