CHAPTER 664: HANDS THAT PUSH BACK (1)

The lift kept humming like a sleepy beast under their boots. The sound was steady, low, and round, like breath in a chest. Dust drifted in the amber lamps, lazy and stubborn, every mote doing a small turn in the air before it finally gave up and fell. The ribs of root around the platform creaked sometimes, wood whispering against stone. It felt like an old ship at sea, except the sea was underground and smelled of mushrooms and iron.

Thalatha rolled her neck to the right until it clicked, then to the left. Habit made her brace for the stab under her ribs—the tiny knife that woke every morning since the outpost burned. She lifted both arms, palms up, breath in, elbows locked. She waited for the pinch to bite.

It did not come.

She paused, surprised enough that the breath went out in a soft laugh. She tested again just to be sure. Cat-arch: spine rounded, chin tucked. Shoulders back, shoulder blades kissing, chest open. The left shoulder was the bad one; the muscle there usually felt like hot rope. Now the pain was... different. Not sharp. Not that swamp-fire she had learned to live with. It felt like a bruise two days old, yellow around the edges. She could stand that. She could train with that.

She leaned down slow, hand to calf, then ankle, then the side of the boot. Hamstring spoke up—hello, I’m here—but not with anger. She let her breath out through her teeth, held the stretch, counted to five the way her instructors taught when she was small and stubborn and wanted to be stronger than the boys twice her size.

"Wow," she said. It slipped out without permission. A small word. Not the voice she used for orders or for comfort. Just truth.

Rodion’s optic pulsed, cool and steady. The little iris clicked tighter, then wider.

Adherence to dosage improves outcomes.

She did not argue. He was right. She looked down at the two tiny cups sitting on the step, empty now except for a stain of green at the rim. Next to them lay the vial with the hairline crack where Mikhailis had snapped it open. The smell still hung in the air: mint snapped between fingers, sap like thin honey, a bit of stone after rain. When she swallowed earlier, the tincture burned like winter in her throat, then settled warm and low.

She saw in her mind the quick work they had done one level up: Silk Guards measuring drops with precise spinneret clicks; the Myco-Archivist fanning a cobalt horn cap and checking the color of the paste against some memory only it knew; Slimeweave smoothing the mixture in small, neat circles, as if icing a cake for a festival she had never gone to. No fuss. No panic. Just craft.

"Thank you," she said to Rodion. No sarcasm. No shield. She meant it, and it showed.

Mikhailis stood a step away and tried to pretend he was not listening. He pretended to fix his cracked lenses, which only made the crack move a little; he pretended to study the ring of the lift; he pretended a lot of things. Pride still leaked out of him like light under a door. It tugged the corner of his mouth up and fought with his attempt at casual.

"You are better?" he asked, not trusting his pretending anymore.

"Better," she said. She rotated her bow shoulder, slow. The sharp spike in her ribs answered with a dull knock, like knuckles on a door from far away. "Feels like someone oiled the hinges."

He tapped the side of his satchel, the way a man pats a loyal dog. "Rodion’s recipe. My... accidental pantry." The guilty look on his face was almost funny. "I keep too many things in my pockets. People laugh. But sometimes the pocket mess keeps friends alive."

She met his eyes for a heartbeat. There was something fierce under the dust there. "Sometimes is enough."

He took a breath and made his voice practical again, as if wrapping emotion in brown paper. "We don’t have the full ant forces. Only the variants I brought. They’re volunteers, but still, it’s a small team." His gaze flicked to the cohort waiting in a respectful ring. "No workers from the nest. No soldiers from the queen. Just us three and them. We keep them out until we find an exit or fix whatever is making this place overreact."

The word unit slid into Thalatha’s chest and sat there. Heavy and right. Not two mortals against a nightmare. Not chase and bleed and hope for a good death. A unit. She could feel her back straighten a little at the thought, as if someone had put a hand between her shoulders and reminded her to stand like a captain again.

The lift shivered under them and then steadied. Steam slipped through Rodion’s chest grille in a soft sigh. A small panel on his side flipped open, neat as a pocket watch lid. Two collapsible cups unfolded with tiny clicks. A vacuum ampoule hissed. He poured a thin stream of tea that steamed without any spore-oil rainbow, clean and clear.

He offered one cup to Thalatha. Heat ran into her fingers and up her arms, slow and sure, until she could feel her jaw unclench. She blew across the surface and took a careful sip. Mint-sweet. A citrus snap. Something herbal that lived in her nose for a breath and then was gone.

"This leg feels different," she said after a second swallow. She tipped her chin toward the waiting chimera ants with the cup. "Since you summoned them. Before, the dungeon felt like a hand on my throat." She touched her collar with two fingers, reflex. "Now it’s still a hand, but our hands push back."

Mikhailis looked at the cohort, then down into his tea as if it held some tiny constellation meant only for him, then at his own hands. He didn’t throw a joke right away. "I argued with myself before letting Rodion have permission to unfurl them," he said. "Risk. Secrecy. The queen’s safety. All the rules I wrote to protect them. Elowen asked me to be clever, not reckless." He smiled without any humor. "But then I remembered we are more alive together." His eyes went far for a moment, past root and bone, past the Whiteways. He looked older there. I remembered I hate funerals, he thought, and it was such a simple, heavy thought that it made his throat tight. He did not speak that part. He just cleared his throat like dust had found him and lifted the cup in a little toast to nowhere.

"Mission stands," he said, steadier. "One: find a real exit. Two: if not possible, neutralize whatever is making the Whiteways angry." He tapped the side of his head once. "Bone-echo said ’river-mouth.’ So we go where the river used to breathe."

Rodion’s optic ticked brighter.

Spore load trending down. Tea reserves are adequate.

"Music to my heart," Mikhailis said, and this time his mouth tilted for real. "Also, Rodion brought tea and still expects me not to love him."

Your love is not required. Your quiet is preferred.

He hid a laugh in the cup and managed not to snort it into his nose. He wiped his lip with the back of his glove and tried to look very serious as the corridor ahead widened. It opened like a throat into three long lanes. The living ribs along the walls pulsed in a slow pressure wave. Light swelled and dimmed with each pulse. You could have marched to it. Or breathed to it. Or gone mad to it, if you had no friends.

Rodion raised his wrist and traced three faint lines on the floor with a tidy blue laser. The lines sat there, a clean overlay on old stone.

"Okay," Mikhailis said. His voice went higher with excitement even as he tried to make it cool. "We split lanes. I am calm. I am mature. I am absolutely not about to narrate this like an arena match."

You are already narrating it.

He grinned and gave up. "Scurabons, left lane—Cut Seams!"

Four blade-runners slid into the left line like water into a gutter. Their sickles rode low, elbows tucked tight. They moved the way good knives move in the hand: no drag, no noise. As they ran, each one pinged small gleams on the root-armor bulges that grew from the floor and walls—hairline weaknesses a human eye would have called nothing. The sickles flashed. Shnk. Shnk. Shnk. Three cuts per target, precise and even, and the armored plates peeled up in curled tongues like bark in spring. The lane went from blocked to clean in ten heartbeats.

"Yes! Yes! That’s textbook—Rodion, did you see that angle—"

I am physically present. Please keep your voice below ’festival hawker.’

Mikhailis coughed and tried to look dignified. It lasted two seconds.

"Silk Guards, mid—Net and Harden!"

Three spinnerets flicked and drew bright lines in the air. The lines met, kissed, and bell-opened into neat nets across the middle lane. Right on cue a jaw-vine trap snapped up from the floor, mouth full of thorn teeth. The nets dropped and cinched. The jaw hit silk, tore a little, then stuck. Crymber Ember stepped forward and gave a small, controlled puff of heat. The silk turned amber and stiff. The jaw froze in a half-snarl like a animal surprised by a magic trick.

Thalatha found the smile this time. "Excellent knots."

One of the spinnerets did a tiny proud tilt, like a child receiving a ribbon, and went back to work.

"Hypnoveils, right—Mirror Honest!"