Silence.
It was a heavy, suffocating void longer than the silence that had swallowed Lily and far more predatory. It was the kind of silence that precedes a landslide or a scream.
Mireya was already lunging toward the collapsed outer wall, her boots skidding on the grit, when Talyra's voice finally tore through the stillness.
"Still here," Talyra rasped.
The voice was jagged, broken, possessing the raw, sandpaper roughness of someone whose lungs had been rattled against their rib cage.
"The wall... it broke my fall better than I broke the wall's. A long, agonizing pause followed, punctuated by a wet, hitching breath. "I am... going to need a moment."
"Take two," Mireya called back, though her eyes never left the wreckage.
She spun around to face the containment structure, and her heart sank.
What remained of the barrier was a lie. It was no longer a containment structure; it was a graveyard of broken magic.
