"Steel in the Blue Light"

Tom let go of the captain.

"He's yours," he told Mama Yves. "The door's mine."

He did not wait to see whether she approved. The cutlass came out of its leather thong with a hiss he felt in his teeth, and he went down the passage low and fast, the way a man goes toward a fight he would rather not have but will not refuse. The carved faces watched him pass. He did not look at them now. He had no candle — he had left the blue flame with Mama Yves and the captain — and he moved by the failing wash of it at his back, into a dark that thickened with every step.

The trapdoor thudded again. Wood complaining. A pause. Then a third blow, lower, more patient — not a man hammering, but a man testing, the way you test ice with your heel before you trust it your weight.

Tom reached the foot of the iron ladder and pressed his shoulders to the cold stone beside it, where a man coming down would not see him until he was already down. He steadied the cutlass in both hands. His breath went thin. He counted his own heartbeats and made himself slow them.

The trapdoor lifted.

Grey light fell in — not sun, but mist-light, the dawn pushing through fog above. And with it came the mist itself, pouring over the lip of the hole and down the rungs like slow water, and Tom understood with a cold drop in his belly that it was not the hunter testing the door.

It was the smoke. Come without him. Come on its own.

A single bare foot found the top rung. Small. Pale. Not the hunter's boot at all.