Chương 113: Chapter 112 – Too Quiet to Trust

Kalsar came in low, and Ant read it half a second before it landed — weight already committed, no way to pull it back even if Kalsar had wanted to, which he never did in a spar that mattered. Ant let the strike go past his shoulder instead of meeting it, turned with it, brought Soul Render around in the same motion he'd been drilling for a week straight. The blade caught the practice-blunted edge of Kalsar's sword and held there, and for once Kalsar's arm gave first.

"Better," Kalsar said, stepping back, already resetting his stance.

"Still telegraphing the turn. Anyone paying attention sees it coming a full step early."

"You saw it coming a full step early."

"I'm not anyone." Kalsar rolled his shoulder, the old joint popping loud enough to hear from six feet off.

"Go again." They went again. Ant lost that one, cleanly, Kalsar's blade stopping a hand's width short of his ribs the way it always did — close enough to mean it, far enough not to. Six months of this, near enough daily when neither of them had somewhere else to be, and Ant still lost more than he won. He'd stopped minding it somewhere around month four. Losing to Kalsar taught you where your gaps were. Losing to anyone else just meant you'd lost.

They went a third time anyway, because Kalsar never called it after a loss if there was daylight left to burn. This one ran longer — Ant getting two good exchanges in before Kalsar's blade finally found the gap under his guard, tapping his ribs hard enough to leave a mark he'd feel tomorrow.

"Getting there," Kalsar said, which from him counted as praise loud enough to shout from a rooftop. He straightened, wiping his brow with the back of one arm, and looked past Ant toward the covered walk.

"Ray still asleep?"

"Ray's always still asleep. Rebekah's covering his shift on the east wall until noon, again, which he'll owe her for and somehow never actually pay."

"Sounds about right." Kalsar sheathed his practice sword and didn't reach for another. His eyes dropped to Soul Render instead, to the second rune sitting dark along the fuller now that the fire had gone out of it.

"Still not going to tell me what Hazel actually said about that."

"She said the more I can hold, the more it holds back. That's it. That's the whole explanation."

"That's not an explanation. That's a fortune-teller's line."

"Welcome to every conversation I've had with Hazel since the day it lit." Ant turned the blade once, watching the faint warmth still sitting in the grip even cold, like the metal hadn't forgotten being used.

"She went quiet and strange for a full minute when it happened. Then Coldwoof pulled her off before she'd say anything more." Kalsar grunted.

"Woman explains things on her own schedule or not at all."

"That's what I said." Natalia was at the long table under the covered walk, same as most mornings, a stack of patrol logs at one elbow and the map screen propped at the other. Ant crossed to her, glancing at the screen the way he still did most mornings — the thing lit up under his eyes, routes and markers sitting on top of a map of Bramholt's whole stretch of territory.

"I still don't fully understand how these work," he admitted, tapping the frame.

"One of six now. You built this whole network in six months."

"Cael built it," Natalia said.

"Or got us access to whoever builds them, which is the part that actually matters. Wasn't his money — the vortex payout covered the cost on its own, high-risk clearances pay out heavier than anything we'd seen before. But money alone doesn't buy this kind of tech. His standing at Cerlan did that part."

"You're losing on purpose," she added, without looking up from the log in front of her.

"To make him feel useful."

"I'm losing because he's better than me."

"That too." She turned a page.

"Route Seven's clear again. Route Twelve's clear. Everything's clear, actually, which is either very good news or the kind of good news I don't trust."

"You don't trust any good news. I've noticed."

"Good news is how you get complacent," Natalia said.

"Ashmere taught me that the expensive way." She said it plainly, without weight behind it, the sort of line that had stopped hurting to say out loud somewhere in the last six months — though Ant still noticed it every time, the way you notice a scar even after the person carrying it's stopped flinching at it.

"Five sites now," Ant said, half to himself, watching the screen cycle through its markers.

"Portals between all of them. Screens that let Maren yell at Thomas about a supply order without either of them leaving their own kitchen. It's the ordinariness of it that gets me. Patrols go out, patrols come back."

"Rushbrook's fences are holding," Natalia said.

"Ashwell's coming along — slower, but Thomas won't rush it, and Garrick's keeping the peace with what's left of the Blackthorn locals well enough that Petra and Nadia and Bastian are starting to look like people with an actual life again, not just survivors of one. Stonefall's been clean as long as I've been counting." This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

You've gone quiet, Mahkir said, from where he'd sprawled in the one patch of shade the training yard offered, not quite asleep, one ear angled toward the clash of practice blades out of habit more than interest. Just thinking. About losing to Kalsar again. About how quiet everything's been. Mahkir's ear flicked, properly awake now. That's usually the part right before it isn't.

Ant didn't get to answer that, because the portal arch at the edge of the yard lit — a low chime, a ripple of light across the stone frame — and Sam stepped through it alone. Alone was the first wrong thing. Sam didn't go anywhere alone if Duncan could help it, and Duncan could usually help it. Ant set Soul Render down before he'd finished having the thought, and Kalsar, a half-step behind him, had already gone still in the particular way that meant he'd clocked it too.

"Sam." Ant crossed the yard.

"Where's Duncan?"

"Stonefall. Running the board." Sam's eyes moved once, taking in the yard, the practice swords, Kalsar, Natalia rising from the table — cataloguing, the way he always did, before he decided how much of the room needed to hear what he'd come to say. He looked back at Ant.

"Got something." That was the whole of it. Ant had known him long enough to understand that Sam didn't pad a sentence out for anyone's comfort, his own included, and whatever came next was going to be short and it was going to matter. Natalia brought the nearest map screen over without being asked, setting it on the low wall between them.

Sam touched two fingers to the edge of it, and Ant watched him hesitate half a second before he swapped the standard patrol overlay for a different layer entirely — red marks scattered thin across five territories, denser in places than others.

"Patrol losses," Sam said.

"Past two months." He tapped the cluster near Stonefall's eastern border, three marks close enough together to nearly touch.

"Higher than they should be."

"Losses meaning what," Kalsar said, already leaning in.

"Dead? Hurt?"

"Hurt, mostly. Twisted ankles that don't twist on flat ground. A man who swears he never fell, bleeding from a fall." Sam's jaw worked once, the closest he came to visible frustration.

"Two gone missing off night rotation. Both turned up the next morning at the wrong gate, no memory of how they got there." He paused, voice dropping for the last of it.

"And Route Nine's team swears they passed Route Eleven's team two miles off their own line. Same faces. Same gear. Route Eleven never left the gate that night — Duncan checked the log himself." Kalsar went very still.

"Someone wearing their own people's faces."

"Or something that can," Natalia said.

"Might be," Sam said. Three words. He didn't offer more, and the way his eyes stayed on Ant instead of the screen told Ant the rest of it before Sam said it out loud.

"Want to look into it. Myself. Quiet." There wasn't a version of this where Ant said no, and Sam clearly already knew that, because he wasn't asking so much as informing — the request a courtesy more than a genuine question. Ant gave it anyway.

"Do it," Ant said.

"Take who you need."

"Don't need anyone. Need it quiet." Sam straightened, already folding the screen's overlay back down to nothing, patrol routes settling back into their ordinary green. Five lines spent. Sam normally managed a whole conversation in three, and Ant knew exactly what the extra two meant. He wasn't going to spend a sixth today even if the room begged him to.

"Sam." Ant caught his arm before he could turn for the portal.

"Be careful. Whatever this is." Sam looked at him a moment. Didn't say anything else. Just held Ant's eyes a half-second longer than he needed to, some private math finishing itself behind them, then turned for the arch. The light rippled once around the frame and went still behind him. Kalsar exhaled slow through his nose, watching the empty archway.

"Man doesn't waste words even when the words matter most."

"That's how you know they mattered," Natalia said, already pulling the log back toward herself, mouth set in a line Ant hadn't seen on her since Ashmere. She spread the patrol logs flat across the table, three months of them, and started sorting by hand — route number, date, outcome — while Kalsar leaned over her shoulder reading upside down without complaint. Ant watched them work a moment before he came around to the other side of the table.

"Talk me through it properly," he said.

"Not just Stonefall. All five."

"Stonefall's the worst of it, from what Sam pulled." Natalia tapped a cluster of entries, moved two logs side by side.

"Rushbrook's clean — Andy would've said something already if it wasn't, he doesn't sit on things. Coldwoof's had two odd reports in as many weeks, nothing like Stonefall's numbers, but Raven flagged them anyway rather than write them off, which tells you something on its own." She looked up.

"Ashwell I don't have good numbers on at all. Garrick's still building his own reporting structure — Blackthorn ran patrols differently, looser, and half his people are still learning our forms."

"So it could already be happening there and we wouldn't know."

"Could be. Or it's exactly what it looks like — new site, new habits, nothing sinister in the gap." Natalia didn't sound convinced of her own second option, and didn't pretend to be.

"We loop Garrick in," Kalsar said.

"Today. Get him keeping the same numbers the rest of us keep, starting now, so we're not guessing about Ashwell a month from now the way we're guessing about it today."

"And the others?" Ant asked.

"Duncan already knows, obviously. Andy, Maren, Rowan?"

"Not yet." Natalia said it without hesitation, the planner in her already three steps past the question.

"Sam asked for quiet. The moment we put this on every screen in the network, it's not quiet anymore — it's five sites' worth of people watching for something, which changes how whoever's doing this behaves, if anyone's doing this at all. We tell the site leads what they need for their own patrols. We don't tell them why yet." Kalsar grunted, half agreement, half the particular sound he made when he'd rather have every piece of information moving faster than caution allowed.

"I don't love secrets between people who're meant to trust each other."

"Neither do I," Natalia said.

"I love losing people we don't have to lose even less." That closed the matter, the way most disagreements between the two of them closed lately — not agreement exactly, more a working truce that let them keep moving in the same direction. Ant watched the map screen a moment longer, the routes lit up green and ordinary across all five sites, nothing on the surface of it to say anything was wrong at all.

Ant stood there a moment longer, Soul Render forgotten on the grass behind him, the training yard suddenly too quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the absence of clashing steel. Told you, Mahkir said. Never stays quiet for long. It just gets better at pretending. He rose, stretched, shook out each paw in turn with no particular urgency, though his ears hadn't stopped tracking the portal arch since Sam had walked through it. And Sam doesn't come through alone over ordinary trouble.

Neither does Duncan let him. I know. So it's not ordinary trouble. Ant didn't answer that one either. He picked the sword back up instead, turned it once in his hand, watching the second rune sit dark and waiting along the fuller.