“Never came up,” Gyre muttered. “There’s more tunnels down there, but I don’t have a full map. We should split up, get as far as we can, hide if we have to.”

“Right.” Yora waved. “Come on, everyone down!”

The sound of many footsteps was getting closer on three sides. Yora tossed her spear into the hole, then jumped after it. Sarah, Nevin, and the rest of her people followed suit. Gyre looked to Kit.

“After you, Doomseeker.”

“Always prepared, right?” Kit’s grin widened.

“Right.”

She hopped over the edge. Gyre followed, absorbing the fall with a crouch. Only a trickle of light from the lanterns in the meeting room filtered through the smoke, and the ground was a mess of stone fragments. Vague silhouettes moved about. He felt someone take his hand and recognized Kit’s slight shape.

“We’re headed north,” Yora’s voice came out of the murk. “If we get clear, I’ll get you a message.”

“I’ll take the other way,” Gyre said.

“Good luck, Halfmask.”

“Good luck.” Gyre pulled Kit into a run and fled into the dark.

*

“Always prepared,” Kit whispered in Gyre’s ear.

“Right.”

“But not to the extent of … you know. Knowing where you’re going.”

“The thing about unexplored tunnels,” Gyre muttered, “is that nobody’s made a map.”

This is why I didn’t want to go to plan B.

His hope had been that the hole he’d blasted in the floor would link up quickly to some inhabited part of Deepfire’s tunnels, allowing for a quick escape. Unfortunately, that did not appear to be the case, at least in the direction he and Kit were moving. They prowled through the blackness, feeling their way along the smooth-walled passages and navigating chunks of fallen stone, Gyre mentally kicking himself for not carrying any nighteye with him.

Gyre had a pair of glowstones in his pocket, but using them would announce their presence for a kilometer in the pitch-darkness. And it hadn’t been long after they’d started moving that he’d seen the flicker of torches behind them and heard the muttered sounds of conversation. The Auxies were sweeping the cavern—slowly and cautiously, alert for ambush, but they were coming.

And now …

“This is a dead end,” Kit said, feeling her way along the wall. “I’m back where I started.”

Gyre looked over his shoulder and didn’t see any light. He took out his firelighter, flicked it briefly, and looked around in the glow of its transient sparks.

“Dead end,” he agreed. It wasn’t even a collapsed tunnel, just a smooth wall of rock. “We’ll have to go back.”

“There were a couple of side passages at the last junction, I think,” Kit said. “But the Auxies have to be getting close.”