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. 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 jagged spine below—a finger of rock pointing into the haze—he had once given a name. The name 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.

But this was different. He felt it before he saw it.

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 to listen.

Then the ground moved.

Marjon usually ground and 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 happened far away.

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, then two. 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.

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. Pieces dropped at different speeds. Some reversed for a heartbeat before continuing. One stopped eight meters above the ground and hung there, rotating.

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.

The eruption had begun far beyond Marjon. The upheaval traveled backward through the Lines until even this place—their root—answered. Marjon sat at the center of the system, a place every other fracture seemed to remember.

Whatever had happened was large enough to move the world.

The Fault Lines answered pressure and collision, forces too large to share the same space peacefully. What had just moved through Marjon carried resistance in it—a force straining against the condition imposed upon it.

His mouth tightened.

“The world does not like what has been thrust upon it,” he said. “It is fragmenting in response.”

He let the conclusion settle.

“Fitzlin caused this.”

Proof could come later. Fitzlin would already know the shape, cause, and purpose of whatever was reshaping the world. He had spent decades standing at the center of events while keeping his influence invisible. Kull treated this movement the same way.

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 summit had broken open: an internal alignment extending into the world, subtle and exact, a needle finding its bearing through disruption.

Direction. A line drawn through the center of his thinking, pointing.

Kull stilled.

For years he had carried a third frequency beneath Stonewake and Greyweave—faint, occasional, easy to dismiss as training residue or the resonance the Fault Lines produced in anyone who lingered near them. Until now, it had asked nothing of him.

The frequency moved to the center of his awareness. The needle had found north.

For an instant, distance became arrangement: one point related to another, however far apart. Meaning would come later. Whatever had moved through Marjon had moved through him too.

The realization held him still.

He moved.

Marjon resisted him as it resisted everything. Distance bent. Light fractured. Sound arrived at the wrong angle. Stone hovered where it should not. The Fault Lines stretched in every direction, a wound refusing to close.

The pull sharpened into clarity.

He stopped at a fracture that looked like any other among thousands. Then its tension declared itself: the strain of something once complete, torn away from its former whole.

Kull crouched and held one hand just above the edge. Stone 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. He had examined sites where power had been torn away. Violence remained in their edges, a system compensating for theft. This fracture carried the clean tension of withdrawal.

This was withdrawal.

He stood.

“It arrived here,” he said. “On its own.”

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

He stayed still and recalibrated.

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.

The Magnet had recognized the boy. Kull saw recognition as an opening, and openings could be taken.

“Recognition,” he said. “A condition.”

Choice implied judgment. Recognition implied condition. Conditions could be studied, reproduced, controlled.

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

If an accident of recognition could shake the continent at its root, what could it become in a mind built to command it? Kull contained the flicker of excitement and kept calculating.

He lifted one hand.

His power imposed itself. He forced arrangement onto what had come undone. 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 shoulders and jaw.

“Yes.”

The fracture held. Obedient. Still.

He had forced the fracture into stability, becoming from outside the organizing force the missing Magnet had once supplied.

The fracture submitted while its wound remained open.

The conclusion was insulting in its simplicity: the world had yielded more readily to the boy’s accord than to Kull’s command.

He rejected it.

To Kull, cooperation was submission whose mechanism remained hidden. His own order required force. The boy’s accord seemed effortless.

In one untrained instant, Gideon had entered an accord 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, “because it is allowed to.”

The Fault Lines remained silent.

“The world needs to 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.”

The words settled. Then, quieter:

“And he stole what was meant to show me how.”

✦ ✦ ✦

He turned inward.

He kept this skill for himself. Most minds resisted such inspection. Kull had spent years learning to walk his own memory as terrain, isolating a moment and returning to it with precision.

He let the world fall away.

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

But his mind shifted. 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 the memory and forced himself back to the summit.

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

The corridor returned. Fitzlin moved ahead of him with the unhurried certainty of a man who had already decided something. The younger Kull followed. The purpose of the memory sharpened into a single word: access.

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

Twice he had approached the summit to understand what the boy had done. Twice his mind had turned him toward the same buried place.

His mind obeyed discipline. Always.

He sensed only his own mind. The redirection had risen from a depth beyond his conscious reach.

The summit and the buried chamber were two points on the same concealed path: the Magnet, the boy, a sealed case in a room older than permission, Fitzlin’s hands, and a scroll threaded with metal.

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 first, his expression clear and measured.

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

Even now, Kull felt the shift 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 pause. Critical.

“This,” Fitzlin said, holding the scroll between them, “speaks of 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 looking beneath words and posture. His fingers tightened around the scroll.

For one suspended moment, Fitzlin reached the hunger Kull still carried openly.

Then he drew the scroll back with deliberate care.

“No,” he said.

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

“You said—”

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

“Then show me.”

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. “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.

He looked at the place where the Magnet had been, where the world had recognized something hidden from him and given it freely to a child who had arrived by instinct.

The imbalance settled into him as cold arithmetic: forty years of discipline weighed against a boy who had simply stood still and been recognized.

“What you refused to show me,” he said, “you prepared him to receive. The Magnet should have been mine.”

What followed was colder than anger: 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 crossed understanding and ruthless refinement.

The distance between his sigil and its answering mark thinned.

“Report.”

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 lasted just 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.

“It is too great a risk.”

“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?”

“No. You will not open it. 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.

“Where do I find it?”

“Fitzlin keeps it where he hides the things he does not trust himself to use.”

“That narrows nothing.”

“It narrows everything.”

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

“You will have enough time.”

“That is confidence, not certainty.”

“No,” Kull said. “It is instruction.”

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

“This is not a request.”

The connection closed. The sigil dimmed.

Around him, stone continued its uncertain orbit. Haze moved. Fractures breathed. The world remained between outcomes.

He felt the same tension he had read in the fracture: a system suspended between one state and the next. Beneath it lingered the force that had moved through Marjon.

Two forces. Opposed, connected. Their identities and location remained hidden while his mind sorted the pieces.

Either the boy had achieved something beyond Fitzlin’s foresight, or Fitzlin had seen it coming long ago and withheld the scroll because Kull belonged inside the design. He was part of it.

Neither possibility was comfortable. Both required the same action.

Beneath both possibilities, appetite took root. The boy could hold the Magnet through instinct and still make Marjon answer. Kull intended to learn what a mind built for such power could do.

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

The Fault Lines trembled in answer.

“Then I will make the choice for it.”

Chapter II

The Hum That Answers

They gave them a room on the third level.

Their training quarters sat higher in the tower, close to the arenas. This room was lower and quieter, with a wide window over Karthune’s terraced lights and walls thick enough to hold private things. Someone had left water, bread, 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. Seren 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 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 what it always does—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. The shape of him. What he’s got in there.”

The room quieted.

“I’ve never felt that. From anybody.”

“That’s Heartward,” Thea said. “Empathic sight. That’s what you’re describing.”

“I know.”

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 until the others give it something to hold.”

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

“Not even close,” Gideon said. “I couldn’t make the teleport happen. Couldn’t shapeshift, not even a little. 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 inside me before I was ready, 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.”

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

The room filled with something other than silence: the three people he had known his whole life, each carrying an emotion he could now feel as plainly as pressure before rain.

Bram first.

Under Bram’s jokes, the hand on his ribs, the careless sprawl against the wall: worry. It carried the edge of fear, all of it aimed at Gideon, and beneath that lived the old dread that family 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. One word on the summit—Marjon—and then everything had happened. Toma sat with his hands folded, breathing slow.

Beneath that lay an older loyalty, one that had cost him dearly long before Karthune, the depot yard, or the rooftops back home. Gideon felt only the mark it had left.

He pulled back. Their inner lives belonged to them, and he closed the door.

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—sharp, aimed, already sorting what to do. Beneath it lay what she would have called vigilance, true but incomplete. Deeper still was a familiar shape she had carried for years.

Her face changed.

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

She knew.

For a second her expression opened, revealing something guarded and deeply private.

Then she shut it again.

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

“Yeah,” Gideon said. “There’s a pressure that goes 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: later.

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.”

“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 the start.”

“How do you know that?” Toma asked.

“I don’t. Not for sure. The hum points that way. When I don’t pull it somewhere else, it goes west.”

“Does he know what happened to him?” Thea asked.

“He didn’t. While it was happening, he didn’t.”

“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 in there?”

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.”

He stopped.

“And?” Toma said.

“And there were spaces.” Gideon looked at the table. “Parts of him that weren’t smooth. 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.”

Nobody moved.

“Spaces,” Thea said slowly. “You felt something inside Kull Kalijan that he’s not using.”

“Yeah.”

“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 the hum was in me. Before Karthune. Before I knew what it was.”

Toma watched him a second too long.

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

“What does it mean?” Toma asked.

“I don’t know yet. I can tell you what I felt. I can’t tell you what it adds up to.”

“It means 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. “I don’t love any of the three.”

Bram took that in. “Wonderful. Great. That’s really 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? In the corridor?”

Gideon met his eyes.

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

Toma waited.

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

“He’s said 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 saves every word like it costs him something.”

“Yeah.”

Bram looked at the ceiling again.

“Okay, Sly,” he said quietly. “What else?”

The old name landed differently here, after Gideon had admitted he could feel the people who loved him.

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 waited behind the corridor wall. Hearing about it was different.

“What’d they say?” Thea asked.

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

Toma’s hands stayed folded.

“He said I didn’t make the teleport happen,” 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 mine. It was his.”

No one spoke.

“Away,” Bram said.

“Away.”

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

“I think so. Can’t be sure. 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—” Gideon stopped. He remembered the weight of the answer. “Later. And he sounded relieved that understanding would come in its own time. Like that was how it was supposed to be.”

The pause lengthened.

“Glad,” Bram said.

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t want you to know yet.”

“Like it was dangerous to know.”

“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. “After Atticus asked. Fitzlin said it to him, not to me. They didn’t know I was still there.”

He looked at them.

“He said Kull’s a Quint too.”

The room took it in.

Bram went completely still. 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.

“Two Quints,” Bram said.

“Yeah.”

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

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

“I think he’s known a long time,” Gideon said.

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 the long dust-colored reach of the Barrens—

The hum shifted.

The shift 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.

Then the world moved.

The world moved beneath them.

Pressure rolled sideways through the deep rock. 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. Something enormous had happened far away, and only now was it reaching Karthune.

Dust came down from the ceiling.

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

A deep grinding sound came through the floor: huge things resettling into a shape that fought every new edge.

Then it stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

In the sudden quiet, they froze. The lamp kept swinging. Dust drifted through the amber 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 gripping the table.

His breathing had changed.

Someone was saying his name.

“Gideon.” Thea’s voice. Close. “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. “Something hit them somewhere else. Marjon felt it first. Now it’s reaching us.”

“Kull?” Toma said from across the room.

“No.” He knew it without knowing how. “Not Kull. Or—not just Kull. Not one thing.” The aftershock still moved through him. “Two things. Hitting each other somewhere else. The Lines are carrying it.”

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

“Are you hurt?” 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—” He searched. “Like being in a room when somebody screams. It isn’t pain, exactly. But it goes through you whether you’re ready or not.”

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.

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. Meaning could wait.

But the hum still leaned toward the Magnet when he touched it.

After what had come through the Fault Lines, it pointed one way.

West. Marjon.

“We need to find Fitzlin,” Toma said from the window. “Now. Before he comes to us.”

“Agreed,” Thea said.

Gideon stood. His throat hurt. So 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, and he stayed.

Thea had already opened her notebook to a clean page. She always had one ready.

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

Gideon picked up the Magnet.

He thought of everything Fitzlin had withheld, and of Kull at Marjon, reading the world exactly right and completely wrong at once.

He thought of what Atticus had once said about Acklin: Gideon’s father believed any fight could be ended if people understood each other well enough. Acklin had understood the method. Timing had betrayed him.

“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.