The seven-beat phrase came faster than Owen could fully read.

Wenrik’s staff blurred. Silver threads of CE bloomed in the air around him, no longer hanging in suspended notes but moving — circling Owen in a tightening spiral. The Cantor’s body weaved between strikes in a fluid, asymmetric motion that didn’t match anything in Gorvax’s notes.

Strike. Step. Strike. Spin. Strike. Rest. Strike.

Seven beats. Each one harder to predict than the last. Each one threading more silver into the cage forming around Owen.

He blocked four. He missed two. The staff cracked across his left shoulder — pain shot down his arm, the gauntlet absorbed half the impact and deflected the rest into bone. The seventh strike came at his ribs and he barely twisted in time, the staff scraping across his side, opening a thin red line through his under-tunic.

The silver threads completed their first cycle.

Owen felt the resonance lock.

His CE seized.

For a half-second, he couldn’t channel — couldn’t push energy down his arms, couldn’t summon the Cosmic Impact Fist, couldn’t even properly suppress. His CE sat inside him, perfectly available, perfectly inaccessible, locked behind Wenrik’s rhythm.

Wenrik moved in for the kill.

Owen did the only thing he could think of.

He hit the ground.

Not in a controlled drop. A full collapse — knees bending, body falling backward, shoulders rolling. The Cantor’s killing strike passed through the space where Owen’s chest had been a fraction of a second earlier. The staff’s silver-edged tip clipped Owen’s hairline instead, opening a shallow gash above his left eye.

Owen rolled. Came up scrambling. Sprinted for the canyon wall.

The silver threads followed him.

They were anchored to him now, not to Wenrik. The cage moved with the prey. He had maybe twelve seconds before the second cycle completed and the resonance moved from *suppression* to *destruction*.

He ran.

Hit the canyon wall at full speed. Used the gauntlet — even without channeled CE, the gauntlet still had its physical hardness — to grip a vertical seam in the rock. Pulled himself up two meters in a single heave. Then four. Then six.

Wenrik was below him, watching. The Cantor wasn’t running. Cantors didn’t need to.

The silver threads kept tracking.

Owen reached a ledge. Ducked behind an outcropping. The threads curled around the corner like fingers.

He had to break the resonance from inside it.

Gorvax’s notes had described this — barely. If a Cantor’s cage completes, you cannot break it from outside. You must break your own CE rhythm. Disrupt yourself before the cage disrupts you.

Disrupt himself.

Owen took a breath. Reached for the most chaotic, unstable thing in his cosmic reserves — the Desolate energy he’d absorbed from the Argentus Nebula dungeon, refined and layered into the gauntlet. Desolate CE was not orderly. It was hungry, hollow, anti-resonant. Gorvax had warned him to never channel it through his core.

He channeled it through his core.

The gauntlet flared with black-violet light. Pain shot through Owen’s chest — actual physical pain, the kind that comes from doing something to yourself you shouldn’t. His CE rhythm went wild. Spiked. Crashed. Spiked again. The nice clean cosmic-energy frequency Wenrik had been building his cage around dissolved into static.

The silver threads shuddered.

Then they fell apart.

The cage broke.

Owen’s CE came rushing back — not the controlled five thousand he’d had, but a chaotic flood, his core trying to stabilize after deliberate disruption. He had maybe sixty seconds before he could fight cleanly again. He could move, but he couldn’t channel.

Below him, Wenrik tilted his head. The Cantor’s silver-edged staff lowered slightly. He looked, for the first time, *interested*.

"Desolate channeling," Wenrik said softly. "Through the core. That is reckless beyond reason, False fist. It is also a method I have not seen before."

Owen didn’t answer. He was busy staying upright on the ledge.

Wenrik began to walk along the canyon floor, moving toward the wall. He would find a path up within a minute. Owen had to move.

He moved.

---

He made it three kilometers north before the sounds reached him.

He was running along a ridge, half-staggering, his CE still in chaotic recovery, his vision graying at the edges from the desolate channeling. The wind had shifted and carried sound from the broken ground to his east — the direction Tessa had gone.

A scream. Cut short.

Then silence.

Then — distant, but unmistakable — the soft musical ring of a staff striking stone.

Owen stopped running.

His chest went cold.

He turned east.

---

He found her in a shallow depression between two rocks.

She was on her back. Her dark eyes were open, fixed on the sky over Prison World. Her mouth was slightly parted, as if she’d been about to say something and hadn’t quite gotten the word out. There was no expression of fear on her face. No agony. Just stopped — the way a clock stops when it isn’t wound.

The wound was through her chest. Clean. A staff strike, driven through the sternum and out the back. The resonance burn around the edges of the wound was silver.

Tessa.

Owen dropped to his knees beside her.

His hands hovered over the wound. Useless. There was nothing to fix. She’d been gone before he started running.

The sand around her was scuffed in a pattern of motion — she’d fought, she’d moved, she’d tried to break away. Her blade was still in her hand. There was blood on it. Not hers.

Good, Owen thought distantly. *Good. She got him at least once.*

He sat there for a long moment.

The wind moved across the dunes. The second sun was fully down now. The first stars of Prison World’s overcrowded sky were starting to come out.

He closed her eyes with two fingers.

He didn’t say anything. There were no words he could find. The space inside his chest where words usually came from had gone hollow.

After a minute, he stood up.

His CE was beginning to stabilize.

He turned back toward the canyon.