Noah went down without warning, knees buckling mid-word, and for one full second nobody moved at all.

Then Nox had him before he hit the ground, catching most of the fall. Lisa was crouched beside them both, hands hovering over his chest without quite daring to touch.

“He’s breathing,” she said, more to herself than to either of the others. “He’s breathing, that’s something, that’s something.”

“Pupils aren’t right,” Doyle said, crouching on Noah’s other side, checking with the flat efficiency of someone who’d done this exact kind of triage more times than he’d ever wanted to. “Whatever’s happening, it’s not a normal collapse.”

“The core,” Lisa said. “It has to be the core. He was still touching it when it happened.”

“I know. Move him first, work out the why later.”

“Is he going to die?” Nox’s voice was quieter than usual, none of the deadpan left in it at all.

“I don’t know,” Doyle said. “Right, I don’t know, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Get him up. We’re not finding out the answer standing here.”

They got him up between them, Nox taking most of the weight without comment.

The walk back to the fence gap felt longer than it had on the way in, every step measured against a body that gave nothing back to indicate whether it was getting better or worse.

The car was where they’d left it. Doyle drove, knuckles pale on the wheel, saying nothing until they’d put real distance between themselves and the Chilterns’ fence line.

“I need to take the core somewhere else,” he said finally. “Away from both of you.”

“What? Why?” Lisa twisted in her seat to look at him. “Shouldn’t it stay with him? With whatever’s happening?”

“That’s exactly why it can’t. If something comes looking for what we took, it comes looking for the core first. I’d rather it find me somewhere else entirely than find the three of you while he’s like this.”

“That’s a guess.”

“Right now a guess is what we’re working with.” Doyle’s jaw tightened. “Eleanor and Gwen are already expecting me. There’s a meeting I can’t miss, and it happens to give me somewhere to take this that isn’t your flat.”

“What meeting?”

“Not tonight. It’s not mine to explain, and it’s not small enough to rush through in a car.” He glanced at her once, apologetic in a way that didn’t quite reach an actual apology. “Trust that I wouldn’t leave the two of you if I thought there was a better option available.”

Lisa didn’t answer that, mostly because there wasn’t a version of arguing that would have changed anything. The rest of the drive passed in a silence none of them seemed able to break.

✦ ✦ ✦

They got Noah settled on the sofa, propped with every cushion in the flat. Doyle left within the hour, the core wrapped in something nondescript under his arm, his goodbye brief enough that it felt more like an apology than a farewell.

“Watch him,” he said at the door. “Both of you. Call me the second anything changes, better or worse.”

“We’ll,” Nox said.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do. Go.”

He went, and the flat felt smaller once he had, just the two of them and a third person present only in body, breathing steadily in a way that offered no real comfort despite being the only good sign either of them had.

Lisa sat on the floor beside the sofa, one hand resting near Noah’s without quite touching, watching his face for any change at all.

“What do we do if he doesn’t wake up?” she asked, quiet.

“He will.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” Nox admitted. “I don’t. Seemed like the thing to say anyway.”

“Say something true instead.”

He considered that a long moment, settling into the chair across from her.

“He’s stubborn enough that I’d bet on him waking up out of spite alone, if nothing else works,” he said. “That’s true, anyway.”

Lisa almost laughed at that, the sound catching somewhere before it fully arrived.

“That’s a low bar.”

“It’s the bar I’ve got tonight.”

She was quiet a while after that, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest like counting it might keep it going.

“I keep thinking about what he must be seeing,” she said eventually. “Wherever he’s right now. Whatever this is.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because thinking about it won’t change whatever’s happening to him, and it’ll just make the waiting worse for you.” Nox said it plainly, no edge to it at all. “Tried it before. Doesn’t help. Costs sleep we’ll need when he wakes.”

“That’s oddly practical of you.”

“Happens occasionally. Rarely, but it happens.”

The words settled between them, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders despite everything. The two of them settled into a watch that neither expected to end quickly.

Somewhere in a disused building overlooking the Thames, far enough downriver that even the water traffic passing below took no notice of what waited inside, Cú Chulainn knelt in a room that had no right to feel as cold as it did.

Given how little of it was visible in the dark, the cold was the one thing about the room he could be certain of.

“You lost it,” Taurus said, and the words themselves carried more weight than any volume could have added to them.

“A temporary setback.” Cú Chulainn kept his chin level, voice steady through sheer force of habit. “I’ve had temporary setbacks before, my lord. I’m still, by any honest measure, the finest thing this world’s stories have produced. That doesn’t stop being true because of one bad night.”

“You’re. That isn’t the same as being enough.” Taurus’s presence filled the room far past what his actual size should have accounted for, though his actual size was considerable. “Ophiuchus doesn’t enjoy hearing that his patience has been wasted. I don’t enjoy being the one who has to explain to him why.”

“Then don’t explain it. Let me fix it instead. I promise you, whoever took that core will regret it.”

Taurus crossed the room in a single stride, faster than anything his bulk should have allowed. His hand closed around Cú Chulainn’s throat before the sentence had even finished landing.

He lifted him off the ground entirely, one-handed, without visible effort. He held him there while Cú Chulainn’s own hands scratched uselessly at a grip that didn’t so much as tighten in response.

“Do you feel that,” Taurus said, quiet now, quieter than the shouting would have been. The quiet made it worse. “That’s what helplessness actually feels like. You’ve spent your whole existence being the strongest thing in every room you’ve ever stood in. I want you to remember, in detail, what it feels like to not be.”

A strangled sound was all Cú Chulainn managed, nothing close to words. There was no version of arrogance built to survive this, no clever line practiced for exactly this moment. The absence of one frightened him nearly as much as the grip itself.

Cú Chulainn’s face had gone a colour it had no business going, pride and terror fighting for space across features that had never once had to make room for either.

“I could end you here,” Taurus said. “Right now, in this room, and Ophiuchus would ask me one question about it, and the question wouldn’t be why.”

He held the grip a moment longer, long enough that the edges of Cú Chulainn’s vision had started to go.

Then he let go, dropping him to the floor gasping, one hand at his own throat like he still didn’t quite believe it was his to control again.

“Get up,” Taurus said, already turning half away. “I’m not finished.”

Cú Chulainn got up, slower than pride would have liked, still fighting to get air back into a body that had briefly forgotten how. He found, once he had it back, that he didn’t trust himself to use it for anything clever tonight.

“If you come back to me empty-handed, I won’t simply take your core as payment,” Taurus said. “I’ll rip it out of you myself, and I’ll feed it directly into the generator. Your death will still be useful to the mission, even if your life stops being worth the trouble. Do you understand me now?”

“I understand.”

“Say it back to me.”

“I understand, my lord. Completely.”

“Good.” Taurus turned away this time, dismissal absolute. “Find whoever did this. Find what they took. Bring it back, or don’t bother coming back at all.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Cú Chulainn reached the Chilterns’ scarred earth within the hour, moving alone. He found, somewhere on the drive there, that the version of himself who narrated his own greatness out loud had gone very quiet indeed.

He catalogued the breach point, the guards left unconscious rather than killed, the precision of it all. Whoever had done this had known what they wanted and how to take it without leaving anything unnecessary behind.

He needed a name. A face. Anything that could turn Taurus’s threat back into something survivable.

Then he found the residue.

It clung faintly to the scorched ground near the generator’s base, and for one confused moment it read as familiar, nothing more.

Then he placed it, and every other thought in his head stopped mattering at once.

“No,” he said out loud, to no one. “No. Him. It’s him.”

He’d let that one live. Turned away, called it not worth his afternoon, and walked off feeling almost generous about it.

Mercy, he’d called it. The kind a king shows a dog he can’t be bothered to finish off.

Something in his chest that had spent the whole night turned into pure, focused fury.

“I let you live,” he said, and the word came out low, almost a growl, nothing performed left in it at all. “I let you crawl away with your life still in your body, and this is how you thank me for it. Ungrateful little brats.”

He was on his feet and moving before he’d finished the sentence, every trace of careful restraint gone, tearing across the scorched clearing toward the fence line with a speed that had nothing left of composure in it and everything of rage.

Whatever came next, he intended to make him understand what his gratitude should have looked like.

CHAPTER 48

Ríastrad III: Rearguard

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.