When the seal was destroyed, the tower's binding supports went dark.
Without them, the floors began collapsing one after another, and I saw no warnings and could not feel the swarm. For the first time, nothing explained what was happening.
Styx lay on my open palm. Her body had turned almost transparent.
"Styx."
She raised one leg.
The floor gave way.
Kane fell with the throne. The key to the emergency exit was still on his wrist. I jumped, caught his arm and hauled him onto the edge.
"Why?" he asked.
"So you can answer to someone other than me."
I tore off the key. A side door opened into a tunnel, where Leon was already dragging the little dragon. Cole and Rem were leading the wounded out. The chain basilisk crawled under its own power, leaving blood on the stone.
The tower tilted.
Styx slipped between my fingers. I reached for her, but a stream of white dust struck me in the face. The red speck vanished into a crack.
A section of the walkway collapsed on top of me.
The stone lay across my thigh. I tried to call up an enhancement, a wound assessment, even a red outline around the damaged area. Nothing appeared. I had to feel the leg with my hands and judge from the pain whether the bone was intact.
Kane appeared through the dust. He saw me under the slab and stopped. Between us lay the Li family's personal seal, fallen from the throne. It could open the lower exit or raise the emergency supports over the walkway, but it held enough charge for only one.
Kane picked up the seal.
For a moment I thought he would choose the supports. Then the ancestral hall collapsed in the smoke behind him, and the patriarch pressed the seal to his wrist.
"The city will ask for me back yet," he said.
The lower door opened. Kane disappeared.
I called to Styx. There was no answer.
Leon's voice came from the next span. He was calling the dragon, and the little beast answered with a hoarse squeak. Then Cole spoke, telling everyone not to rush to the central circle, to check every pocket between the slabs and mark each place they had already searched with chalk.
"The crack first!" I shouted.
"Those we can hear first," he replied.
One of the archive workers was moaning nearby under the stone. I could not see him, only hear the man trying to draw breath. Before, the System would have shown his chances of survival and let me choose the best route. Now he and I lay in the same darkness, neither knowing who they would reach first.
A golden ring slid across the slab. Barely able to stand, the chain basilisk pushed its muzzle into the gap and hooked its collar around the rubble. No one ordered it to pull. The beast heard the worker's moans and slowly crawled backwards.
The slab rose a hand's breadth.
Cole pulled the worker out first. Leon and the little dragon held up the edge while Rem wedged pieces of the shattered throne under the stone. Only then did they reach me.
I managed to ask about Styx.
The little dragon sniffed the crack and returned alone.
Then the ceiling collapsed a second time, and everything vanished.
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