**CHAPTER THIRTY?SEVEN

  “Handhold”**

  The Circle fell like a dying star.

  Stone screamed. Silver dust fountained into the air, whirling in torn halos as the standing stones shattered one by one. The bowl of the peak groaned under the collapse — a grinding, thunderous wrench that shook the teeth in Anna’s jaw and turned the world into bright, broken snow.

  “DOWN!” Anna cried, pulling Lena into her coat. She shoved the girl into the lee of a fallen monolith and reached for Lukas—

  —just as the ground dropped.

  The ice shelf beneath Anna’s boots sheared away with the clean, merciless sound of a blade biting glass. The world lurched. Her feet scrabbled for purchase and found air. Snow burst upward in a silent bloom as she slid toward the ragged tear that had opened along the rim.

  “Mama!” Lukas screamed.

  Anna caught nothing. No branch. No ledge. The sky tilted; the bowl of the Circle spun. She clawed at the broken surface and found only splinters of ice that sliced her palm and came away in useless, shining shards. She tried to dig her elbows, her shoulders, anything into the slope. There was nothing to take hold of but cold.

  The abyss yawned below.

  Not like this, she thought, clear and ferocious. Not in front of them.

  “Mama!” Lena sobbed behind her. “Mama—please—”

  Anna’s boot hit a ridge of buried rock and bounced.

  She went over the edge.

  A small hand smashed into her wrist.

  Pain detonated up her arm. The fall stopped so violently she lost her breath. The world snapped into a bright, terrible focus: the rim a foot above her face, snow cascading over the edge like a slow?motion waterfall, and Lukas — lying flat on his stomach, chest over the brink, both hands clamped around her wrist with everything he had.

  “I’ve got you,” he choked. “I’ve got you, Mama.”

  His pupils were huge with fear; his jaw shook. He was seven. He weighed nothing. His boots skidded an inch closer to the lip.

  “Let go,” Anna rasped. It came out a frightful whisper. “If you fall—”

  “You taught me to finish the strike,” he said through his teeth, voice breaking. “Hold on.”

  He slid another inch.

  “Lukas!” Lena screamed, scrambling to grab his ankle.

  “No!” Anna gasped. “Get back—”

  But Lena didn’t listen. She wrapped both arms around Lukas’s shin, digging her heels into the snow, teeth bared with the effort of being alive.

  The Primordial staggered in the ruins of the Circle, tendrils whipping, hum fracturing to a furious static. It turned toward the edge where Anna dangled and lurched — slow, calculating, recovering.

  “We have seconds,” Lukas panted. “Mama… left hand. Find a hold.”

  There wasn’t one.

  There had to be one.

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  Anna dug fingers into slush and scraped stone. Her left hand slipped, scrabbled, slipped again—

  “Here!” Lukas shoved something over the lip — the axe, haft first, as if offering her the spine of a tree. “Hook it!”

  Anna swung, muscles tearing lightning through her shoulder. The axe bit into a seam of ice and stone, metal squealing. It caught. Just enough.

  “Lena,” Lukas gasped, “wrap the rope—”

  “What—”

  “My belt—fast!”

  Lena fumbled with numb fingers, ripping the leather belt free from Lukas’s coat loops. He looped it around Anna’s trapped wrist, knotted it to the axe haft with a clumsy, desperate hitch, and threw his weight backward while Lena anchored him with every trembling pound she had.

  The belt went taut.

  Anna’s shoulder screamed. The axe groaned.

  Above them, the Primordial took a step that made snow jump. It lifted its head. The faint, wrong glow beneath its skin pulsed in time with a rhythm the Circle had taught it to crave.

  “Up,” Lukas said. Not a plea. A command. “Mama, climb.”

  “I—can’t,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “My arm—”

  “Then use me,” he snapped, and slammed his forearms down over her trapped wrist, bracing the belt with his bones. “Step on the rock. Left—there!”

  She found it — a black fang of stone kissing daylight through snow. She set her boot, pushed. The belt creaked; the axe shifted a fraction.

  “Again,” Lukas ordered.

  She pushed again, dragging an inch of body over the lip. Snow burned her ribs, tore skin off her knuckles; the belt cut her wrist to fire; the axe wobbled—

  “Hold!” Lukas cried. “Hold!”

  She held.

  He adjusted, inching backward on elbows, never letting go.

  The Primordial reached the broken rim. Its shadow fell over them like a door closing.

  Lena screamed — not in fear this time, but with the sharp, cutting pitch that had shattered the Circle’s song. The sound knifed the air. The Primordial recoiled a half?step, tendrils stuttering under its skin, as if the memory of breaking were still raw.

  “Now!” Lukas cried.

  Anna shoved with everything left in her. The axe skated, caught; the belt yanked; the rock bit her boot. She slid up another foot, then another, until the rim scraped her chest and she clawed over the edge, collapsing half atop Lukas, half in the ruin of silver dust and shattered stone.

  They lay gasping — three hearts beating a single terrified rhythm.

  The Primordial roared.

  Lena grabbed the axe with both hands, wrenched it free, and thrust it into Anna’s palm.

  “Up,” she said, voice a thread but steel. “We go now.”

  Anna staggered to her feet, dragging Lukas and Lena with her. The Primordial’s hum rebuilt into an oncoming storm. It stepped toward them—

  Lukas jerked the leather belt free of the axe haft, looped it around a fallen shard of standing stone, and heaved. The shard pivoted like a lever, skidding into the gouge Anna had climbed from, wedging the rim with a makeshift brace.

  “Move!” he yelled. “It’ll hold for a breath!”

  They ran.

  A dozen steps. Twenty. The slope dropped out of the Circle’s bowl into a chute lined with wind?polished ice and old scoured rock — a path the storm had carved and the hive hadn’t yet learned.

  Behind them, the Primordial hit the wedge.

  For one beautiful, borrowed second, the brace held.

  Then it shattered.

  The monster staggered, crashed to a knee, and the slope drank the delay like water.

  Anna didn’t look back. She ran with her children flanking her — Lena’s fingers knotted in her coat, Lukas at the outside edge with the axe like a guardrail that could swing. Snow cut their faces; light burned their eyes; the air tasted like iron and old grief and something almost like victory.

  When they reached the shadow of the chute, Anna caught Lukas’s sleeve and pulled him close, mouth to his hair.

  “My brave boy,” she said, voice wrecked and whole. “You saved me.”

  He shook against her — not from cold now, but from the weight of what almost happened finally landing.

  “I told you,” he whispered. “I’m not letting you fall.”

  She kissed his temple and turned them downhill, teeth bared at the wind.

  “Then we don’t,” she said. “Not today.”

  They disappeared into the throat of stone.

  Behind them, the Primordial found its feet and howled — wounded, furious — and the mountain threw the sound back in its face,

  because somewhere in the ruin of an ancient song, a boy’s hands had decided his mother would live.