Gideon Irondell and the Fragmented Fault Lines

The Gideon Irondell Trilogy – Book 2

Terence J. Murphy

For those who know that looking deeper always reveals more.

Chapter I

The Place That Was Opened

Kull Kalijan arrived at Marjon by another’s power.

He stood at the edge of the Fault Lines, the fractured world spread beneath him in broken seams of stone and magnetic haze. The air tasted of metal. Suspended rocks drifted in slow, unnatural orbits above the rifts. Threads of metallic dust turned in place. Light bent along the edges of things, pulled thin by competing forces.

He had stood here before both looking for the Seer and as a younger man, banished to these western edges after the Council lost faith in him, he had walked these ridges until they shaped his thinking. The long and jagged spine below—a finger of rock pointing into the haze—he had once given a name. The name he had given it when he was younger had faded.

Kull held his ground and watched.

The Fault Lines lived in constant motion. He had known that since the hum first rose through the soles of his feet, a response as immediate as cold against skin. They shifted. They breathed. They registered the deep interior of the world on their own terms, never letting the world forget the Excursion.

But this was different.

The hum had changed. Its pitch carried a new edge. Pressure sharpened behind his thoughts. The drifting dust stopped and hung suspended, as though the air itself had gone quiet.

Then the ground shook.

Marjon usually shifted in the low rhythm of its ancient argument with itself. This time, a lateral lurch raced through the stone like a wave through water, fast and total, carrying the urgency of something that had disturbed it.

Kull spread his stance and held.

The first fracture opened thirty meters to his left, a clean split widening in seconds to the width of a man. Its edges dropped in opposite directions. A second fracture answered from the right. The lines met, cracked, compressed, and a section of ground between them rose, tilted, and held at an impossible angle.

Then the eruption began.

Stone exploded upward from three points at once, driven from within. Columns of fragmented rock climbed thirty meters, then fifty, trailing haze and dust in spiraling curtains. The sound arrived half a second behind the sight, a layered roar that punched through his chest and left his ears ringing. Ash filled the air.

Kull stayed where he was and watched.

The suspended stones above the basin shuddered from their orbits. Several dropped. Others accelerated, crossing and nearly colliding before the field caught them and drew them into new positions. The geometry above Marjon had changed.

A fourth fracture split the ground beneath him. He stepped left by instinct and let the break race past.

The haze thickened. The erupted stone reached its apex and fell in broken rhythms.

Then the wave passed.

The ground stilled. The new fractures settled. Misaligned stone continued its altered orbit. Dust resumed its drift.

Kull straightened and looked out at what Marjon had become.

Whatever had happened was large enough to move the world. The Fault Lines answered to a force straining against the condition imposed upon it.

His mouth tightened.

“The world does not like whatever just happened,” he said. “It is fragmenting in response. The world is tied to what they boy and I did on the summit.”

He let the conclusion settle.

“Fitzlin caused this.”

Proof could come later. Fitzlin would already know the cause and purpose of whatever was reshaping the world. He had spent decades studying the relationship of it against the events that occurred. He did this all while keeping his influence invisible.

Heat rose in him. He let it pass. Fury was a poor instrument; he had learned that long ago.

Then a second sensation emerged.

It rose from the place in his memory where the recent events of the summit had broken open: an internal alignment extending into a place he did not know existed in him.

Direction. A line drawn through the center of his thinking, pointing to a new direction.

Kull stilled.

For years he had carried a third frequency beneath his Stonewake telekinesis and his Greyweave mind-bending —faint, easy to dismiss as training residue, even for him. Until now, it had asked nothing of him.

The frequency moved to the center of his awareness, but he still couldn’t understand it. Whatever had moved through Marjon had moved through him too. It couldn’t decipher whether it was something new within him or the result of what was happening here.

The realization held him still.

He looked down once more into the Fault Lines which stretched in every direction, a wound refusing to close.

The pull of it sharpened into clarity.

He stopped at a fracture that looked like any other among thousands.

Kull crouched and held one hand just above the edge. Stone in Marjon could keep the memory of a force long after the force itself was gone.

He read it.

The hum rose—pressure behind thought—and beneath it came a quieter impression: an absence shaped by withdrawal. Something had pulled itself away.

Kull’s eyes narrowed. Whatever was happening inside him retreated. A withdrawal.

He stood.

“The frequency arrived here,” he said. “On its own, but it chooses not to show itself. The object the boy held must be the culprit.”

The Magnet the boy used came from the world’s most unstable point, a consequence of that instability—an answer Marjon itself had produced.

He stayed still and considered the implications.

The Magnet had remained here, integral and stable, until the summit. Until the boy. Until Kull himself had unknowingly supplied the second condition the world required.

“It recognized him,” Kull said, remembering the boy pulling the object while he was holding him on the summit. “But it also called to me.”

Kull saw recognition of them both as an opening. Neither was pre-destined for the object.

An untrained boy had used the object through instinct alone. He had stood in the right place, been the right thing, and the world had answered.

If this artifact could shake the continent at its root and transport Kull from Karthune to Marjon, what could it become in a mind built to command it? Kull contained the flicker of excitement.

He lifted one hand.

His power imposed itself. He forced arrangement onto the fractured earth below him. The Fault Lines resisted with a deep grinding protest, then yielded. Haze tightened. Trembling stones corrected into clean, predictable arcs. The resonance beneath the earth settled.

Kull lowered his hand. The effort cost more than he expected; he felt it in his mind and throughout his body.

“Yes,” he yelled.

The fracture held. Obedient. Still.

He had forced it into stability, supplying what the missing Magnet had once supplied.

The result sat with him. In one untrained instant, Gideon had created something beyond Kull’s lifetime of discipline.

Kull set the thought aside.

He released the fracture. It slipped back into instability more easily than it had submitted, as if his order had been the temporary thing.

“The world fractures,” he said. “It must be controlled.”

He looked down into the fracture, at the slow-turning depths where dust glimmered and stone hovered.

“I am the one to do it. I will not let Fitzlin give it to a boy who knows nothing of what control requires.”

The words settled. Then, quieter:

“And he stole the object that was meant to show me how.”

✦ ✦ ✦

He turned inward. Investigating the events from the summit in his own mind.

He kept this skill for himself. Never disclosing it to any other. A mind resisted such self-inspection. Kull had spent years learning to walk his own memory as terrain, isolating a moment and returning to it.

He entered his thoughts and let the world fall away.

The summit formed around him. Wind. Stone. The boy. The pressure building at the center of the moment, the air changing in the instant before—

But his mind shifted away from the summit. Kull was now standing in a corridor.

Stone. Narrow. Deep underground.

He was younger. He recognized Karthune’s lower levels before he understood why he was there: a passage he had walked once, following Fitzlin into unmarked chambers hidden from guards and public record.

He pulled out of it, frustrated with the diversion to the other memory. He forced himself back to the summit once again.

Wind. Stone. The boy across from him, the pressure building toward—

The corridor returned. Fitzlin moved ahead of him with his usual unhurried certainty. The younger Kull followed.

Kull opened his eyes. Marjon stretched around him, vast, broken and alive.

Twice he had approached the summit to understand what the boy had done. Twice his mind had turned him toward the same buried place in his mind. This couldn’t be coincidence.

His mind obeyed discipline. Always.

He sensed only his own mind. No one was mind-bending him away from the memory. The redirection had risen from a depth inside him that was beyond his conscious reach.

A clear conclusion emerged.

The summit and the buried chamber were two points on the same concealed path: the Magnet, the boy, and where Fitzlin was taking him as a boy.

Kull entered the memory deliberately. The connection lay there.

The corridor formed: narrow stone, cool undisturbed air far below a living city, Fitzlin’s footsteps ahead. The younger Kull followed, alert and hungry in a way he had not yet learned to hide.

They reached an unmarked archway. Fitzlin pressed his hand to the wall. For a moment nothing happened. Then the stone thinned like breath across glass and parted just enough to admit them.

The chamber beyond was small, buried deep. Shelves were cut directly into rock. Bare stone surrounded sealed cases and unmarked recesses. The room carried the age of something that predated governance.

Several sealed cases rested against the far wall, dustless despite the chamber’s age. Fitzlin crossed to them and chose the smallest, tightest-sealed case.

He opened it.

Inside lay a scroll wrapped in metallic thread that pulsed faintly, as if resisting release. Kull felt its weight immediately: knowledge kept from too many hands for too long.

Fitzlin studied it at first, his expression clear and measured.

“The Council believes this prophecy never came to pass,” he said.

Even now, Kull felt the implications in that single word. Prophecy.

“They recorded it. When it failed to manifest in their time, they called it error. An anomaly. They decided fear had written the warning.”

He lifted the scroll carefully.

“They forgot it.”

“And you did not,” Kull said.

Fitzlin looked at him. “No.”

A small critical pause.

“This,” Fitzlin said, holding the scroll between them, “speaks of what will emerge. It never said when the event will come.”

Kull reached for it at once. Whatever Fitzlin had judged worth hiding already felt his by right.

“I am ready,” he had said.

Fitzlin began to extend the scroll.

Then his expression changed.

It was slight: the focus in Fitzlin’s eyes turning inward, the stillness of a Heartward empath looking beneath words and posture. His fingers tightened around the scroll.

For one suspended moment, Fitzlin sensed the unrelenting hunger Kull carried openly.

Then he drew the scroll back with deliberate care.

“No,” he said.

The refusal landed harder than any Kull had received before or since. His hand remained extended in the empty air.

“You said—”

“I said there was more I could show you,” Fitzlin replied. “And there is.”

“Then show me,” he said, anger from the slight coming through.

Fitzlin studied him, awareness moving past discipline and certainty toward the hunger beneath both.

“You are not ready to understand it,” Fitzlin said.

“I understand everything you have shown me.”

“That,” Fitzlin said, “is the problem.”

The memory closed.

“It was the power of the Magnet,” Kull said quietly. “He was going to show me and he stopped. That is what he hid from me.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Kull returned to Marjon.

He stood in silence. The Fault Lines pulsed beneath his feet, holding their instability like a question.

“What you refused to show me,” he said, “you gave to an Uunder boy. The Magnet should have been mine.”

What followed was colder than anger, it was certainty.

He raised his left wrist. The sigil answered. Dark geometry etched into his skin glowed, then tightened into a narrow pattern of focused intent. The method belonged to him alone, built from magnetic understanding and ruthless refinement.

The sigil answered.

“You have an assignment,” Kull spoke.

A voice came through, thinned by distance and stripped of anything that might identify it.

“My Commander.”

“You will enter the First Regent’s private chambers.”

The pause on the other end lasted long enough to become disobedience.

“Security has increased since the summit. The Council is suspicious, and the tower is watched. Moving now will draw attention.”

“You will not draw attention,” Kull said. “I expect you to make sure of that.”

“It is too great a risk.”

“It was not a request.”

The hesitation on the other side showed compliance through silence was the only answer that would be tolerated.

“There is an object within those chambers,” Kull continued. “Secured. Concealed. It predates the Council’s formal archive.”

“You want it retrieved.”

“Yes.”

“And opened?”

“You will not open it,” Kull ordered. “You will not examine it. You will not attempt to understand it.”

“If it is that significant, then leaving it sealed may be—”

“It is not for you,” Kull said. The firmness ended the probing of the contents.

“Where do I go to find it?”

“Fitzlin keeps it where he hides the things he does not want others to see.”

“His chambers?”

“He has a hidden location there.”

“His chambers are protected. Even if I enter, I may not have time to search properly.”

“You will make sure that you have enough time.”

“I will consider whether I can make an attempt.”

“No,” Kull said. “You are mistaken. This is instruction.”

A few seconds passed. When Kull spoke again, his voice hardened.

“To be clear, this is not a request. Your compliance is expected and the subsequent delivery of the scroll is expected shortly.”

The connection closed. The sigil dimmed.

Around him, stone continued its uncertain orbit. Haze moved. Fractures breathed.

“The world is trying to choose,” he said.

The Fault Lines trembled in answer.

“I will finally receive what was intended for me and deliver the control this world demands.”

Chapter II

The Hum That Answers

They gave them a room on an upper level.

Their training quarters sat lower in the tower. This room was quieter, with a wide window over Karthune’s terraced lights and walls thick enough to hold private things. Someone had left water, bread, and a lamp already lit. Amber light moved across the stone.

Thea sat on the edge of the sleeping bench, arms folded, watching Gideon. Bram had claimed the floor by the window, back to the wall, legs stretched out. The healers had already checked him and found only bruising, though his hand kept finding his ribs. Toma stood near the door, quiet and watchful.

Gideon sat at the table. The Magnet of Marjon rested in front of him, dark and still. His attention stayed on the space around it.

Nobody said anything for a while. Then Bram cracked.

“Okay,” he said to the middle of the room. “What did you do up there?”

Gideon didn’t answer right away.

“I don’t know.”

Bram turned his head. “You said that on the summit.”

“Still true.”

“It’s been an hour. Come on. Give us something.”

“An hour doesn’t change the answer, Bram.”

Bram looked at the ceiling. “You made Kull Kalijan disappear. From a summit. In front of all of us.”

“I know what happened. I don’t know what I did.”

“How do you do something and not know what you did?”

“I don’t know, Bram. That’s—that’s the whole problem.”

Bram opened his mouth, shut it, and dropped his head back against the wall.

Thea hadn’t taken her eyes off Gideon. He turned toward her.

She held his look. “You did something with the hum.” Her certainty filled the words.

“Yeah.”

“And you used the Magnet.”

“It helped, I think. With whatever it was.”

“Both at once.”

“I think so.” He looked at his hands. “It’s the hum I can’t explain. The Magnet did something —it focused the current. But the hum—” He stopped. “You know how it’s always there. Low. All the time.”

“We know,” Thea said.

“Up there, I wasn’t holding it back. I was following it. Like it already knew what it was doing and I just—stopped arguing.”

Toma crossed the room and sat opposite Gideon, hands folded on the table.

“And Kull?”

Gideon took a moment.

“There was another current in him,” he said. “When he was pressing on me, I should’ve been trying to get out from under it. The hum reached somewhere else.” He stopped. “I could feel him from the inside. What he’s got in there.”

The room quieted.

“I’ve never felt that. From anybody.”

“That’s Heartward empathic sensing,” Thea said. “That’s what you’re describing.”

“I know. It somehow turned on up there.”

She looked at him. “Gideon. Nobody’s trained you in that.”

“I know that too.”

“Fitzlin was saving it for last,” Bram said. “He was clear about it. Telekinesis, mind-bending, shapeshifting, teleportation. Then the empathic stuff. He said it holds the others together.”

“Last,” Toma said. “Maybe because it doesn’t work correctly until the others give it something to hold.”

“And the others aren’t done,” Thea said.

“Miles to go,” Gideon said. “The teleport still won’t come. Shapeshifting gives me nothing either. Total failure, honestly.”

Lamplight shifted across the wall.

Bram pressed a hand to his ribs. “So, it just—showed up. On its own.”

“It showed up when it showed up,” Gideon said. “I didn’t call it. Kull was holding me, and the hum answered.” He paused. “Like it had been waiting for someone to ask. I think that’s why the Seer and Fitzlin gave me the Magnet. To help that to occur.”

As he said it, he caught what he had missed on the summit.

The emotional senses of the room came flooding in: the three people he had known his whole life, each carrying what they were feeling as plainly as pressure before rain.

Bram first.

Under Bram’s jokes, the hand on his ribs, the careless sprawl against the wall carried worry. It was the edge of fear, all of it aimed at Gideon, and beneath that lived an old dread that family and friends could vanish faster than Bram could joke it away.

Gideon pulled back as if he had crossed a boundary that belonged to Bram.

He turned to Toma.

Toma’s quiet looked the same as always, but now Gideon could feel the weight beneath it. Toma sat with his hands folded, breathing slow.

Beneath that lay an older loyalty, one that was a deep part of his makeup and existed long before they came to Karthune. Gideon felt the staying power that lived in his friend.

He pulled back. Their inner lives belonged to them, and he closed the door, but it kept pressing into him.

He made himself look at Thea last.

He had tracked Thea’s position the entire time while keeping his eyes elsewhere.

He looked.

Worry came first. It was sharp, aimed, and already sorting what they needed to do. Beneath it lay what Gideon would have called vigilance, true but incomplete. Deeper still was a familiar wisdom she had carried for years.

Her face changed.

She had felt him looking past her face and into the place beneath it.

For a second her expression opened, revealing something guarded and deeply private, as if deciding to let him in. Then she shut it again.

“You can feel us,” she said, quiet and flat.

“Yeah,” Gideon said. “There’s a wave of emotions that go through me now. All the time.”

Across the room, Bram’s hand went still against his ribs.

Toma just looked at Gideon and didn’t look away.

Thea held his eyes another second, then gave him the smallest nod which told him they would talk about it later. Alone.

He understood.

“Okay,” Bram said, most of the performance back in his voice. “Putting aside the part where you can feel all of us now, which apparently we’re not talking about—” He looked at Gideon. “Where’s Kull?”

“Don’t know. Same answer as before. Been through this too many times, Bram.”

“Guess.”

“Marjon.” The answer came before the thought. The hum had been pointing there since the summit, faint but unmistakable. “The Fault Lines. He went back to where the Magnet came from.”

“How did you conclude that?” Toma asked.

“I can’t prove it. The hum points that way. When I leave it alone, it goes west to its origin.”

“Do you know if Kull knows what happened to him?” Thea asked.

“While it was happening, he didn’t. I saw it on his face.”

“Then he’s going to tear the place apart figuring it out.”

“Probably.”

Bram went quiet. His face stayed bare of humor.

“What was in him?” he asked. “When you felt him. What’s inside that man besides evil?”

Gideon had been waiting for the question. The answer still resisted him.

“Mostly what I figured. Telekinesis. Mind-bending. He uses both like he’s done it ten thousand times. Smooth. Worn in. Far better than I can do.”

He stopped.

“And?” Toma said.

“And there were spaces.” Gideon looked at the table. “Parts of him that weren’t developed. Things just sitting there, unused. When the hum went through him, they moved. He didn’t make them move. I don’t think he even knew. I think the Magnet interacted with them.”

Nobody moved.

“Spaces,” Thea said slowly. “You felt something inside Kull Kalijan that he’s not using. There’s more to him? That’s not good for any of us.”

“I know that.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Gideon paused. A word sat just out of reach, and he left it there. “It felt familiar. That’s the part I keep coming back to.”

“Familiar how?”

“Like what’s in me. The things I sense within myself but can’t seem to touch yet.”

Toma watched him, studying him but also considering how this affected their path forward.

“Great,” Bram said. “That’s—yeah. Exactly the answer I was hoping you’d avoid.”

“This changes things,” Toma concluded.

“It does, three things,” Thea said, faster now, organizing because she was scared. “One, the man who almost killed us tonight wasn’t using everything he has. Two, we don’t know if he can get to it. Three, we don’t know if the summit just woke it up.” She stopped. “None of the three bode well.”

Bram took that in. “Wonderful. Great. The more you three talk, the worse it sounds. That’s really great. Just so great.”

“Bram,” Thea said.

“I’m coping out loud. It’s a process.” He pressed a hand to his ribs.

“Gideon.” Toma’s voice stayed even. “What did Fitzlin say afterward? He always knows more than he ever says.”

Gideon looked at his friend who always seemed to catch some of the deeper pieces.

“He said I didn’t have to understand it right now.”

Toma waited.

“He said to understand what I did, I have to understand what I am first. In that order.”

“He’s said something like that before,” Thea said.

“Yeah.” Gideon looked at the Magnet. “He also said what I did was new to him. Cleaner than anything he’d seen.”

Bram’s face changed. “He said that.”

“Yeah.”

“Fitzlin. Who says every word like it costs him something.”

“Yeah.”

Bram looked at the ceiling again, shaking his head.

“Okay, Sly,” he said quietly. “What else? I feel like you’re building up to something.”

Using Sly, his name from the Ferro Barrens, landed differently here. He was hit with an empathic wave as it settled into the other two, as well.

Gideon let it.

He took a second to decide how much to say.

“I heard part of Fitzlin and Atticus talking,” he said. “In the alcove.”

They had all known another conversation took place behind the corridor wall. Hearing about it was different.

“What’d they say?” Thea asked.

“Fitzlin said my empathic abilities opened during the fight. That I was feeling Kull’s power from the inside.”

Toma’s hands stayed folded.

“He said I didn’t teleport Kull, at least not directly.” Gideon went on. “I found the parts of Kull he’s never used and lined up with them instead of fighting the parts he does use. It was never my ability to send him away. It was his.”

No one spoke.

“Away means Marjon,” Toma said, setting the word down.

“It felt like the Magnet picked the spot.”

Thea had gone very still. Her hands folded in her lap, one thumb moving over the other knuckle—her tell when a problem had moved ahead of what she was ready to show.

“And then?” Thea asked carefully. “What else did you hear?”

Gideon looked at the Magnet.

“Atticus asked if I understood what I’d done. Fitzlin said no.” Gideon stopped. He remembered the answer vividly. “He said it would have to come later. Like that was how it was supposed to be.”

The pause lengthened.

“He doesn’t want you to know yet,” Bram said.

“Like it was dangerous to know,” Gideon said quietly.

“But now you know there’s more you don’t know,” Toma said.

“Yeah.”

Bram let out a long breath, careful around his ribs, and looked through the window. Karthune’s terraced lights held steady. The bells had stopped. Somewhere below, people moved through corridors, doing the work a city required after a bad night.

Gideon put both hands flat on the table.

“There was one more thing,” he said.

“Oh great, this story continues to spiral down a hole I don’t care to go,” Bram said, shaking his head.

Gideon looked at each of them in turn before he spoke.

“He said Kull’s a Quint too.”

The air seemed to still.

Bram went completely blank in his face. The performance vanished. His hand dropped from his ribs.

Thea didn’t look up. Her thumb stopped. Gideon felt the pieces click together for her—the spaces inside Kull, the unused parts, the familiarity of them—and close around Fitzlin’s word.

Toma gave one small movement of his head like he had figured it out before Gideon divulged it.

“Two Quints,” Bram said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s what Fitzlin’s notebook was tracking,” Toma said. “The two of you. He was keeping tabs on both of you.”

“He knew all along,” Thea said. “He knew before either of you got to Karthune.”

“I think he’s known a long time,” Gideon said. “Maybe before Kull was around.”

Lamplight shifted again.

Outside, dawn had begun to mark one edge of the sky, a pale promise of where the light would come from.

Gideon noticed the change slowly, then all at once. It came from below the room, below the city, under the tower and mountain, beneath the green hills of Karthune and through the long dust-colored reach of the Ferro Barrens.

The hum shifted.

The tremor struck all at once.

His hands flattened on the table before he chose to move. In the half-second before it hit, he knew its size. The hum had been low and quiet his whole life. What rose beneath it now was a flood.

The world moved beneath them.

Waves rolled sideways through the deep rock emerging from a western source. The fragmentation from Marjon was reaching Karthune.

The tower groaned at its roots. The lamp swung hard, flinging shadows across the walls. A shudder climbed through the stone under Gideon’s palms and into his arms.

Dust came down from the ceiling.

The water in the cup by Thea’s bench rippled. Then again.

Then it stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

In the sudden quiet, they froze. The lamp kept swinging. Dust drifted through the dim light.

And through Gideon—through the door that had opened in him—the Fault Lines screamed.

The scream came through the hum, rising from the bones of the world. It drove through the tower, the rock, Gideon’s second heartbeat, and kept coming.

He was still gripping the table.

His breathing had changed.

Someone was saying his name, but his senses were overwhelmed.

“Gideon.” Thea’s voice finally broke through. “Gideon. Look at me.”

He looked at her. Somehow, she had already crossed from the bench and knelt beside his chair, one hand on his arm, eyes on his.

“What is it?”

“The Fault Lines.” His voice came out low. “At Marjon. It started there and it’s reaching us now.”

“Kull?” Toma said from across the room.

“No.” The answer arrived with the certainty of instinct. “Kull is part of it, but there’s another force too. I think it’s coming from me and the Fault Lines are carrying it.”

Bram was on his feet. Gideon hadn’t seen him get up.

“Is it hurting you?” Bram asked, his voice stripped bare.

“No.” Gideon straightened and released the table. His hands ached. “The hum carries whatever the Fault Lines carry. It’s too much at once. It’s like being in a room when somebody screams. The sound goes through you before you can brace for it, but it’s not hurting me.”

Thea’s hand slipped from his arm. She watched him in silence.

Her thumb returned to the knuckle of her other hand. The aftershock had given her one more piece, and she was fitting it to the rest.

Whatever she was building stayed behind her eyes.

He gave her the space.

He looked at the Magnet.

Still. Dark.

He reached for it and let his hand settle on the stone, waiting for the faint answering shift he felt on the summit.

It came. The Magnet knew his hand.

He tried a piece of what he had done on the summit. He gathered the hum close and pushed it toward the Magnet.

The hum moved through him.

The stone stayed silent.

He tried again, loosening the part of himself that always argued with the hum.

Nothing.

The Magnet stayed cool and quiet in his hand. The hum leaned toward it and dispersed before it could gather or sharpen.

The connection remained, faint and unreachable. After another second, he set the Magnet down.

He kept the attempt to himself, choosing not to tell the other three he tried. Meaning of its unwillingness to come forward could wait.

“We need to find Fitzlin,” Toma said from the window. “Now. Tell him what you felt. If he’s been tracking this from the beginning, he needs to know this piece.”

“Agreed,” Thea said.

Gideon stood. His throat hurt, as did his ribs. His legs still carried the fight. He rose anyway.

He looked at his friends.

Bram met his eyes, one hand at his ribs. Fear showed plainly now.

Thea had already opened her notebook to a clean page and was writing quickly. She always did that when something important came about and may be needed later.

Toma waited at the door, watching Gideon as he had since they were children running the lanes back home. He stood there like someone who had made up his mind long ago.

Gideon picked up the Magnet.

“Okay,” Gideon said.

He closed his hand around the Magnet and turned toward the door.

The hum steadied. Low. Patient. Pointing west. Waiting for him to stop arguing and follow.

They went to find Fitzlin.