Dust hung in the air like a low fog, stirred into thin spirals each time someone shifted a stone. The morning light touched it unevenly, falling through the broken arches of what had once been the Dawn Spire’s outer cloisters. Sena knelt at the edge of a collapsed corridor, fingers pressed to a narrow pocket of space where the rubble had not fully settled. A faint trickle of cold air brushed her skin. She drew in a quiet breath, listening.

  Rhalir stood a little behind her, one hand braced on a fractured column. “The space extends farther than I thought,” he said. “Your instinct was right. Some could have survived down there.”

  “How long?” asked someone to Sena’s left. The voice was thin with fear.

  Rhalir answered the question carefully. “A day. Three, if they found clean air. Longer if they were fortunate enough to be near a cistern.”

  The Ivathi man who had asked – thin, gray-bearded, still wearing ceremonial white stained with dirt – pressed a hand to his mouth. “Three days,” he repeated.

  “We are not through dawn yet,” Sena said. She finally rose, brushing grit from her palms. “And some will survive longer than they should. I survived two days under the harbor wreckage when the quake struck Lethen Bay. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

  The memory of the cold had never left her. She’d been submerged to the waist, legs caught under a harbor beam, gripping fast to a pillar as the cold sea ate her from the bottom up. When the tide came in and left her in water up to her chin she was certain she would drown. But she’d held on, fighting down panic, gasping for her life.

  If Rhalir hadn’t found her, she would have died in agony.

  “That was different,” the man whispered. “You are Kelthi. Stronger than –”

  “Than you?” Sena asked. That was an old stereotype, that the Kelthi could endure more pain than humans. “Stronger than the acolytes? Than the children buried under there? Do you intend to only help those with no need of it?” She let the question sit. The man bowed his head.

  Behind her, two Ashborn spoke in low tones, thinking themselves quiet. Sena’s Kelthi ears caught every word.

  “Why are we digging for them?” one muttered. His name was Eric. A spear-maker from the river quarter who’d lost three cousins to Ivath’s levies. He looked at the rubble as though it were a grave long deserted. “They’d have let us drown. They did let us drown.”

  “Let the stone finish what they started,” said the woman beside him. She was younger, cropped hair and broad shoulders, a burn scar twisting the skin of her jaw. Mary. Sena had seen her fighting when the Brighthand had attacked just two nights ago, wild with fury. “We owe them nothing.”

  Sena turned to face them fully. “Care to repeat yourselves?” she said.

  Eric straightened but did not look ashamed. “You heard me.”

  “I did,” Sena said. “And I’ll hear your grief when we’re not standing over people who might still be alive.” She stepped closer. Eric shifted but held his ground. “But if you want to honor your dead by adding to theirs, you’ll do it on some other day. Not while I’m here.”

  Mary crossed her arms. “You’re young to be giving orders.”

  “And you’re old enough to know when to hold your tongue,” Sena said. She didn’t raise her voice. “If you don’t want to dig, stand back. But you won’t poison this work while others are fighting to breathe below us.”

  Rhalir came to Sena’s side, quiet but present. His gaze moved over Eric and Mary one at a time, steady as a loaded bowstring. “She is right,” he said. “And we need every hand we have.”

  A Sister stepped forward, with three Brighthand at her back, ash in her braid, her face streaked with soot. It was Hellen.

  It might have ended there if Hellen had stayed silent, but she spoke with a clarity Sena had not expected from someone who had spent her life bound to the Dagorlind. She faced the Brighthand first.

  “Unless you plan to dig with your swords, they’ll only get in the way,” Hellen said. “Pick up shovels. Picks. Anything that will move stone. If you are used to guarding doorways with your spears, good – guard these dig sites. Keep them safe. But no one stands idle.”

  The Brighthand hesitated. One of them was a broad-shouldered officer, dust coating his pauldrons. He opened his mouth as if to object. Hellen didn’t give him space to.

  “We are not the Dagorlind today,” she said. “We aren’t anyone’s masters. We’re rescuers. If that doesn’t sit well with you, walk back to the city alone.”

  The officer closed his mouth.

  Sena studied Hellen for a moment. The girl was filthy, exhausted, and still trembling slightly from whatever she had survived in the Spire, but her voice held. Sena respected that.

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  She touched Hellen’s arm lightly. “Thank you.”

  Hellen exhaled as if she’d been holding that breath for hours.

  Sena turned back to Eric and Mary. “You have a choice,” she said. “Stand here and stew, or help me clear a path. Every minute we waste arguing is a minute someone underneath loses air.”

  Eric glared. Mary dropped her gaze, then nodded once. “Point me to the place you want opened first.”

  Sena nodded toward the narrow vent she’d found. “Here. There’s space. More than we thought.”

  The work crew gathered. Tools were passed hand to hand. Rhalir crouched with Sena again, brushing aside debris with the care of someone who had done this many times, burials and rescues both.

  Hellen knelt across from them, lifting stones with the Brighthand as if she had been raised doing manual labor, not cloistered schooling. She met Sena’s eyes once over the crumbled stone, and a shared recognition settled between them, a refusal to look away.

  Someone struck with the first blow of a pick. The sound echoed down the broken corridor. The work began in earnest. Stone broke unevenly under their tools, crumbling in some places and holding stubborn in others. The morning light shifted as clouds began to gather, casting the rubble heap in a dull gray that made it difficult to see the smaller movements of dust drifting upward. Sena leaned her shoulder to one slab and pushed; it rocked in its foundation of shattered mortar but refused to give.

  “We’ll have better leverage from inside,” Rhalir said quietly. He brushed grit from his hands. “The wall gave on the far side. We may be able to widen it from within.”

  Hellen glanced toward the collapsed archway that led deeper into the ruined cloisters. “The interior stairs are gone,” she said. “But the chapel wall split open. There may be a way through there.”

  Sena wiped her forehead with the back of her sleeve. The cold of the morning had begun to fade beneath the heat of their labor. “Let’s see it.”

  They crossed the broken courtyard in a small group: Sena, Rhalir, Hellen, the Brighthand officer whose name was Callahan, Mary, and Eric, who followed with the stiff reluctance of someone whose conscience had begun to gnaw at him. The others continued clearing the outer rubble, working in pairs under the watch of the remaining Brighthand.

  The chapel doorway had collapsed inward, leaving only a wedge of shattered stone through which dim light filtered. Hellen moved first, testing the edges with her hands before lowering herself through. Sena and Rhalir followed. The air grew cooler inside, the dust thick and damp. The once-polished tiles were buried under fallen beams, overturned pews, and shards of colored glass.

  “We can’t stay long under this,” Callahan muttered. He had been a severe presence during the negotiations before the Spire fell, but exhaustion had worn his edges down to something that looked closer to uncertainty. “The ceiling could come down at any moment.”

  “Then we move quickly,” Sena said.

  They skirted the larger fallen beams and reached a chamber where the outer wall had sheared away entirely, opening the space to the cliffside wind. From here, the outer rubble they had been clearing was visible in cross-section: jagged layers of stone, pockets of darkness where voids had formed, the faint glint of metal where a railing had twisted into itself.

  Mary approached the fractured wall and pressed her shoulder to a boulder-shaped mass of stone. “If we break this one apart, the whole layer will loosen.”

  Callahan stepped sharply toward her. “If you break that before we brace the beam above it, you kill everyone inside.”

  Mary turned, bristling. “I know how to move stone. Don’t talk to me like –”

  “You’ll listen,” Callahan interrupted, “if you have any sense. I’ve commanded men for twenty years..”

  “And now you command no one.” Mary took a step toward him, shoulders squared.

  Eric moved behind her, ready for escalation.

  Sena felt the shift before either of them raised their hands, the heat of anger rising from both sides like the drop in air pressure before a storm. She stepped between them before the spark could find tinder.

  “Enough,” she said. “None of you throw hands while people are breathing under this stone. Mary, step back. Callahan, lower your voice. We have no time for posturing.”

  Neither moved at first. Mary’s jaw was rigid, breath loud through her nose. Callahan’s hand drifted to the hilt of his sword, not in threat but some ingrained habit of asserting authority.

  Sena met each of their gazes in turn. “We are here to dig,” she said. “To save whoever we can. If you want to settle grudges, you may do it when the bodies are above ground.”

  Rhalir shifted a fallen beam aside with a grunt that filled the silence. “Sena,” he murmured.

  She turned. He had crouched near a seam in the stone, where the layers met at a half-collapsed angle. A faint sound rose from below – a muffled thump, then another, rhythmic but weak.

  Sena knelt beside him. “Quiet,” she whispered.

  The group fell still.

  There it was again, two voices, one calling faintly, the other answering with a broken, rasping cry.

  Hellen moved toward the sound, brushing torn parchment aside to crouch beside Sena. “There’s space beneath this,” she said.

  “We need an opening,” said Sena.

  Callahan recovered himself quickly, stepping to the broken seam. “The tension’s wrong here. If we pry this without support –”

  “There’s a gentler angle from above,” Rhalir pointed to where the broken balcony rail had collapsed inward. “If someone can lift that beam, I can break the stone underneath without it falling in.”

  “I can lift it,” Mary said.

  Callahan looked as though he meant to object, but the urgency overtook him. “Fine,” he said. “But do exactly what I say.”

  Mary crouched and placed her hands under the lowest part of the beam. It was warped, splintered, and embedded in rubble, but a sliver of space remained beneath the largest segment. Rhalir pressed both palms to the stone under it, gauging the weight.

  “Lift,” he said.

  Mary pulled upward with a low, sustained grunt in her throat. Her arms trembled, but the beam rose just enough for Rhalir to wedge a broken pillar hunk beneath it. Sena held the makeshift support steady while Rhalir scraped stone from the fractured edge.

  The muffled voices grew louder.

  Hellen leaned close to the seam. “We hear you,” she called. “Hold on. We’re coming.”