The silk wasn't just holding him; it was burying him alive.

  Each pull ripped more skin from Corvin's shoulders, but he couldn't stop. Raw, choking panic hammered against his ribs. He was nineteen years old, hanging in the dark, and he was going to be eaten. His breath came in ragged gasps, fogging the cold air. The friction burned like battery acid, slicking the white threads with his own warm blood. He threw his weight forward again, muscles screaming. "Snap, damn you. Snap!"

  He dragged his chin left. Instinct. The same thing Vane had drilled into him — "when everything goes wrong, count your people."

  Reth was there. Three, maybe four meters away, hidden in the dark but present in sound — the small, deliberate intervals of a man testing silk at the joints, methodical, unhurried. Six years of fieldwork.

  Beyond Reth, Silas. Corvin could hear him less. The shielding that had kept them all breathing on the way down had gone, which meant either Silas had stopped casting — or Silas had stopped. He didn't let himself finish the thought.

  Then the ones he couldn't account for.

  Thaddeus. The Master Evaluator with robes that cost more than Corvin's contract fee. Nothing. No voice, no movement, no sound at all from the direction he'd last been standing.

  Garrick. Elara. Nothing.

  And Vane.

  Vane had taught him to read silences. Spent six years teaching him the difference between a forest gone quiet and a forest gone dead. Always there, always steady.

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  He was nowhere. In any direction. In any register Corvin had.

  The man who had taught him to survive was simply gone.

  Lyra he could not hear at all.

  Thirty meters down, the nightmare forest glowed. Sickly blue-white caps cast long shadows. The air tasted like rotting meat and copper. Around him in the canopy, giant spiders clicked and shifted. The vibrations of their massive legs plucked the anchor lines holding him up. Sour bile burned the back of his throat.

  He dragged his chin around, cervical vertebrae popping. "Doran!" he choked out, his voice cracking. "Doran, break it!"

  The Vanguard hung three meters away. Stripped of his heavy plate armor. Covered in glowing gel and the raw meat of chemical burns. But Doran wasn't thrashing. The big man's eyes were locked on Corvin, wide and flat. It was the look of a man who had already accepted his own autopsy.

  If Doran had given up, there was no way out.

  Then, the clicking stopped. All of it.

  Every spider in the canopy froze. The sudden silence was heavy, ringing in Corvin's ears. His heart slammed against his sternum.

  A figure strolled out of the glowing mushrooms.

  Corvin stopped breathing. It had the shape of a young man, but the movement was wrong. Too smooth. Too unbothered. Pale skin, uneven silver hair, and a heavy, dead-white tail swaying behind it. And its eyes — bright amber, burning in the dark. It wasn't a person. It was the dungeon itself, wearing a skin.

  It stopped directly in front of Doran.

  Corvin screamed. A raw, scraping sound tore out of his throat. He threw his entire body against the silk again, tearing his own muscle tissue, heedless of the pain.

  The creature raised its right hand. Its fingernail grew, stretching and hardening into a pale, surgical spike.

  It didn't look at Corvin. It didn't care about the screaming. It simply pressed the bone-saw point to Doran's sternum.

  And began to cut.

  Six weeks earlier.

  In a hole in a limestone hill, in the dark, something opened its eyes.