**Chapter Seven

  Collapse**

  The moment the Archivist vanished, the Ledger Room exhaled.

  Not a gentle sigh.

  A shudder.

  Like an old building realizing the load?bearing wall is gone.

  The Sigil Spine’s crack pulsed violently — violet light flaring, then dimming, then flaring again in rhythmic spasms. Each pulse sent tremors through the floorboards, rattling shelves and rattling something far more fragile inside my skull.

  The room was failing.

  Nolan tightened his grip on my shoulders. “We need to go. Now.”

  Dixie leapt onto a nearby shelf, tail fluffed to double its size. “The Sieve is destabilizing. This place is going to eat our memories if we stay another minute.”

  “I know,” I rasped.

  But my legs refused to move.

  Because the Hollow King’s whisper still echoed in my bones.

  Beatrix.

  Not a name. A claim.

  Nolan shook me gently. “Trixie. Focus. Look at me.”

  I blinked hard. His face came back into view — edges blurring, then sharpening. “I’m trying,” I whispered.

  “Try harder,” Dixie hissed. “The walls are starting to melt.”

  They were — not literally, but the shadows ran like ink down paper, pooling at our feet. The Ink?Walkers skittered, jittering like broken marionettes, their forms blurring as the spells that animated them unraveled.

  One of them reached for me.

  Not to attack.

  To hold on.

  To anchor itself to something real as its world dissolved.

  It couldn’t, of course — its fingers passed through my sleeve like smoke. It made a thin, wordless sound as half its body sloughed off into vapor.

  Dixie hissed at it, ears pinned. “Don’t let them touch you. They’ll take whatever memories they can grab.”

  “Move!” Nolan barked.

  I forced myself into motion.

  We stumbled toward the door — the only stable thing left in the room — as the Sieve whipped through the air like a cyclone of glowing dust. I tugged my jacket up over my mouth, but it wasn’t physical dust I needed to avoid. It was psychic erosion.

  Every mote that brushed my skin tugged at pieces of me.

  My first spell. My grandmother’s handwriting. The sound of Dixie’s first laugh.

  I gritted my teeth and kept going.

  But then —

  The Sigil Spine cracked again.

  A jagged sound split the air — not a snap, but a tearing, the sound of something ancient and sacred breaking open.

  Violet light flooded the room.

  The floor lurched.

  Nolan lunged forward and wrapped an arm around my waist as I nearly fell; his other hand grabbed Dixie by the scruff mid?air. The three of us crashed against the door with a grunt.

  “Trixie!” Nolan shouted over the rising roar. “Open it!”

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  “I’m trying!”

  Magic sparked painfully against my palm. The Cadence Lock sensed my panic and fought me, pushing my pattern out of alignment.

  “Breathe!” Dixie commanded. “Use your grandmother’s cadence!”

  I tried.

  Four in, hold, four out.

  But my breath shook too hard to keep the rhythm.

  The door remained cold.

  Closed.

  Unmoving.

  Behind us, the Spine gave a final, terrible pulse.

  A sound like a thousand pages tearing at once ripped through the chamber.

  Nolan yelled, “TRY AGAIN!”

  I braced both hands on the door, forced my lungs to slow, and whispered—

  “Open.”

  This time, my cadence aligned.

  The door flung outward.

  We spilled through it in a tangle of limbs and fur.

  As soon as Nolan dragged me clear, the door slammed shut behind us with a seismic boom that rattled the entire workshop.

  The shelves toppled. Tools clattered to the floor. Jars burst, releasing decades of stale herbs and dust into the air.

  I lay sprawled on the workshop floor, chest heaving, head spinning.

  Dixie crawled onto my chest and pressed her forehead to mine. “You’re okay,” she whispered. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

  I didn’t feel okay.

  I felt—

  Empty.

  Just for a moment.

  Then the emptiness receded, but it left something behind.

  A faint, icy echo where the Hollow King’s whisper had been.

  “Damn it,” Nolan muttered, leaning back against a cabinet, breath ragged. “Is every room in this city trying to kill me?”

  “Yes,” Dixie said.

  I groaned. “They’re not all like this.”

  “Some are worse,” Dixie added.

  Nolan stared at her. “That was not comforting.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  I sat up slowly.

  The workshop swayed around me. Or maybe I was the one swaying.

  Nolan noticed and steadied me with a hand on my shoulder. “You lost some time in there.”

  “I know.”

  He looked at me closely. “Do you know how much?”

  I hesitated.

  Then shook my head.

  His jaw tightened. “What did he do to you?”

  “He barely touched me,” I whispered.

  The truth was worse.

  The Hollow King touched me.

  “And there’s something else,” Dixie said quietly.

  Both Nolan and I looked at her.

  Dixie’s eyes glowed faintly — not with magic, but with fear.

  “The Ledger Room didn’t just destabilize,” she whispered.

  “It woke up.”

  A chill crawled up my spine.

  “What does that mean?” Nolan asked.

  Dixie’s tail thrashed once. “It means the Hollow King’s influence isn’t contained anymore.”

  I swallowed hard. “He knows I’m here.”

  “No,” Dixie corrected softly. “He knows who you are.”

  I closed my eyes as nausea rolled through me.

  Nolan steadied me again. “Trixie… what does he want?”

  I opened my eyes.

  The workshop seemed darker.

  Colder.

  Quieter.

  “He wants me,” I said.

  “And I think—” My voice faltered.

  “I think he wants me to open something.”

  Dixie’s pupils narrowed. “A door.”

  Nolan stiffened. “What kind of door?”

  I looked toward the sealed Ledger Room door.

  The wood pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.

  “A very old one,” I whispered. “And if the Archivist is right…”

  Dixie’s fur bristled. “He isn’t.”

  “…then I might be the only one who can.”

  Nolan shook his head. “Then we don’t let him force you.”

  Dixie snarled softly. “Good luck stopping a void?god with moral outrage.”

  But Nolan didn’t back down.

  He squeezed my hand.

  “We’re not letting him have you,” he said simply.

  And in that moment — chest tight, head spinning, fear still clawing at me — I believed him.

  For the first time since the Null Sigil appeared, I believed we might still have a chance.

  A slim one.

  A dangerous one.

  But a chance.

  I stood on unsteady legs.

  “Let’s go home,” I whispered.

  Because the Ledger Room wasn’t safe anymore. Because the wards were breaking. Because something old was waking beneath Salem.

  And because I could feel the Hollow King waiting for me.

  Patient. Hungry. Certain.

  The next move was mine.