The pain was worth it this time, and it’s nice because that’s never a guarantee; pain isn’t often wrapped up in a neat bow of purpose. But the benefit of immortality is a second chance at everything. Now that we’ve sprung one trap, Fione and Yorl know what to look for—the mechanical triggers hidden in the stone and littering the tunnel moving forward. They steer us around every horsehair tripwire, every deadly gas vent, and soon the tunnel changes, morphs and widens and opens into a yawning chasm—darkness as far down and far as we can see. The tunnel continues as a thin stone pathway from one side of the gap to the other, barely room enough for two people to walk side by side.

“I’m no expert, but this room sort of screams ‘trap.’” The buzzing in my head chooses the exact moment I step into the cavern to intensify, crushing me with a flood of random thoughts and pressures. It’s like someone’s crashed cymbals in my head and turned it to mush: strings of jokes I can barely hold on to, one argument replaced with the next, one thought laced with another, and the hunger beneath it all, conducting it like the head of a dark, chaotic choir.

“Definitely a trap. Not for us, though.” Malachite points at the distant, faintly lit walls on either side of the chasm. They slope up to the infinite ceiling and down to the infinite drop, but Lucien’s flickering witchfire illuminates them enough to see the very deliberate carvings in the stone.

“Beneather runes.” Yorl squints, his catlike pupils dilated so large his eye color is just a faint ring of green around black. “This room is a hevstrata.”

“Hev-what now?” Fione frowns.

“Beneather runes are the only things that can affect valkerax—hold them in place or keep them out of a place—”

“I know that,” Fione interrupts, but Yorl presses on.

“They become unreliable against large masses of valkerax. Which is why these hevstrata were made in the early days of the War of White: choke points full of beneather runes meant to disorient groups of them.”

“It messes with their brains,” Malachite clarifies. “If a hunting party’s being chased by a bunch, they come here to throw ’em off. It works. Most of the time.”

“Well, good news—it’s working right now.” I wince, holding my scalp. “Bad news—it’s working right now.”

“Are you all right?” Lucien asks.

“Oh, I’m fine. I just can’t—” I pause, gulping air and trying to remember what I was going to say next. The noise is like a cloth over wood, sweeping away the crumbs of the sentence cake I was trying to build. “I—I can’t think straight.”

“Then think crooked,” Malachite snipes. “We just need to get across the gap, and it’ll get better.”

“Maybe,” Yorl adds.