Noa gnawed on a stale granola bar from her purse, trying not to touch the wrapper or anything as much as possible, even though the stinging burn had already begun to dull on its own. The oats were dry and powdery, sticking to her teeth. She chewed mechanically, not tasting much of anything. Eating gave her hands something to do besides shake. She also chewed on her thoughts.

  Unless this was all an elaborate hallucination, she had teleported away from the… wolf centaur thing. Hexapedal wolf? Her stomach twisted again at the memory—too many legs, too much motion, the wrong shape moving too fast. It had to do with numbers.

  The thought surfaced slowly, not as a revelation but as a quiet, nagging pressure. Numbers like the clearing she was in being exactly forty meters across. Not approximately. Exactly. She had paced it once already just to prove to herself that she was wrong. She hadn't been.

  And the black stone at the center—four meters by four meters, flat and slightly raised from the ground, its edges sharp and clean like it had been measured into existence. The eight surrounding trees, too, their height divisible by four in a way her brain kept catching on without her permission. The longer Noa looked, the more fours and eights revealed themselves, tucked into spacing, angles, repetitions. The pattern sank into her skin like static. She looked away, suddenly uneasy.

  The strangest thing about the place was the stream. It circled the gazebo in a flawless loop, a living ring of moving water that never broke or wavered. No ripples escaped its boundary. The surface reflected the canopy in a warped, continuous band, green folding endlessly into itself.

  Noa stuffed the wrapper in her purse before leaving it behind. Curiosity fueled her. She went down the odd stairs while crumbs stuck to her tongue as she chewed the last bite. Her steps were cautious and slow to avoid using her hands to hold on to anything, finding stairs shaped from interwoven roots. The wood was slick and pale beneath her flats. Wolves watched her from the tree-line, silent and still, eyes following her every step—but they wouldn't cross the stream. That alone told her more than she liked. There were rules in this place, rules she didn’t know.

  But Noa was thirsty. She stuck her hand into the water. The current took hold of her almost violently, like a conveyor beneath glass. A steady pull like a lazy river from hell. The interior wall was stone and smooth and the water dragged at her skin with patient insistence. Noa yanked her arm back because it would be easy to get dragged under. The water had been deeper than it looked at first as she peered down. The stone walls of the stream went down to darkness. Noa wasn’t that thirsty.

  Magic had to be what operated the stream. The word felt ridiculous even as it settled into place. Noa hated the idea that her life had turned into something so unintelligible, so detached from every rule she had built herself around. She hated the thought that all those years of observation and measurement and proof might now be subordinate to something that was subverted by sparkling evidence. Her hands still burned from that instinctive use, and the silver fractures splitting through her skin caught the light like tinsel.

  Noa went back up the stairs, wincing as the movement sent a sting across her back. The scratch there flared as fabric brushed it, and when she craned her neck she could see the shallow groove where the wolf's tooth had caught her arm. That had been close.

  Before she got half way up, there was a sound that she couldn’t identify and she peered through the gap between the white and purple roots that curled around the gazebo's boundary. Beyond them, the forest thickened but between was motion. The wolves had multiplied since the last time she had looked—more bodies slipping between trees. They were circling something that wasn’t her. Her unease sharpened.

  That was when she saw him. Thirty-two meters.

  A man crouched low with a blade, balanced like a coiled spring. He wore a vicious grin.

  She leaned over the railing, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. He wore a dark blue uniform, the shape of it tugging at something familiar in her memory—vaguely military, though distorted through unfamiliar design. The belt sat wide and heavy at his waist, more like a thick reinforced band, with what looked like a second sword or maybe a rapier hanging at one side. His armor was leather, dyed a deeper blue and stained darker still in places, reinforced at vital points with metal plates that caught the light when he shifted. One large plate guarded the left half of his chest with blue paint in the corner.

  He looked happy. Almost boyishly so.

  A wolf lunged.

  Noa put a hand in front of her mouth as breath left her in a soft, startled sound. He moved fluidly, the blade flashing bright as reflected light skittered along its length. He struck once, clean and precise. The attacking wolf yelped and stumbled back. Two more leapt in. He met them just as easily.

  Steel carved red arcs through motion. The sounds of impact were dull, wet, and precise in a way she found morbidly beautiful. The fight dragged closer to the raised structure step by step, wolves taking injury by injury, a slow, tightening spiral around the gazebo. The man whipped around and struck with balance and controlled momentum. As they moved nearer, she shifted with them along the rail, tracking every motion.

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  Four wolves remained. Two were heavily injured now, snarling through strings of saliva, breath coming in ragged bursts. Her heart thundered so loud she could feel it in her ears as the man was driven backward, boots skidding in the dirt.

  One wolf pounced. He caught it by the fur, fingers locking in tight to keep snapping teeth from his throat. His blade plunged into its belly, the motion sharp and decisive.

  "Watch out!" she shouted.

  He spun towards her instead of the wolf. Too late. Another wolf slammed into his side. Fangs snapped shut around his leg. The impact wrenched both of them sideways and he cut through the wolf. They came apart but his leg went into the stream.

  The water pulled him under. His balance vanished and the stream took him down in one violent drag. Noa's lifeguard instincts from college kicked in. There was no time to think through it. The decision lived entirely in her spine. She vaulted the railing.

  For a fraction of a second there was only air and the sickening drop as gravity took over. She hit the small patch of ground between the base and the stream and rolled into it. Then the stream hit her as she took in a deep breath. Cold flooded over her all at once, shocking through cloth and skin, driving straight into her chest. The force of the current seized and yanked her sideways. She tumbled under.

  The water pressed in from every direction, loud and heavy, stripping sound down to its deepest vibrations. The current took over immediately, wrapping around her body and hauling her downward at a steep, disorienting angle. It was not a gentle pull. It was insistent, powerful, as if the stream itself had intention behind it. Darkness swallowed what little light had filtered down from above. Her chest tightened with the sudden, familiar pressure of held breath. Panic nudged at the edge of her thoughts, but something steadier pushed back just as hard and she kicked.

  Numbers. All numbers. Speed. Angle. The downward drag of the current. The way her body was rotating as she was pulled. How long her lungs could hold. Shouldn’t her ears be popping? How quickly another body would sink when caught like this. The weight he might be, the possible weight of the metal on his armor. Drag. The darkness was an obstacle she had to guess through. He was still sinking.

  She reached without seeing. Her hand closed on fabric. The texture told her it was real before her brain confirmed it. Her fingers locked fast, reflex gripping hard even as the current tried to tear him away from her. An arm hooked around her forearm in return, the contact sudden and desperate.

  They were spinning now. But Noa was never lost. She was never turned around.

  Target: 2 [2][147*3] 882

  ! Lazil's eyes cannot see you

  The pressure changed. The water did not loosen its grip so much as redirect it. Momentum tore forward instead of down. The darkness broke apart into rushing light, brightness slamming into her closed eyes as the stream released them all at once.

  Water spilled off her like a sheet as they burst free into the grassy clearing. They crashed into the ground together. The impact drove the breath from her lungs in a raw, broken gasp. She opened her eyes to the canopy and sat up immediately. And screamed.

  Her arms were on fire. She dragged in another breath, startled into another scream by the sight of her own hands. They shook violently in front of her face, skin flushed blood-red, the silver lines no longer contained to her fingers. They were climbing now, threading themselves upward along her forearms as if drawn there by heat and force both.

  The pain was white-hot. Not sharp. Not localized. Everywhere. Like exposing raw nerves directly to flame before it cooled to just her hands.

  She turned, wild-eyed, toward the stranger. He lay limp and pale beside her. The sight cut through the pain. He’d grabbed her arm in the water but it hadn’t been enough.

  Noa forced herself still. Forced her hands to move. She could not feel for a pulse properly through the shaking and the burn, so she pulled off his armor with blue eyes painted on, finding the straps and fighting them. Every second costing a percentage of survival. Once the armor was free she stared down at him and her hands. How was she supposed to do compressions?

  Her throat tightened with worry. Then anger. She didn't burn herself to give up. It was just a little water in his lungs. She shut her eyes for a heartbeat and braced herself. Planted her hands flat against his chest. The instant her palms made contact, pain spiked again, sharper than before. It felt like thousands of needles driving inward at once, trying to force their way through skin and bone alike.

  She started compressions anyway. Her vision blurred with heat and tears. Her brain felt like a live wire submerged directly into flame. Each push was agony layered atop agony, a steady rhythm she fought to maintain through the trembling in her arms.

  Noa was crying through it when he started coughing.

  The sound broke loose from his chest in a violent, choking burst, followed by another. Relief hit her hard and she stopped compressions immediately and used her foot to roll him onto his side before collapsing backward onto the grass. She hugged her burning hands to her chest. Her pain spilled out of her in wordless sounds she couldn't shape into anything else.

  The man continued coughing. He dragged himself onto hands and knees, hacking until his breath stuttered into something shakier but alive. He retched once, then sat there panting and unmoving for a long moment. Finally, he turned to look at her. His brown eyes were rimmed with red.

  "Why?" he asked. His voice was deep and ragged, eyes conflicted. The question didn't make sense to her. Why what? Save him?

  "I had to," Noa said.

  He scowled at her and rolled onto his back, coughing again.

  "No," she said, and he gave her another hard look, "You have to sit up."

  He did. Slowly. He looked around the interior of the gazebo as if grounding himself in place. He coughed again, then reached for the straps of the backpack he had been wearing and tugged it free, tossing it aside.

  Noa stayed where she was, teeth clenched, riding out the waves of fire that still tore through her arms. The only sounds were him rummaging, coughing and groaning as he put pressure on his leg where he'd been bit. When he caught her staring he asked, "How much?"

  "What?"

  "How much mana did you use?" he asked her.

  The numbers. Noa looked up at the canopy, unable to fight the burn. "Eight hundred eighty two.”