The cellar access was hidden beneath a workbench—a section of floor that lifted away to reveal stone steps descending into darkness. Toreth had it open before the front door finished shuddering from someone’s second round of hammering.

  “Go,” she hissed. “Comes up three buildings over, near the dye quarter.”

  “What about you?” Vessin asked.

  “I live here. I work here. I have every reason to be here.” Her rust-red eyes were hard. “You don’t. Go.”

  Cade didn’t argue. He dropped through the opening first, his thicker frame barely fitting, and found himself in a narrow tunnel that smelled of damp stone and old lacquer. Rhys followed, then Zyrian, then Vessin—the musician moving with surprising grace for someone whose profession didn’t require athleticism.

  The tunnel was cramped and twisting, clearly not designed for rapid transit. Cade’s shoulders scraped against the walls; he had to duck at irregular intervals where the ceiling dipped. Behind him, he could hear Vessin’s labored breathing and the lighter footfalls of his smaller companions.

  Then—light. A grate overhead, bars of illumination cutting through the darkness.

  Vessin reached up and pushed. The grate lifted away, revealing a storage room filled with fabric bolts and dye vats. The smell hit Cade immediately: sharp chemical tang mixed with something floral.

  Miravet’s shop.

  They emerged into chaos contained. The deep-blue dyer was already moving, pulling fabric down from display racks, creating clear paths through her cluttered space. And beside her, an older Kindred. Female, perhaps, though gender was often ambiguous among the sphere-born. Pale lavender skin, silver-white eyes that held more years than Cade could fathom. She stood utterly still amid the activity, watching the newcomers emerge from her friend’s floor with an expression of weary recognition.

  “Caltrissa,” Vessin said. “We have a problem.”

  “I heard the screaming.” Her voice was soft, measured, carrying the weight of someone who had seen too much to be surprised by anything. “Jolo is searching. The question is—what set him off?”

  Zyrian had moved to the wall, one hand pressed flat against the sphere-stone, his eyes distant. Listening through the earth in that way Cade had seen him do before.

  “They’re asking about covenant users and sunderchains,” Zyrian said quietly. “Every building they hit, they’re asking if anyone’s seen someone new with a covenant-type essence or if anyone had started a sunderchain.”

  Cade’s stomach dropped. His probing at Orvenne’s contract. It must have—

  “Can we make it to the portal?” Rhys asked. “If we move fast—”

  “Moving fast is exactly what they’ll expect.” Caltrissa moved to the window, peering through colored glass at the street beyond. “Jolo isn’t searching alone. Listen.”

  Cade listened. The shouting had spread—no longer concentrated in one area, but distributed across the city. Multiple voices. Multiple directions. And beneath the shouting, something worse: the sound of doors opening. Footsteps. Compliance.

  “He’s using the contracts,” Caltrissa said quietly. “Compelling the bound to assist in the search. Every person he’s spoken to in his search so far has just become his eyes and ears.”

  “That’s... dozens of people,” Miravet breathed.

  “Hundreds, possibly. Anyone with a contract that includes obedience clauses—which is almost all of them—is now actively looking for whatever set off the alarm.” Caltrissa turned back to face them, her silver-white eyes settling on the trio. “They’ll cover every street, every building, every corner of this city within the hour. You cannot hide from that many searchers.”

  “Then we don’t hide.” Cade’s mind was racing. “We run. Straight out. Fast enough that they can’t coordinate a response.”

  “The streets will be packed with people looking for you.”

  “Not the streets.” He looked up. “The rooftops.”

  Caltrissa followed his gaze. For a long moment, she was silent.

  “It’s your best chance,” she finally said. “Perhaps your only one. The bound can search buildings, but most lack the physical capability to pursue across rooftops. You’d only face those with relevant essence abilities or exceptional athleticism for an artisan.”

  “Only,” Zyrian muttered.

  “It’s better than facing everyone.” Cade was already moving toward the back of the shop, looking for roof access. “Vessin, you should stay. You’ll just slow us down, and there’s no reason for you to—”

  “Good idea.” Vessin’s voice was steady, no false heroics. “I’d only hold you back up there. And someone needs to stay behind to—” He stopped, reconsidered whatever he’d been about to say. “Just go. Fast as you can.”

  Cade found a ladder leading to a roof hatch, tested it, and started climbing.

  Fermata’s rooftops were not designed for running.

  The buildings curved and spiraled, their surfaces smooth sphere-stone shaped for aesthetics rather than traction. Cade’s first increased-gravity-adapted leap—from Miravet’s shop to an adjacent structure—nearly sent him sliding off the far side. The combination of the slope and an unnaturally sharp curve into the wind threw him far beyond what could be justified, only stopped by one of Rhys’s barriers popping up to catch him. This must be what Zyrian mentioned, how projectiles don’t behave as expected in the inner rings. Including jumps.

  Rhys and Zyrian fared better, their smaller bodies more agile, their experience with the sphere’s architecture and curved arcs giving them instincts Cade lacked.

  Below, the city swarmed.

  Cade could see them streaming through the streets—Kindred of every size and color, moving with purpose but not urgency. Searching. Checking doorways and alleys and windows. A coordinated grid pattern that would have been impressive if it weren’t so horrifying.

  They don’t want to do this, he reminded himself. They’re being forced.

  “The gate’s that direction,” Rhys called, pointing toward the archway they’d entered through two days ago. “Maybe half a mile. If we can—”

  A wall erupted in front of her.

  Wood—pale tan fibers woven tight, sprouting from the rooftop like a fast-growing hedge. Rhys barely stopped in time, her momentum carrying her into a collision that would have broken bones in a lesser body.

  Another wall, to their left. Stone this time, gray and solid, rising from the sphere-stone surface as if the building itself had grown a tumor.

  “Essence manifestations,” Zyrian growled. “They’re coordinating.”

  Cade spotted them—two Kindred on a rooftop fifty feet away, their hands raised, expressions twisted with the particular anguish of people doing something they hated. One had bark-brown skin. The other was gray and weathered, almost camouflaged against the stone they were creating.

  “Don’t hurt them,” Cade said. “They’re not—”

  Something hit his shoulder.

  Not hard—more like running into an invisible post. But it spun him, threw off his balance, sent him stumbling. A barrier. Small, targeted, placed precisely in his path.

  He caught himself, looked around, spotted a third Kindred on a lower rooftop—this one making precise gestures with their hands, placing obstacles in the air like a puppeteer pulling strings.

  “Barrier user too,” Rhys said grimly. “And they’re good.”

  They pushed forward anyway. Over the wood wall—Cade simply crashed through it, his mass and momentum too much for the hastily-grown barrier. Around the stone obstruction, leaping to an adjacent building. The barrier user kept placing obstacles, but they were getting harder to hit as the trio picked up speed.

  Then the strings appeared.

  Thin lines of something fibrous—instrument strings, Cade realized with sick irony—stretched across their path at varying heights. Trip wires. A string-essence user of some kind, probably conscripted like the others, turning their craft into a weapon.

  Zyrian spotted them first, his earth-sense somehow extending to the tension in the lines. “Down!” he shouted, and they dropped, sliding under a web of strings that would have caught them at throat and knee height.

  More strings ahead. A lattice now, too dense to slide under or jump over.

  Cade sharpened his anima, trying to cut through—but before he could act, something else hit them.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Webbing.

  Not strings—invisible adhesive strands, anchoring to the strings before yanking free from their mass and inertia, coating Cade’s arms and torso before he could react. Sticky. Strong. Binding his limbs together as more strands followed, targeting Rhys and Zyrian as well.

  A web-essence user of some kind. Of course there would be one.

  They went down in a tangle of sticky fibers, struggling against bonds that tightened with every movement. Within seconds, the rooftop was swarming with Kindred—climbing up from below, leaping from adjacent buildings, surrounding them in a ring of unhappy faces.

  No one attacked. No one struck or kicked or took advantage of their helplessness. The bound citizens simply held them down, adding more restraints, working with the grim efficiency of people following orders they despised.

  “I’m sorry,” one of them murmured as they secured Cade’s wrists. A young Kindred, blue-green with tearful eyes. “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to do this.”

  “I know,” Cade said. “It’s not your fault.”

  It was the only comfort he could offer.

  Jolo arrived fast.

  One moment the rooftop was crowded with bound citizens and three captured strangers. The next, a new presence moved through the crowd like wind through grass—Kindred parting before him without being asked, their bodies responding to hierarchy they couldn’t resist.

  He was tall for a tier-six. Eight feet, maybe nine, with skin the color of burnished copper and eyes that crackled with contained lightning. His movements were precise, economical, each step exactly as long as it needed to be. A predator’s efficiency.

  “Well,” he said, his voice carrying that same smooth authority Cade had heard through Toreth’s door. “That was entertaining.”

  He’d been watching. Cade realized it with a sick lurch—Jolo had been close enough to intervene at any point, fast enough to catch them himself, and he’d chosen to observe instead. To let the bound citizens do his work. To enjoy the hunt.

  “Three newcomers,” Jolo continued, circling them with casual interest. “Fresh from the labyrinth, I’m told. Arrived yesterday. And somehow, between then and now, one of you managed to ring all of my contracts in this city like a struck bell.” He stopped, looking down at them with theatrical puzzlement. “How, I wonder, did y’all manage that?”

  No one answered.

  Jolo smiled. It didn’t reach his crackling eyes.

  “Not feeling talkative? That’s fine. We have time.” He gestured at the surrounding crowd. “Clear the area. Take them to—” He paused, scanning the nearby buildings, and pointed at a modest home two rooftops away. “There. I’ll conduct my interview in private.”

  The bound citizens complied, half-carrying, half-dragging the trio to the indicated building and depositing them inside a small common room. Furniture was shoved aside. The three prisoners were arranged on the floor, still wrapped in webbing.

  Jolo entered last, closing the door behind him.

  “Now,” he said, settling into a chair with the ease of someone who owned everything he could see. “Let’s try this again. Which one of you set off my alarm?”

  Cade met his gaze. Said nothing.

  Rhys stared at the wall. Silent.

  Zyrian’s rust-red features twisted with defiance, but he too remained mute.

  “The strong-willed type. I appreciate that, actually. It makes the breaking more satisfying.” Jolo leaned forward, studying each of them in turn. “One of you has a covenant-adjacent essence. Something that resonates with bonds, that can sense or perhaps even affect them. The gong that rang through my contracts—that wasn’t a sunderchain attempt, I found no evidence of such coordination. Plus, it was too clean, too singular. No, that was someone poking. Someone with the ability to perceive what shouldn’t be perceived.”

  He rose, approaching Zyrian first.

  “You. The defiant one. Let’s see what you’re made of.”

  Cade felt something shift in the air—a pressure, a presence, something extending from Jolo toward Zyrian. His Oath essence registered it as intent. Dominion. The opening move of a contract being imposed.

  Zyrian jerked like he’d been struck. His teeth bared in a snarl, every muscle in his bound body tensing with rejection. The proposal—whatever it was—slid off him, refused, but the refusal clearly cost him something. He was breathing hard when Jolo stepped back.

  “Normal resistance. Strong, but normal.” Jolo’s crackling eyes narrowed. “Not you, then.”

  He moved to Cade.

  “And you. The thick one. Let’s see—”

  The pressure came again. That extending presence, that proposal of domination.

  Cade felt nothing.

  No pressure. No proposal. No sense of anything being offered or imposed. Just... Jolo, standing in front of him, clearly concentrating on something that wasn’t connecting.

  Jolo tried again. Harder this time, his brow furrowing with effort.

  Nothing. The attempt slid off Cade like water off worldbone, so completely ineffective that Cade wasn’t even aware anything had happened. His Oath essence simply... negated it. Jolo’s essence meeting its opposite and finding no purchase at all.

  “It’s you,” Jolo said softly.

  He stepped back, really looking at Cade for the first time. The bulging muscles that no sensible Kindred developed until tier-nine at earliest, if ever. The spotted skin with its tiny imperfections—freckles, moles, marks that sphere-born simply didn’t have.

  “What are you?” Jolo murmured. “I’ve never seen a covenant essence that could simply ignore a Dominion proposal. That shouldn’t be possible.”

  Cade didn’t answer. Didn’t know how to answer. He hadn’t even realized Jolo was trying anything until the second attempt failed.

  Jolo’s expression shifted. The casual cruelty, the predatory amusement—it faded, replaced by something colder. Calculation.

  “You can’t be contracted,” he said slowly. “Which means you can’t be controlled. Which means you can’t be trusted. Which means—”

  Lightning gathered in his hand.

  “—you’re too much of an inconvenience to keep alive.”

  He struck without warning—a bolt of crackling energy aimed at Cade’s head, fast enough that a normal tier-five would have died before processing what happened.

  Cade was not a normal tier-five.

  His body moved on instinct—months of labyrinth combat, thousands of hours of Earth-side training, reflexes honed beyond what his tier should allow. He twisted, dropping his shoulder, and the lightning that should have taken his head instead caught him across the upper arm.

  Pain. Searing, electric pain. But his water essence was already responding, his flesh shifting toward liquid at the point of contact, webbing sliding through and off while diffusing the current through a body that had become temporarily non-conductive. The lightning grounded out through his transformed tissue, dissipating into the floor instead of cooking him from the inside.

  Jolo’s eyes widened.

  Cade’s Oath essence sang.

  He could feel it now—really feel it, for the first time since acquiring it. Not just passive awareness, not just the strength bonus he’d been accumulating. Something deeper. Something that recognized this moment as exactly what he was for. A tier-six Dominion user, enslaving an entire city, attacking someone who had done nothing but look at injustice and flinch.

  I will seek to minimize suffering.

  The strength flooded through him. His muscles—already enhanced by his unusual physiology—surged with power that shouldn’t have been possible at his tier. Fifty percent from his Earth-trained body. Another fifty percent from his Oath alignment, stacking on top of the first.

  He was still weaker than Jolo in raw anima, but physical strength wasn’t just about anima. It was about leverage, about muscle density, about the trained efficiency of a body that had spent years learning exactly how to apply force.

  In pure physical power, Cade was Jolo’s equal. Maybe more.

  He surged upward, the webbing restraints tearing like wet paper under strength they weren’t designed to contain. Jolo backpedaled, lightning gathering for a second strike—

  A barrier materialized between them.

  Rhys. She’d freed herself somehow, her smaller body slipping restraints that had been sized for Cade, and now she stood with both hands raised, a shimmering wall of force blocking Jolo’s line of attack.

  The lightning struck the barrier. Rhys staggered, absorbing the impact, but held.

  “Now,” she gasped.

  Zyrian moved.

  The floor beneath Jolo’s feet cracked, then gave way—stone projecting downward, creating a hole that swallowed the tier-six’s footing in the building’s earthen flooring. Jolo dropped, just a few inches, but it was enough to disrupt his balance, to break his concentration, to create an opening—

  Cade closed the distance.

  Jolo was fast. Tier-six reflexes, honed by however many lifetimes of combat experience. He twisted, lightning arcing from his fingertips toward Cade’s face—

  But Cade had spent months training in the labyrinth, developing techniques that didn’t rely on being the quickest thing in the room.

  His tail swept low, wrapping around Jolo’s ankle in the same instant that his hands reached for the tier-six’s wrists. Water-transformed flesh, flowing around the lightning instead of conducting it. Grip secured. Leverage established.

  Jolo’s eyes went wide with sudden fear.

  “You can’t—”

  Cade pulled.

  The motion was simple—a wrestling technique he’d learned at fifteen, modified for a body that now had a tail. Control the limbs, disrupt the base, bring them down. Jolo went down, and Cade went with him, landing on top.

  Lightning crackled against water-flesh. Barriers flickered as Rhys struggled to contain the energy discharge. Stone groaned as Zyrian fought to keep Jolo’s footing destabilized.

  Cade’s hands found Jolo’s throat. His grip overpowered any of Jolo’s efforts to throw him off.

  “You enslaved them,” he said, his voice strange in his own ears. Resonant. Heavy with something more than vocal cords could produce. “All of them. The whole city. For what? Power? Entertainment? Because you could?”

  Jolo snarled, lightning building for one final desperate strike—

  Cade squeezed with everything he had, imbuing anima into his grip.

  The crack was audible as Jolo’s neck crunched and distorted around Cade’s hands. The lightning died. The body beneath him went limp.

  And in that moment, Cade felt something he’d never felt before.

  The knot.

  Not Orvenne’s knot—not a single contract wrapped around a single soul. This was the source. The central tangle from which all of Jolo’s bonds extended, threads radiating outward like a spider’s web to every person he’d ever contracted. Cade could see them now with perfect clarity—hundreds of connections, hundreds of chains, all anchored to the soul that was currently dying beneath his hands.

  And the knot was collapsing.

  Without Jolo’s will to maintain it, the structure was coming apart—but not cleanly. Death clauses were activating, triggers firing, signals racing down every thread toward every bound soul. Pain. Compulsion. Punishment. Death. The final cruelty built into every contract, designed to ensure that even in death, the contract-holder’s spite would be felt.

  Hundreds of people were about to start screaming.

  No.

  Cade didn’t think. Didn’t plan. His Oath essence moved through him like instinct, and he seized the unraveling knot before the signals could escape. His awareness plunged into the tangle, found the threads that carried the death clauses, and held them. Stopped them from firing. Trapped the cruelty at its source before it could reach its targets.

  The knot fought him. It was designed to collapse destructively, to take as many people as possible down with its creator. But Cade’s essence was designed for exactly this—for opposing unjust bonds, for preventing suffering, for freeing those who should never have been chained.

  He didn’t just hold the knot. He unmade it.

  Thread by thread, clause by clause, he unraveled the structure from the inside. Each thread he released sent a ripple down its connection—not pain, not punishment, but release. Clean dissolution. The bonds simply... ended. Gently. Completely. As if they had never been.

  And his Oath essence transformed.

  It was like a door opening inside him—or rather, like a door he hadn’t known existed suddenly becoming visible. The first oath had given him awareness of suffering, strength in acting against it. The second oath—

  I will free the unjustly bound.

  The words branded themselves on his soul, and with them came understanding. He could feel every remaining contract in the city now. Not just their presence, but their shape, the knots wrapped around souls, the threads connecting them to their sources. Jolo’s bonds were gone, unraveled by his hand. But others remained. Other knots, other anchors, other Unbound still holding their chains.

  Cade stood slowly, Jolo’s body cooling beneath him.

  “What,” Zyrian breathed, “did you just do?”

  Cade didn’t have words for it. Not yet. But he could feel the answer in his bones, in his essence, in the new oath that had branded itself on his soul.

  I will free the unjustly bound.

  And he had.