CHAPTER 48

Nox felt it before he heard anything at all, a pressure building somewhere below the flat, nothing like traffic or weather.

“Lisa. Get up. We’re moving.”

She was on her feet before she’d finished processing the words, years of this kind of warning teaching her not to waste time asking why first.

“Now?”

“Now.”

He had Noah up and over one shoulder before she’d crossed the room, still unconscious, still breathing in that same shallow rhythm that had told them nothing for hours.

“What’s it?” she asked, already grabbing whatever she could reach that mattered: a bag, a coat, anything that could be carried without slowing them down.

“Don’t know yet.”

The building came apart three seconds later.

It didn’t come apart at a door or a window. The wall itself went, an entire section of brick and plaster ceasing to be a wall. Something enormous stepped through the gap it left behind like the architecture had been a mild inconvenience rather than an obstacle.

Nox was moving before the dust settled, Noah’s weight balanced awkwardly across his shoulder, Lisa a half-step behind him.

The three of them made the street with seconds to spare, and behind them the rest of the ceiling gave up, dust and plaster coming down in a grey curtain that swallowed the doorway whole.

Cú Chulainn followed them out through the same hole he’d made, slowly. There was something wrong in the way he moved that neither of them had seen from him before, a tightness in the shoulders that read less like confidence than like barely leashed fury.

“Where is it?” he said. No preamble, nothing like the version of him that had toyed with them for the better part of an hour the last time they’d met.

Nox set Noah down carefully behind a parked car, out of the immediate line of anything, and straightened to face the question.

“Where’s what?” he said. “Be specific. We’ve stolen a lot of things this month.”

“Do not.”

“Do not what? Ask clarifying questions? Seems reasonable to me.”

Cú Chulainn’s jaw tightened. For the first time since either of them had met him, he looked less like a man enjoying himself and more like one running on something much darker.

“The core,” he said. “You know exactly which one.”

“Ah. That core.” Nox’s tone didn’t shift at all. “No idea where it’s. That conversation is above my pay grade.”

“You’re lying.”

“Constantly. Doesn’t mean I’m lying about this specific thing.”

Cú Chulainn didn’t bother answering that. He moved, faster than the street had any right to accommodate, and the fight started before either of them had finished deciding how they wanted it to.

A wall of bone tore up through the tarmac, rising between Cú Chulainn and the two of them. It cost him a fraction of a second to break through, which hadn’t happened to anyone who’d tried that against him before.

“That’s new,” he said, genuine surprise cutting through the fury for just a moment.

“Get used to it.”

Nox went low and fast, scarlet threads already extending from both forearms.

He didn’t throw them at the man. He threw them past him, into the lamp post and the car roof and the railing on the far side of the street. Then he moved, and the threads moved with him.

It was the thing Ryuzu had spent a mountain winter beating into him. Do not fight a faster man in a straight line. Build a room he has to fight you inside.

Cú Chulainn broke the first thread without noticing it. The second one caught his forearm on the way through and opened it.

The exchange that followed looked nothing like the last time either of them had tried to match him. He wasn’t landing killing blows, not yet, but he was landing something, thin cuts opening along the arms and shoulders that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago.

“You’ve improved,” Cú Chulainn said, and there was no compliment in it this time, just an assessment delivered through gritted teeth.

“Told you it was above your pay grade to know where the core was. Should’ve asked whether we’d got better too.”

He came again, faster, and this time Lisa was ready for the follow-up, another skeletal wall already rising to catch the strike meant for Nox’s exposed side.

“Left!” she called.

Nox pivoted on the word alone, trusting it completely. The strike that would have ended the fight in one motion instead found nothing but empty air where he’d been standing a moment earlier.

“You two talk too much,” Cú Chulainn said.

“Occupational hazard,” Nox said. “Means we survived.”

Lisa wasn’t building walls any more. She was building them a floor.

Bone came up through the tarmac in narrow ridges, ankle height and no higher, laid in a pattern that meant nothing at all until Cú Chulainn tried to cross it at speed and had to choose where to put his feet.

He was still faster than anything either of them had fought. He was now faster along lines she had drawn.

“He’s taking the ridges,” she said. “He hates being slowed more than he hates being cut.”

“Then give him somewhere to go.”

Her second working rose out of the ground itself, bone and stone fusing into something with real mass. Spectral plating wrapped it in the same pale light that had saved Noah twice already.

It bought real time, absorbing a strike that would otherwise have gone straight through her, and she used the time to reposition rather than survive it.

The grimoire was open against her hip and she hadn’t looked at it once. She had stopped needing to somewhere around the tundra and had never mentioned it to anybody.

“Together!” she called.

Nox read the timing without needing more than that single word, closing from Cú Chulainn’s blind side while Lisa’s construct held his attention. For a few genuine seconds the two of them moved like they’d rehearsed this exact combination a hundred times instead of making it up under fire.

It wasn’t enough to end anything. It was enough to hurt him, and hurting him did something to his composure that nothing else that night had managed.

“Enough,” Cú Chulainn said, and the word came out wrong, distorted, something underneath his own voice pushing through it.

Whatever restraint he’d been operating with dropped away entirely. He came at them without any pattern at all now, pure aggression, every strike aimed to end things rather than test them. The two of them found themselves giving ground, which hadn’t happened yet tonight.

“He’s not holding back anymore,” Lisa said, breathing hard, blood running from a cut along her hairline she didn’t have time to register.

“Noticed.”

“Options?”

“Working on it.”

He wasn’t working on it. He was counting, which was the only thing he had ever been reliably good at under this much pressure.

Four seconds between the man’s combinations at the start of the fight. Three now. The gap was closing because the fury was eating the discipline. A man who stopped being careful eventually stepped somewhere he hadn’t chosen.

That was the whole plan. It wasn’t a good one.

Lisa put her hand flat on the tarmac. The next working came up slower than the last, and Nox understood without being told that she was running out.

“How many more of those have you got?”

“One. Possibly one.”

“Then make it a good one and stand behind me.”

“I’m not standing behind you.”

“I know. I say it every time and you never do it.”

A strike that should have taken her head off instead caught her raised construct, shattering it, and she stumbled back three full steps before catching her own balance.

“Lisa!”

“I’m up. Cover the left.”

Nox covered it. Threads snapped taut in a line that turned the next blow just enough to matter, and bought her the half-second she needed.

They weathered three more exchanges that should have ended things outright, Lisa’s constructs shattering one after another, Nox’s threads finding less and less purchase against a fury that had stopped caring what closing cost it.

But they weathered them, barely, and on the fourth exchange something finally clicked between the two of them that hadn’t clicked in any fight before this one.

Neither of them called it. That was the part that mattered.

Lisa put a ridge where Nox was going to need one before he had asked for it. Nox left a thread hanging across the gap she was about to open because he had worked out that she would open it.

Bone rose in a spiral rather than a wall this time, drawing Cú Chulainn’s attention downward for exactly the half-second Nox needed. The strike that followed carried everything both of them had left to give it.

It connected. Cú Chulainn staggered, real damage showing on his face for the first mark either of them had managed to leave, something raw and furious taking the place of whatever composure the last hour had left him.

“That,” he said, voice low, “was a mistake.”

He gathered himself. Watching him do it, both of them understood that whatever came next would be the last exchange either of them got a say in.

“Whatever that was,” he said, “it’s the last thing either of you gets to land tonight.”

He came at them in a single straight line, faster than either of them could track, aimed to take both of them out in the same motion. There was no defence either of them had left to raise against it.

Lisa closed her eyes. Nox didn’t, watching it come the way he’d watched everything come his whole life, refusing to look away even from the thing that was about to end him.