Lightning shattered my inner core. "Coraline!" Otto's voice split the hall like an order. "Hold the coil! Now!" I couldn't move. The rite pulsed around me—ancient chants, elder hands, threads of memory braided into something that was supposed to be mine forever. The thread hollered and broke. My core, the warm knot that had been mine for a thousand rotations, unspooled and leaked out into the stone like steam. "Don't stand there!" Anna yelled. Her face was a blur at the edge of my vision. She reached for me and her fingers slid through my skin like water. "Start the coil again." Otto's hands worked with impossible calm for a man on the verge of losing a disciple. His voice was low and hard. "Stop the chant. Seal the chamber. Get me the elder band." "Seal the chamber?" A laugh thinned out of my mouth. It sounded wrong. I tried to gather a sentence and the words came out like chopped wood. "Not now. Otto—" "You were supposed to be our hope," he said. No one shouted that. He didn't need it to be loud; the accusation cut cleaner because he said it like a judgment. My vision flickered. I saw the elders' faces—their disappointment arranged into a neat ledger. Shame is always louder than pain. Someone slapped my cheek. The sound was soft but it threw me upright. "Enough," Otto said. He stepped forward and his palm hovered over me, not touching