The street they surfaced onto was one of the middle district's wider ones, the kind that handled the afternoon's commercial traffic with the practiced ease of infrastructure that had been doing this for generations. Carts and vendors and the movement of people going places with the purpose of people who had somewhere to be and a time by which to be there.

  The four of them stood in the middle of it and looked like what they were, which was people who had recently been in a pit.

  Kai's arm was held against his side. Aris had bruising along his jaw that was developing the particular color of something that had committed to the process. Elysse's borrowed armor had acquired new evidence of the evening. Colette's cape was still folded over her arm, the crest side inward, the disguise that had served its purpose and hadn't been unfolded yet.

  Nobody on the street paid them particular attention, which was one of the useful qualities of a busy middle district thoroughfare. It absorbed unusual things by volume.

  "Here," Colette said.

  She held the spell tracker out toward Elysse.

  Elysse looked at it in Colette's palm. The gold casing, the sigil geometry worked into its surface, the dark needle behind the face that was waiting for something to orient toward.

  She took it.

  They formed a circle around her without discussing forming a circle, the four of them closing the space naturally, the instinct of people who had just spent an evening operating as a unit and had not yet stopped. The street moved around them and the circle held its small interior space, Elysse at the center with the tracker in her hand.

  Nothing happened.

  "Do we—" Aris started.

  "Wait," Kai said.

  The tracker sat in Elysse's palm and the needle stayed where it was and the gold casing caught the afternoon light without comment. A merchant's cart passed behind Colette. Someone called across the street to someone else. The city continued its business at the boundary of the circle without interest.

  Then the tracker warmed.

  Elysse felt it first, the temperature change in her palm, the gold casing going from the neutral cool of metal to something warmer and more deliberate. The needle moved. Not to a direction, not yet, it moved the way a disturbed compass moved, finding its bearings, the dark point swinging across the face with the agitation of something that had been inert and had just been given a reason not to be.

  "It's reacting," Aris said.

  The needle began to spin.

  Slowly at first, the rotation of something finding its range, and then faster, the dark point becoming a blur across the face of the tracker, the gold casing warming further in Elysse's palm until it was the warmth of something working rather than something resting. The sigil geometry on the casing caught the light differently now, the carved lines picking up the afternoon sun with a quality they hadn't had when Drent held it, responding to something in the person holding it that they hadn't been responding to before.

  "Is it broken," Colette said.

  "It's not broken," Kai said, watching it.

  "It's been spinning for—"

  "It's finding it," Kai said. "The signature. It's reading the sigil on her back and calibrating to the source. Give it time."

  The needle spun.

  Thirty seconds. A minute. The street around them continuing its afternoon. Aris watching the tracker with the focused attention he brought to things in the clinic when a treatment was working and he was monitoring the rate. Colette watching it with the expression of someone who had been waiting for the moment of truth since the Underbowl and was now in it and had not yet determined whether she wanted to be.

  Then the needle stopped.

  Clean. Certain. The way a compass stopped when it had found north, without the gradual slowing of something running out of energy but the immediate stillness of something that had arrived at its answer and had no more searching to do.

  The circle opened.

  All four of them turned to follow the needle's direction without coordinating the movement, the natural extension of people who had formed around a center and were now reading what the center had found.

  The needle pointed.

  Down the street, past the mid-district buildings, past the roof lines, in the direction that the city's rings descended toward the lower district and the Cours Centrale plaza and the arch at the center of everything.

  Toward the dungeon.

  Nobody said anything for a moment.

  The tracker held its position in Elysse's palm, the needle unwavering, the gold casing warm, pointing at the arch with the certainty of something that had done exactly what it was built to do.

  "Right," Kai said.

  He said it with the flatness of someone who had suspected this and was now confirmed and was not particularly pleased about being confirmed.

  "Whatever placed that sigil," he said, "is in the dungeon."

  "A monster," Colette said. "Something she encountered on the way up. Something deep enough that—"

  "Maybe," Kai said.

  Colette looked at him.

  "A monster sigil weakens with distance and dissolves with time," Kai said. "We've been over this. She's been on the surface for days and this thing is progressing." He looked at the needle, steady and certain in its direction. "Which means if it's a monster it's something nobody has ever encountered before. Something that can place permanent sigils. Something operating on completely different rules from everything in the dungeon's recorded history."

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  "Or," Aris said.

  "Or," Kai said, and let the word sit.

  "Or what," Colette said.

  Kai looked at her.

  "A person," he said. "Someone with an Eido that can place sigils. Someone who was in that dungeon when she was in that dungeon, or someone who had access to her before she descended." He looked at the tracker. "Someone who is still in the dungeon. Still there. Still holding the sigil in place."

  The street moved around them and the needle pointed and the afternoon light fell across all four of them with the indifference of light that didn't have opinions about what it illuminated.

  Colette was very still.

  She was looking at the needle and she was not looking at the needle. She was looking at something behind it, behind the direction it pointed and the dungeon at the end of that direction and the fifty-three floors below the arch and whatever was on one of those floors still holding a signal in place like a thread tied to a person's back.

  "If it was a person," she said slowly.

  She stopped.

  "Colette," Aris said.

  "If it was a person," she said again, and her voice had dropped to the register it had been in on the nave floor that morning, the register without performance in it. "Who placed a sigil on my guild member. Who tracked her. Who made sure she couldn't—" She stopped again. "Then what happened in that dungeon."

  Nobody answered.

  The question didn't require an answer. It required space, and the street gave it none, the city continuing around them with the thoroughness of a city that did not adjust its pace for the moments happening inside it.

  Colette felt the cold of it move through her.

  Not the cold of the pit floor. The cold of a thought arriving at a conclusion she hadn't been ready to reach, the specific cold of a shape becoming visible in the dark, the shape of something that had always been there but had required this specific moment and this specific needle pointing in this specific direction to become visible.

  If someone had placed that sigil on Elysse.

  If someone had been in the dungeon and had done that deliberately and had been holding it in place since.

  Then what had happened on Floor 46 with fifty-three of her best people was not what the reports had said it was.

  A monster event. An unfortunate encounter. Terrible, yes. Devastating, yes. But the kind of thing that happened in dungeons to people who went deep enough, the kind of thing that had happened before and would happen again, the kind of thing that had a category and a name and a place in the established understanding of what dungeons did to the people who entered them.

  Not that.

  Something else.

  Something that had a person's shape.

  The shiver moved through her from the base of her spine to the back of her neck and she did not let it show and she closed her hand around the thought the way she'd closed her hand around the tracker, holding it, not dropping it, not looking at it yet.

  Later.

  There would be time for that later.

  "We don't know anything yet," Aris said.

  He said it with the plain honest quality he used for things that were true and needed saying without being cruel about the saying. He looked at Colette with the direct attention that was his and then at the group.

  "We know it points at the dungeon," he said. "We know the sigil is being maintained from somewhere in there. We don't know what's maintaining it. Monster or person, we can't confirm either right now." He put his hands in his pockets. "What we can do is wait. A few days. If the tracker's direction changes, moves toward the surface, we're looking at a monster that can travel between floors. If it stays fixed—"

  "It's a person," Kai said.

  "It's more likely to be a person," Aris said. "And we'll know more than we know now."

  He looked at the group. At Kai's arm and Elysse's ribs and Colette's closed expression and the afternoon light on all of it.

  "Right now," he said, "we go back. Edric treats the arm and the ribs and whatever I've acquired this afternoon." A pause. "And then we get scolded, probably."

  "Definitely," Kai said.

  "And then we wait," Aris said. "And then we know more."

  Colette looked at him.

  The expression did the small thing it did when something had landed correctly, the slight shift of someone who has been carrying something and has been given a place to set it down temporarily.

  "Yes," she said. "Alright."

  She straightened the cape over her arm. Looked at Elysse. Looked at Aris.

  "One thing," she said.

  "The church," Aris said.

  "The church," Colette confirmed. "Edric cannot know where we went today. The Underbowl specifically. The Undercourse in general." She paused. "He is a priest of the Eternal Depth. He found us injured and is going to ask where we've been and we are going to need a version of today that does not include an underground illegal fighting arena."

  Kai made a sound.

  "I hate to say it," he said, with the expression of someone who genuinely did hate to say it, "but she's right. We might have to lie to him."

  "We're not lying to Edric," Aris said.

  "Aris—"

  "We're not lying to Edric," Aris said again, with the tone of someone for whom this was not a position open to revision. Then, after a moment: "We're just not going to tell him everything."

  "That's the same—" Colette started.

  "It's a different category," Aris said. "Lying is saying something false. Not mentioning the underground illegal fighting arena is just—not mentioning it."

  "That is a theological distinction I am not sure holds up," Colette said.

  "It holds up enough," Aris said.

  Kai looked at him.

  "You've thought about this before," Kai said. "This specific category."

  "I live with a priest," Aris said. "You develop frameworks."

  Kai almost smiled.

  "Fine," he said. "We went to the market. We found a contact. We obtained the item through negotiation." He looked at the group. "All true."

  "All true," Colette agreed, with the expression of someone who had been in enough council chambers to recognize a workable version of events when she heard one.

  "All true," Aris said, to the street, in the tone of someone making peace with a decision.

  They began to walk.

  Kai leaning slightly on the right side, the arm held carefully. Colette with the cape still folded, the tracker in her other hand. Aris with the bruise developing along his jaw and the shoulder that had its own opinion about the afternoon.

  The street opened ahead of them toward the lower district, toward Cours Edren, toward the church at the end of the road with the open door and the broken latch.

  Elysse did not move immediately.

  She stood where the circle had been and looked at the tracker in her palm, at the needle pointing toward the dungeon arch with the certainty of something that had found what it was looking for. The gold casing warm in her hand. The sigil geometry on its surface catching the light.

  She looked at the direction it pointed.

  At the arch, visible at this distance only as a suggestion between rooftops, the top of the stone frame above the Cours Centrale plaza. The entrance. The beginning of the floors and everything below them, the forty-six of them she had come up through alone and could not remember, the thing that had put this sigil on her back still somewhere in there, still holding it in place, still present.

  She had come up through that.

  She had fought through forty-six floors and made it to Floor Six and collapsed in a Deepbloom patch and been found by a boy with a dark Eido and been carried to a church in the lower district and had woken up in a small room with mismatched furniture and the morning light coming through the window and a cracked plaster ceiling above her.

  And she didn't remember any of it.

  Forty-six floors of whatever had happened. The people who had been with her, maybe, the ones the woman with the red hair had mourned on a bench that morning. The thing that had put this on her back. The reason she had been down there in the first place.

  All of it in the dungeon.

  All of it waiting.

  She looked at the needle for a long moment.

  Then she closed her hand around the tracker, the warm gold casing against her palm, and looked at the four figures moving down the street ahead of her, the afternoon light on their backs, going in the direction of a lower district church with a broken latch and a priest who was going to ask questions.

  She followed them.