The formation site was in the center of it. Forty feet down. Draven stood at the bank and looked at the water and then looked at Lyra. "How deep can you take us," he said. "Deep enough," she said. "The water pressure at forty feet is manageable with a sustained bubble. I can hold it for thirty minutes before the output becomes a problem." She looked at the lake. "The issue isn't getting down there." "What's the issue," Jin said. "The formation uses water as a conductor," Sera said. She had her hands on the bank stone, reading what she could through the earth at the water's edge. "It's built into a submerged structure down there. The water around it isn't passive. The formation has integrated the lake into itself. Every current, every movement in the water above the site, the formation reads." She looked at Lyra. "If you move the water actively while we're inside the bubble, you're not just moving water. You're sending signal into the formation." Lyra understood before Sera finis

The city was called Aldenmere and it had a population of forty thousand and a market district that ran six streets wide in the center of it and operated seven days a week regardless of weather or occasion. The formation site was under the market's main intersection, forty feet down, accessible through the city's old drainage system which had been built three hundred years ago and then mostly forgotten when the newer system was built above it. The drainage tunnels were not on any current city map. They were on the sect's internal maps, which Sera had memorized from documents she wasn't supposed to have seen. The problem was Draven's face. He had been on a broadsheet in this city. He had been on broadsheets in every major city since the garrison, and Aldenmere was large enough to have had a print run of several hundred. Three people recognized him between the city gate and the market district. He pulled his hood up. It helped for about ten minutes before a merchant's son pointed at h

They reached the capital with two days to spare. The Colosseum of Depth was visible from the main road in, which the builders had apparently intended, the structure large enough and old enough that it had become part of the city's skyline in the way that things became part of skylines when they'd been there long enough. It sat at the city's center, pre-imperial stonework, the kind of architecture that didn't apologize for its own size. Draven looked at it from the road. He looked at the street stones they rode over and thought about Sera feeling the formation's signature through these same stones three weeks ago, the same architecture as every site they'd dismantled, running under the oldest structure in the capital. Two days. The Colosseum's entrance had been transformed for the tournament: banners, temporary stalls selling food and tournament programs, a press of people moving in and out for registration and briefings. Competitors from every region of the empire and beyond, the

Zephyr found him between the second and third matches. He appeared at Draven's shoulder the way Zephyr did everything: without announcing himself, already present when Draven noticed him, as though he'd been there for a few seconds and was waiting for Draven to become aware of it. "You figured out the floor," Zephyr said. "Yes," Draven said. "Before you arrived here." "Several weeks before." Zephyr looked at the corridor around them, the movement of competitors and officials and staff through the Colosseum's interior, the noise of it. He looked back at Draven. "What do we do." "We fight," Draven said. "We win. We reach the center." He looked at Zephyr. "The formation needs the matches to charge it. If we stop competing the sect accelerates some other way. We have to give them what looks like a normal tournament while working our way to the keystone." "Which means the semifinals and the final at the center of the pit." "Yes." "And if the formation completes before we get ther

The supply room had shelves of maintenance equipment on three walls and a lamp that worked and enough floor space to stand in comfortably. Jin sat on a crate and held his hands out and the man who hadn't given his name looked at them. He took Jin's left hand in both of his. "The frequency work," the man said. "You've been running lightning at a resonance the pathway wasn't built for. The pathway is adapting but it's adapting under strain. Like a road being used by traffic it wasn't designed for." He moved to the right hand. "Each use compresses the damage into a smaller section of the meridian. It doesn't spread. It concentrates." "Is that better or worse," Jin said. "Neither. It means the limit is specific. There's a point where the concentrated damage becomes a blockage. Before that point the path functions, after it the path fails." He set Jin's right hand down. "You haven't reached that point. You're close." "How close," Jin said. "The tournament final," the man said. "If y