The labyrinth doesn't bluff. It audits.
The effigy's footfalls thinned into the stone and went out like a metronome winding down. The labyrinth held its breath. The mage-light over Evelyn's shoulder trembled, then steadied into a pale coin.
Rem kept his forearm across her collarbone one beat too long.
"Remove it," she said, not looking at him.
He stepped back. "Stabilized your stance. Done."
"I do not need"
"Correction," he said. "You did not want help. You needed it. Three veterans died in a heartbeat. That was not a D-rank hello. That was a warning."
Her chin tilted with aristocratic geometry, a small precise angle that said her patience had an edge. "Who are you to assess?"
"Rem," he said. He did not offer a hand. "Porter. No mana. Plenty of unpleasant truths."
"Functionally a weight," she said, already bored with his existence.
"A controlled one," he said, "against an uncontrolled threat."
The light painted a frost-blue blade along her cheekbones.
"You will return to the entrance and wait. I will close the dungeon."
"You will not," Rem said, mild.
She met his eyes. "Beg pardon?"
"You will not close anything alone," he said. "That effigy is a roaming boss. It protects a heart. I rank it A, minimum. You walk in proud, you do not walk out."
Her mouth curved, not nicely. "Assessment from a man with no mana. Adorable."
"Adorable was you trying not to shake," he said. "You are fast. You are clever. Pride still eats people."
A muscle ticked in her temple. "You are impertinent, porter."
"Accurate, Nerd," he said.
Her eyes flashed. "Do not call me that."
"That is your label," Rem said, even. "You cast in stanzas. You think in diagrams. Nerd fits."
"Presumptuous."
"Procedural," he corrected. "You want to live, we apply procedure. You create windows, I exploit them. You call phases, I move. We break the heart, we leave."
"We," she repeated with surgical disdain. "No. You are a liability."
"Yet here I am," he said. "I do not watch people walk into a grinder while I hold the door because their last name likes applause."
Something unreadable crossed her face and vanished. She flicked two fingers. The mage-light split into scouts that drifted forward, tasting the dark.
"You will not slow me," she said. "If I say move, you move. If I say run, you run."
"Copy," Rem said. "If you cast, call it. I do not need the theory, just timing."
Her mouth was a knife. "Very well. Keep up, porter."
"Keep leading, Nerd."
She flowed, a measured vector of pale light and trained intention. Rem matched her without commentary, boots catching the labyrinth's pulse. The corridor bent like a ribcage. The air smelled of wet iron and old ash.
She checked over her shoulder once. He was there, five paces back, not winded.
"Acceptable pace," he said.
"Try to maintain it," she replied, clipped, and accelerated.
He did.
They entered a drowned amphitheater. Steps sloped toward a pit that held a concentration of cold like a memory. The monsters rose from the bowl, canine silhouettes stretched too thin, tendons braided with glimmering slag, porcelain teeth in porcelain mouths. Eleven. Their breath steamed where it should not.
Evelyn moved first. Hands up. One palm steady. Two fingers of the other slicing a short arc. The sigil she had seeded earlier flared. A spear of condensed chill hummed through the front beast's skull. It folded without drama. The second leaped. A translucent plane blinked into existence and swatted it against the wall. She spoke three syllables, precise as ticking crystal.
Rem grabbed a rusted chain from the amphitheater's rim and wrapped it twice around his forearm and once around his fist. The third beast took a hook to the temple and painted the wall with a crockery crack. A fourth came low. He stomped. The floor fissured. Its jaw lost interest in being attached. He slid under a fifth, came up with a chunk of broken pillar, and batted six and seven out of the air like ugly parade balloons.
"Two right," he said.
"I can count," she replied, voice frigid. Glyphs ringed her wrists like cuffed light. She clapped once, almost polite, and a pressure ring rolled out flat and mean. The two on his right staggered as if gravity hiccupped. She threaded a line through one's eye. The other took his knee and changed its mind about existence.
Something latched Rem's back and bit down. The chain caught most of it. He slammed his shoulders into a column and the bite lost enthusiasm. He rolled, tore the thing off, and threw it into the skin of Evelyn's still-hovering shield. The shield did not care for visitors.
She finished the last one without flourish, palm to forehead, a darkness of light that poured and withdrew. It collapsed like a puppet whose strings were ashamed.
Air returned to damp and quiet.
Evelyn flicked gore from her fingers with surgical disgust. "Efficient."
Rem unwrapped the chain, his forearm crosshatched purple. "Adequate," he said. "The next wave will adjust."
Her eyes narrowed like a queen hearing a peasant say something true. "You overstep, porter."
"You under-brief," he said. "Why are we talking when we should be moving?"
She gave him a look that could have frozen water on a stove. Then she crouched and brushed two fingers through the gritty dust. Whisper-glyphs rose like steam.
"They were herded from the north gallery," she said. "Not random. The effigy is tightening a perimeter around the heart."
"Roaming boss," Rem said. "Protecting the core."
She did not reward him with acknowledgment. She stood and moved. He followed.
The labyrinth encouraged mistakes. Arches were painted to look like corridors and they watched back. Doors had hinges stitched from vertebrae. Tapestries were woven of mineral filaments that hummed when you got too close and hummed louder when you tried to leave. The mage-lights skated ahead, touching edges and tasting traps. Sometimes the wall was rock. Sometimes it was chitin. Once it was softer than stone and pulsed like something sleeping.
"Explain something," Rem said as they skirted a stairwell that moaned with a draft not entirely of air. "Where is the rest of your team?"
"Pinched at the exit. The dungeon forked them out when the double throat closed. They are sealed out of the inner ring."
"So it is us," Rem said. "And the thing that thinks it is a law."
"And the heart," she said. Not romantic. "Destroy it and the structure collapses. The effigy loses its anchor."
"You say that like you have studied," Rem said.
"I study everything," she said.
"And your reasons," he said, even. "You have stacked them high."
"You pry," she said. "How provincial."
"I triage," he said. "People who volunteer to die are either fools or guardians. You do not read fool."
Silence measured them for three turns of corridor.
"My father believes rank is inheritance," she said at last as they threaded through a forest of statues grown up from the floor in positions of prayer. One wore a crown of fused coins. One had teeth where its eyes should be. One looked almost human and regretted it. "The Association believes risk is a ladder. Both are wrong here. This place punishes presumption. My team walked into a misranked pit because someone wanted a clean report. I will not leave them to the story that will be written about their competence."
Rem nodded once. "Guardian, then."
Her mouth sharpened. "Do not reduce me."
"You are not a type," he said. "You are Evelyn. But Evelyn, do not get dead proving a spreadsheet wrong."
"You assume I cannot do both," she said. Arrogance and humor wore contempt like a coat. The mage-light quivered as if amused.
They moved.
A crystalline lizard traveled in skids and whispers. Evelyn pulsed a low-frequency hum that turned it to powdered glass without drama. A tapestry of hands decided to be a man. Rem treated it like a reckless rope and burned it across stone until it stopped wanting to be anything. A field of thin needles waited on the floor, glamoured to look like dust, until Evelyn whistled two notes that made them stand straight and harmless. In a room with a sunken center, a column of air spoke in voices Rem recognized as everything he had ever forgotten on purpose. Evelyn's eyes went distant for a breath. Rem put a hand on her shoulder, brief and mechanical, a switch flipped. She returned like someone snapping a book shut.
"Do not listen to rooms that want to be people," he said.
"I know that," she snapped.
"You paused," he said.
"I was measuring."
"Sure," Rem said. "Dignified lag."
Her glare could have cut canvas.
"Stay irritated," he added. "It keeps your pulse in the right range."
"Your bedside manner is appalling."
"I am not your medic, Nerd. I am your heavy object."
"You are an object at least," she muttered.
"Good," Rem said. "Keep that thought. It means you will not try to rescue me if I do not deserve it."
She glanced at him, sharp and assessing, and looked away before the look could become anything.
They began to see signs of the effigy's patrol the way you see a storm before it arrives. The air cooled without a source. Edges of doors fused into glassy lips. In the dust were grooves like tracks left by a heavy key dragged at an angle. Along a side hall lay caved chests, burst packs, a pair of boots without feet, and a broken association badge with a lamina imprint that looked like authority and felt like apology. It had been snapped cleanly into two pieces that knew each other before they were separated.
Evelyn crouched. Her palm hovered above the badge without touching. She inhaled without sound. When she stood, some part of her had become a locked room.
"You knew any of them?" Rem asked.
"Yes," she said.
He did not say sorry. He said, "We move."
They did.
At a choke point where two arteries of corridor met, the ceiling bulged like a half-inflated lung. Rem braced, expecting a drop, but nothing fell. The bulge contracted as they passed and exhaled a sweet resinous breath that clung to the back of the tongue. Evelyn pressed a knuckle to the inside of her elbow. A glyph blinked there like an emergency light.
"Counteragent?" Rem asked.
"Filter," she said. "For suggestion."
"Good," he said. "Rooms that want to be people."
"Rooms that want to be parents," she corrected, voice even. "They say go home. They say kneel. They say you have done enough."
He filed that.
They entered a long gallery lined with niches. Most were empty. A few held fragments of statues, a hand, a jaw, a wing with veins carved into the stone so delicately they looked real. At the end of the gallery, the floor had been polished by many things that did not leave footprints. A faint hum threaded the air, mechanical but older. The mage-lights dimmed, not because Evelyn's focus flagged but because something ahead ate illumination as if it had teeth.
Evelyn stopped. The lights drew in around her like moths hitching a ride.
"It is close," she said.
"How far?" Rem asked.
She lifted her hands a fraction, testing pressure like a swimmer tasting current. "Thirteen measures. Four turns of breath if you do not waste any."
"Copy," Rem said. He tested the weight of his chain. Too short for range, good for control. He set it down. He picked up a broken haft, balanced well and wrong length, and set it down too. His hands mapped the floor quietly. Seams, ridges, a line he could use to leverage hips into force without sacrificing stance. "Call your phases, Nerd."
"Do not presume"
"Call them," he said. "You do timing. I do physics."
She looked ready to argue out of habit. Habit was a luxury.
"Threads first," she said. "Measure bind. Short. Do not rely."
"Would not," he said. "What else?"
"If it looks at you, it sees through you," she said. "Do not stand still in its attention. If you must step, change more than one variable. Angle and height, not only position."
"Vector shift," he said. "Understood."
"And do not run," she added, quieter. "If you run, it will match your pace, and you will never slow again."
"We do not run," Rem said. "We work."
Her mouth flickered. It might have been contempt. It might have been agreement.
They took the final turn and arrived in the plaza before the heart.
Black slate. Ribs of obsidian rising like ship frames found under a desert. Steps down into a sunken chamber where the thing it all protected lay cradled in petrified wood, a mass that might have been crystal if crystal could rot. It pulsed in patient beats. Each exhale made the walls shiver. The sound was less a sound than an idea. If you held still long enough, it would teach your bones a rhythm they were not born knowing.
Between them and it, the effigy waited.
The effigy did not posture. It did not threaten. It suggested. Its head was an onyx oval with a ridge and a hollow, no features and too much attention. Arms too long. Hands too narrow. In one hand, an implement that was not quite a spear and not quite a key, serrations drinking what light remained and returning nothing. It stood with the patient inevitability of a door you will open whether you want to or not.
Rem felt the urge to swallow and refused. Not because it would give anything away but because refusal reminded the body about agency.
Evelyn's voice dropped to a frequency the chamber liked. "Do not speak loudly," she said. "It listens for declarations."
"So we do not declare," Rem said. "We perform."
He took a half pace forward. Not chivalry. Geometry. He mapped clear lines. Approach, retreat he would not take, fallback points he did not want. He counted seams. Left heel on that one. Right corner of slate there. He set contingencies like nails.
Evelyn lifted her hands. The sigils that poured out were not the tidy lace of earlier engagements. These were older, economical, a language of constraints and bargains. The mage-lights collapsed into her chest and re-bloomed as faint rings along her forearms. The air gathered into threads, luminous and nearly invisible, strung across the floor as if a constellation had been coaxed into wires.
"Phase one," she said, almost inaudible.
The effigy's head turned inch by inch like a compass finding north. It aligned with the pitch of her spell.
Rem kept his eyes on joints, not on the place a face should be. Hollow where shoulder met arm. Flex in the wrist. Weight distribution across the feet. Its balance did not travel like a person's, more like a thought re-centering. He noted and filed and refused to plan beyond the next two steps. Plans love being wrong.
"If it breaks the first thread, it learns a note," Evelyn murmured. "The second, an interval. The third, a song."
"How many threads?" Rem asked, equally soft.
"Five," she said. "It will not need them all."
"Then we will not give them all," he said.
"Ego," she asked, a thin sardonic ribbon.
"Budgeting," he said. "Seconds are currency. Spend them well, Nerd."
Her nostrils flared. Annoyance, and underneath it, attention.
"On my signal," she murmured. "Move on lines, not on hope."
"Hope is not a tool," he said. "Ready."
Evelyn's fingers flattened. The first thread tightened around the effigy's shin. It did not test the bind. It registered it the way rain registers ground.
Her pupils thinned. Focus narrowed to the width of a blade.
"If I say fall back, do not argue."
"Will not."
"And if I say leave me, you will"
"Not a command you are authorized to give," he said without heat. "We do not bleed on that order."
Her jaw flexed. "Porter"
"Procedure," he said. "We leave together. Or neither."
The effigy shifted a fraction of a degree. The first thread tightened and sang the faintest metallic vowel. It had begun to listen.
"It learns," she whispered. "Everything here learns. It records, compares, corrects."
"Then be new," Rem said.
Without looking away from the effigy, he closed his fingers on a length of fallen lattice, a rib of obsidian that had cracked clean. The weight was good. The balance was wrong until he choked up on it. He did not intend to club. He intended to interrupt.
Evelyn's spellwork feathered the air. Faint pressure stitched up Rem's back like a hand checking that he was still there. He did not shrug it off. The heart pulsed again and the chamber pulsed with it. Rem resisted the desire to sync himself to a rhythm that did not belong to him.
"Do not match the beat," Evelyn murmured, as if she had heard the thought. "If you do, your body will negotiate against you."
"Noted," he said. "We keep our own time."
"Your humor is misplaced," she said.
"It keeps the blood where it belongs," he said. "Behind the ribs, Nerd."
"Stop calling me"
"Later," Rem said.
They stood with the world arranged in angles and risks. The effigy made no sound. It watched without eyes. It stood with the exactness of a toll.
"Two signs," she breathed. "If it tilts its head to the right, it is about to divide space. If it tilts left, it will erase what you were a moment ago. The first can be interrupted. The second cannot. Do not let it choose left while looking at you."
"Understood," Rem said. "If it chooses left on you, I break the look."
"And if you cannot?"
"Then I break the room."
She almost asked what that meant. She decided not to ask a man who made promises as if he meant them.
"Three more," she whispered, and Rem realized she was counting the threads that had not yet tightened, budgeting the song the effigy would learn if she let it listen too long.
He adjusted his grip on the obsidian rib. The polished seam under his heel was a friend with a narrow definition of friendship.
"Call your marks," he said.
"Mark One. Bind laid."
"Copy." He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, cutting his breath into squares he could stack.
"Mark Two. I drop the temperature. Its joints will answer slower for one measure. That is all."
"One measure is a country," Rem said. "We will use it."
She gave him a look so sharp it might have shaved him if he had been closer. "Do not speak like a poet when you are about to be machinery."
"Rude," he said softly. "Correct."
Her hands hovered, palms slightly in, as if holding an invisible sphere. The rings of light braided once, unbraided, and braided again. She swallowed. Rem heard it and did not let the sound become important.
"Mark Three," she said, quieter. "If I say blind, close your eyes and move two left, one forward, drop."
"Two, one, drop," he repeated. "Blind."
"Mark Four," she went on. "If I say mirror, do not move. The room will move around you."
"That sounds friendly," he said.
"It is not."
He filed both with the neatness of a man who hates forgetting.
The effigy tipped its head a degree to the right. The weapon, not spear and not key, gathered a suggestion of angle.
"It is choosing test cuts," she breathed. "It wants to see us as problems with solutions."
"Let it," Rem said. "We will not be the same problem twice."
"If you survive the first."
"Plan for the first," he said. "The rest is inventory."
"You are very certain, porter."
"No. I am very practiced."
"Is there a difference?"
"Yes. Practice can be audited."
Something in the effigy flexed. Not metal, not sinew, intention. The first thread tightened again. The chamber brightened by almost nothing, as if the light was being re-accounted for.
"We are at the door," Rem said.
"Do not knock," Evelyn said. "We are not guests."
He almost smiled. Almost.
He did not look back, but he felt her center shift. She had moved it down from her throat into her ribs, then down again into the flat of her palms. The threads around her arms hummed. The heart took a breath so large the slate under their feet sighed.
"Evelyn," he said, using her name like a tool because tools have to be precise.
"What," she said, a blade sliding free.
"We leave together," he said. "Auditable practice."
She did not answer. She set the second thread like a wire across the world.
The effigy stilled.
The plaza listened.
The heart beat once, patient and huge, a beat that asked if they were sure.
"Rem," she said, her voice a wire at the base of the skull.
"Here."
"If I fail, do not say anything nice about me later."
"Was not planning to," he said. "Work first."
Her head turned the smallest fraction, puzzlement or the shadow of a smile never allowed to exist. "Work first," she echoed. Her hands set the third thread where gravity would least expect it.
Rem rolled his shoulders and unclenched his jaw, then set it again. He placed his left heel on the seam that made force cheap. He lifted the obsidian rib to where it needed to be if it needed to be.
The effigy's head tilted another degree to the right.
"Do not blink," she whispered.
"I do not," Rem said.
"Nerd," he added, because her shoulders set better when she was irritated.
"Porter," she breathed back, mortally offended and perfectly ready.
The effigy's weapon caught a thread of absent light and lost it. The air condensed. Quiet grew heavier. Somewhere under their feet, something ancient rolled over in its sleep and chose not to wake yet.
"Mark Two," Evelyn said, each syllable cut from glass. "Temperature drop."
The world obeyed her. Subtle. A single degree of refusal braided through motion. The effigy did not shiver. It adjusted. Not slower. More deliberate.
Rem felt the change touch his tendons. He accepted it and did not overcorrect. The room tried to make his breath line up with the heart. He kept his own time.
"Mark Three staged," Evelyn said. Then, like a blade on a whetstone, "Do not run."
"Noted," Rem said.
He drew one more breath. He took inventory one last time. Seams. Angles. Her voice. His hands. The heart. The thing that stood like a toll between them and the end of this.
"On my signal," Evelyn murmured. Rem could hear the cost of those threads in the small muscle at the hinge of her jaw, the calculation rolling on and on, the courage that was not loud.
The effigy leaned.
It was a small thing, a shift in the algorithm of its stance. The plaza felt it the way animals feel a storm begin inside their bones. The weapon described the beginning of an arc. The third thread brightened by a degree, like frost deciding to be glass.
Evelyn fixed her gaze on a point in the air that only she could see. Her lips parted to speak the word that would start the equation.
The heart took its largest breath yet.
The air carried the taste of copper that comes when you are about to learn whether you were right.