The river ran shallow here, sliding over glass-sand and threaded crystal gravel that caught dawn like a cracked lens. Aydin crouched at the edge and leaned in until his breath touched the surface, and his reflection stared back. War-hero handsome in a way that felt borrowed, sun-warm skin, royal cheekbones, heavy-lidded eyes that made him look calm even when he was not, thick dark hair tied back with a strip of rough cord, clean-shaven jaw that looked too clean for a place like Stonehaven. He exhaled, and the water fractured him into prismatic shards. His face split into clean angles, cheekbone into light, eye into a sliver, mouth into a bright cut, then snapped back together as the current rolled on.

  For the smallest second, he wondered if this was what he used to look like, before the ocean had teeth, before the world had veins. He tried to pull the old image forward and got texture instead of a picture, heat on his shoulders, salt in his nose, a laugh that felt like home. No face. No mirror.

  Aydin let the thought go.

  In this world, a face was the shallowest layer.

  The river’s surface trembled. Not wind. Something under it. A shift in the ring-hum like the land flinched in its sleep. Aydin’s reflection wobbled, then steadied, and he stayed crouched long enough to watch the tremor travel downstream like a rumor that refused to be owned.

  “Staring at yourself already?”

  Rand’s voice came in loud, cheerful, and too confident for morning. He splashed into the shallows without caring who got wet, scooped up a pebble, and flicked it across the water like he was skipping boredom itself.

  “If a demon pops up, get behind me. Captain Khalen’ll be upset if his new pet dies.”

  He said it like it was funny, like it was a kindness.

  Aydin stood slowly, water slipping off his fingers, and looked at Rand the way he’d looked at the river, as if he were collecting evidence.

  “Good morning to you too.”

  Rand’s grin widened, pleased he’d gotten a reaction at all. He rolled his shoulders, flexed his right hand like he expected applause, and the skin along his knuckles showed pale-grey patches, stone trying to remember it belonged there. It crawled in thin plates, then faded, then crawled again, uncertain.

  Rand pretended that was normal, and Aydin filed it away anyway.

  A shape moved on the bank behind them, quiet enough that Aydin didn’t hear her until she was there. Lys stepped into view like she had been walking for a while and only now decided to include them in the same reality, and Aydin’s eyes snagged on the weapon before his brain could name it. A crossbow, but wrong in the way everything out here was wrong, thick-limbed and overbuilt, the stock wrapped in dark grip-leather, the limbs banded in metal like braces on a broken jaw. It was big enough that Aydin’s first thought was that it should live mounted on a wall, or bolted to a ship rail, and Lys wore it like a casual burden.

  He watched her adjust the strap once, a small tug, and the whole thing settled quiet against her like it belonged there. No clank. No bounce. No complaint.

  She didn’t greet. She checked straps, buckles, the edge of the riverbank for scuffs, the reeds for breaks, the way the crystal gravel had been disturbed near the waterline, the thin line where wet sand met dry like it was a boundary someone had crossed without permission. Her gaze flicked to Rand’s boots, then to Aydin’s cuffs, then out across the flats beyond the river.

  Then she reached into her pouch and took out the gourd, dried vine-plant, palm-sized and hard, carved with spiral vent slits that made the thing look like it was breathing even when it wasn’t. A crystal pin held the lid down, the latch cut into a notch with a clean little click when she tested it. Inside, something chirred softly, not bird, not beetle, glossy and patient, a tool that happened to be alive. Lys held it near her ear for a heartbeat, then nodded as if she’d heard a number.

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  “We find.”

  “We mark.”

  “We leave.”

  Rand opened his mouth, probably to say something heroic, and Lys turned and started walking like the speech had already failed. She didn’t look back to see if they followed.

  They did.

  Aydin fell into step beside her, and Rand jogged ahead for a few strides, then drifted back when he realized no one was watching. The world opened out into Rimsea color, bright and wrong, crystal outcrops rising like ribs from the sand, saltgrass swaying with glass-tipped blades that clicked together in the wind like someone sorting shards. Farther inland, old tide flats had fossilized into something coral-like, crystal growths curling up from the ground in slow, stubborn spirals, as if the sea had once reached here and left its bones behind.

  Lys didn’t narrate it. She read it, pace changing when the wind didn’t sound right in the reeds, eyes dropping to the ground whenever the ring-hum shifted underfoot.

  Aydin reached into his own pouch and pulled out a second gourd, smaller, carved with the same spirals, and lifted it in his palm like he was holding a firefly in a prison. The glow inside wasn’t bright yet, just present, the soft green-white of a thing doing its job.

  “How does this work again, exactly?”

  Rand scoffed.

  “It’s a dungeon-sniffer.”

  Lys didn’t bother looking at him.

  “It feeds on ambient mana. Stronger vein, brighter glow.”

  The light inside Aydin’s gourd pulsed faintly, green-white through the spiral slits, like a small heart beating in a shell.

  “If we drift off-vein, it dims. If it goes dark, we go home.”

  Rand made a face.

  “It’s just a bug.”

  Lys stopped walking so fast Rand nearly bumped into her. She held her gourd up between them, and the insect’s glow licked through the spirals in slow, breath-like bands.

  “Don’t shake it. Don’t tap it. Don’t try to wake it up. If you break it, we do this blind, and blind is how you die out here.”

  Rand lifted both hands, offended by the concept of consequences.

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  Lys started walking again, and the moment Rand tried to reclaim the front, she shifted her path a half-step to keep him from doing it without ever making it a confrontation. Aydin watched that, watched how she controlled space without talking.

  They hadn’t gone far before Lys raised a hand, sharp and flat. Both men froze on instinct, even Rand, whose instincts were usually limited to step forward.

  “Hold.”

  Aydin stayed still and tried to figure out what she’d seen. The glass-sand here looked undisturbed at a glance, the crystal gravel line of the vein threading forward like pale lightning, but Lys crouched and brushed two fingers along a faint scuff that was almost nothing, then pointed to a broken reed tip a pace away, then to a patch of saltgrass where the glass tips were dulled as if something had slid through them with weight.

  “Something moved through here,” she said, quiet. “Not us.”

  Rand leaned, eager, trying to see the track like seeing it would make him the one who’d found it.

  “What, like a deer?”

  Lys didn’t look at him.

  “Not with feet,” she said. “Wait.”

  They waited, and the waiting was the point. The glowbug stayed steady and calm in its gourd, bright enough to say they were still on the vein, dim enough to say they weren’t near the source yet. The hard information was the way the reeds held their breath, the way the wind cut out for two seconds and returned wrong, the way the ring-hum under their boots didn’t match the shape of the ground.

  Rand couldn’t help filling the silence because silence didn’t clap for him.

  “How long are we—”

  Lys’s hand rose again, and Rand shut his mouth like he’d been slapped.

  A sound came, not close, not far, more like underneath the world than on it. A slow scrape, followed by a soft crack, followed by a pause that felt deliberate. Aydin’s body did its own math, lungs tightening, shoulders locking, sand in his cuffs settling like it was listening. Something passed through the reed bed off to their right, and they didn’t see it, only felt its presence in the way the glass tips of the saltgrass angled in a corridor that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  When it was gone, Lys waited longer than anyone wanted. Rand’s impatience started showing all over him.

  “What are we waiting for?” he whispered, because whispering still felt like doing something.

  Lys pointed at the saltgrass corridor.

  “Something passes here,” she said. “We let it.”

  They moved again, and this time Lys kept them on higher ground where crystal ribs broke the wind and the reeds thinned. Aydin realized she wasn’t avoiding difficulty, she was avoiding being funneled.

  Rand tried to turn the walk into a contest anyway, drifting ahead then circling back, scanning for something he could claim. Every time he found a “sign,” Lys either ignored it or corrected it with a glance that made him look wrong without saying he was wrong. Aydin kept his own curiosity on a leash, only letting it out when he could do it without making Lys’s job harder, like when he drifted half a step off the vein to see how fast the glowbug responded.

  “Back.”

  “Now.”