Chương 137: What We Do Next

The war room at HQ still smelled faintly of the wood polish Thomas's crew had used on the new table, sharp under the older smell of smoke that never quite left any room in this building anymore. Ant got there first, before anyone else, and stood with both hands flat on the wood for a moment before he sat down. Natalia arrived next, quiet the way she always was, the room settling around her presence without her having to ask it to.

People leaned toward her without seeming to notice they were doing it, drawn in rather than commanded. Kalsar came in behind her, Andy a step after that, and Duncan last, dropping into the chair across from Ant like he'd been waiting outside the door already rather than just arriving.

"You weren't going to have this without me," Duncan said, before anyone could ask.

"Wasn't planning to leave you out," Ant said.

"Sit." Maren slid in last, a stack of papers already under one arm, and took the seat closest to the door out of old habit.

"Yesterday was information," Ant said, once everyone had settled.

"Today we decide what we actually do with it."

"Then let's do that," Natalia said. Her voice carried without effort, the kind that didn't need volume to be heard.

"You start." Ant laid it out plain. The warehouse stayed closed for now, the second door too, because pushing on either one meant open war with a clan whose ordinary people, per everything Rebekah had found, mostly had no idea what their own leadership was doing. That war was coming. Not today.

"So what do we do today," Andy said. Not a question, really. He already had an answer waiting; Ant could see it in how he sat.

"We get ready for it properly, instead of finding out we weren't when it's already started." Ant looked around the table.

"Hazel first. The team that goes out next time needs to be equipped for it, not scraping by on what survived this last fight."

"She's got ten forgers under her now," Maren said.

"Fully trained, not apprentices anymore. That forge could outfit twice this clan if you gave it the time."

"Give her the time, then." Ant nodded once.

"Whatever the main fighting force needs, she gets first priority on it."

"And the warehouse itself?" Kalsar asked.

"You said closed. Not forgotten."

"Not forgotten." Ant looked at Natalia.

"I want eyes on it. Distance only, nothing that gets anyone close enough to be seen. Raven, Rebekah, and Ray."

"Rebekah knows the layout already," Natalia said, working through it out loud rather than questioning it.

"Raven's the best tracker this clan has. That's a strong pairing." She looked at each of them in turn before she went on.

"Three go, three come back. I want that said out loud so everyone remembers it's a promise, not a hope."

"And Ray's coming along to keep himself out of trouble," Duncan said, dry, the first real trace of his old self showing through.

"Man's been three days off a battlefield and he's already asked Hazel if she can forge him something that whistles when it's thrown. Better he's got a job than an afternoon free." That got a short laugh out of Andy, quick and gone.

"Keep him on a short leash out there anyway. Distance work isn't his instinct."

"Noted," Ant said.

"Next. New bonds."

"That's us," Kalsar said, meaning himself and Andy both, and Andy dipped his head to confirm it.

"We've got recruits stacking up faster than we can properly train them. If war's coming, every one of those bonds needs to be solid before it does, not still finding its feet."

"I'll help," Duncan said.

"Not full-time. Just until things settle." Kalsar looked at him a moment, considering it, then nodded.

"Fine. You take the ones who talk too much during drills. You'll understand each other." Duncan grinned, the first real one Ant had seen from him since before the battlefield, and let it go without a comeback.

"Patrols," Ant said, moving on before anyone could dwell on it.

"They need reinforcing. Whoever's behind Marigolds isn't going to wait politely while we get ready."

"I'll take that," Natalia said.

"Operational control across all four sites, Maren backing me on logistics and numbers. Every patrol gets brought up to full strength before we're done, not just the ones closest to trouble. I'm not interested in winning a fight nobody had to be in. I want every one of them coming home at the end of their shift, every time, and I'll rework the rotation myself if that's what it takes."

"Priya, Marcus, and Ben too," Ant said.

"They asked to be useful. Give them something real, under supervision, not busywork."

"They'll answer to me directly," Natalia said.

"Three people who just switched sides in the middle of a battlefield need someone watching out for them as much as watching them. That'll be me."

"And me," Thomas's voice came from the doorway, before Ant had gotten to him — the man had a habit of arriving exactly when his name came up, whether by instinct or by listening at the door, Ant had never worked out which.

"Fortifications. With the main strength split up and out, every site's thinner than it looks from inside the walls. I want that fixed before anyone finds out the hard way."

"Which sites worry you most?" Ant asked.

"Rushbrook and Stonefall both, same reason — small, still settling in, walls built for weather more than for anyone actually trying to get through them. HQ and Coldwoof can hold if it comes to it. Those two can't yet." Thomas ticked it off on his fingers without needing to think about the order.

"New gate reinforcement, a second watch post at each, and I want more people trained to actually use the wall rather than just stand on it."

"Do it," Ant said.

"Whatever you need." The room went quiet for a moment, everyone's part of it settled, and it was Maren who finally asked the question Ant had been waiting for someone to ask. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"And you?"

"Mahkir and I are going out. Vortexes. Just the two of us." Every eye in the room turned toward him at once.

"We've got skills sitting unused that we'll need sharp before this is over, not fumbled through for the first time in a real fight. I can't lead this clan into a war I'm not ready for myself."

"How long," Kalsar asked.

"However long it takes." Ant didn't look away from him.

"I'll check in. I'm not disappearing on you." Nobody argued with it, which told Ant more than agreement would have. They'd all seen the same fight he had. They knew exactly how close it had come to going worse. The portal at the edge of HQ's yard hummed low the way it always did, a sound Ant had stopped noticing months ago and only remembered when someone new flinched at it.

He stepped through with the rest of them, and the world reassembled itself a heartbeat later into Coldwoof's own yard, cooler air, different birds calling somewhere past the wall. Raven was already waiting near a wide fenced yard behind the pens, and for the first time since Ant had known her, she looked nervous, hands clasped in front of her like she needed somewhere to put them.

"Never done this before," she said, by way of greeting.

"Studied for it. Never actually done it."

"You'll be fine," Ant said.

"Easy for you to say. Nobody has to live with your mistake if you get this wrong." Seven candidates stood spaced out across the yard, none of them older than their early twenties, hands tucked into sleeves or crossed tight over chests, nobody quite meeting anyone else's eyes. Ant recognized two of them from the intake surge, faces without names yet. A third, a woman named Hannah, he'd actually spoken to once, briefly, about nothing in particular.

Maren stood at the edge of the yard with a stack of intake forms rather than any device, ready to check names off a list.

"Once you've bonded," she said, mostly to the group at large, though loud enough for all of them to hear, "you go straight to the lab at Coldwoof proper. That's where the actual chip gets fitted — needs equipment I can't carry out here, calibrated right or it reads nothing worth having. My father's own chipping stock, sat in a drawer for months because Cerlan wouldn't hand over the official technology. Today it finally gets used, just not out here in the yard."

Raven opened the gate at the far end, and the unbonded Kithren came through in a loose, uneven wave, a dozen or more of them fanning out across the packed dirt with no order to it at all, sniffing the air, circling wide of each other, sizing up the humans standing still and waiting to be chosen or passed over.

"That's it," Raven said, low, mostly to herself.

"Let them work it out." The monitor-lizard-type went straight for Hannah, no hesitation in it at all, armored scales banded dark green through brown crossing half the yard at a flat, purposeful run that had Raven's hand half-raised before she caught herself and let it drop again. Hannah watched it come without stepping back, and then knelt without being told to, hand already out before the creature had finished covering the ground between them.

Ant watched the moment it took, the fast, clean animal instinct of it, no ceremony beyond the two of them choosing each other, and felt something in his chest that he didn't have a name ready for. He'd stood in a courtyard once, seventeen years old, and watched every other name get called before his. He remembered exactly how long the silence had lasted after the last one, how the crowd had started looking anywhere but at him, how nobody had told him what came next because nobody had ever needed to know before.

Nineteen years since. Nobody had asked him to be here today. He'd asked to come. You're thinking loud enough that I can hear it without trying, Mahkir said, quiet, close. I know. Good. A pause. I'm not going to tell you it doesn't matter. It clearly does. I'm only going to say that you're not that boy in the courtyard anymore, and this isn't that courtyard. Ant didn't answer that out loud.

He watched Hannah kneel there a moment longer than the bond itself had taken, both hands pressed flat against the lizard's banded back like she needed the weight of it under her palms to believe any of it had actually happened, and let that be answer enough. The rest of the yard thinned quickly after that. A woman two spots down went to her knees as something low and quick wound itself once around her legs before settling.

A man near the fence laughed out loud, short and startled, when a creature he clearly hadn't expected chose him over the candidate standing closer to it. The wiry young man Ant hadn't spoken to before was claimed next, a feathered, sharp-beaked creature coming up onto its hind legs against him before he'd even had time to look nervous about it.

One by one the space cleared, candidates peeling off in pairs to sit with whatever had claimed them, until only one person was left standing in the middle of the yard with the light gone long and gold around her. The last Kithren left the pen gate almost reluctantly, a toad the size of a dog, skin mottled dark green and yellow, throat pulsing slow and even.

It crossed maybe half the distance toward the yard's center, then simply stopped, and sat, showing no more interest in anything around it than it had shown inside the pen a minute before. A girl named Rikku stood alone now, arms wrapped around herself, eyes fixed on the toad and not moving from it. Then the toad's throat stopped moving, and its attention drifted past her entirely, toward nothing at all.

Rikku's hand came up halfway, uncertain, then dropped back to her side, and Ant felt the same cold, familiar dread of what might be coming before it arrived. He knew exactly how this went. He'd lived it once already, every second of the silence that follows a name nobody answers.

"It's all right," Raven said, crouching near the two of them, though her voice didn't sound entirely sure of that.

"Sometimes it takes a minute lon—" Mahkir's growl came from somewhere low and old, a sound Ant felt more than heard, rolling out across the yard loud enough that two of the newly bonded creatures flinched against their handlers' legs. The toad's eyes snapped back into focus. It came up onto its feet in one heavy, deliberate movement, and crossed the remaining distance at a pace that had nothing hurried about it, stopping directly in front of Rikku.

She stared at it, then at Mahkir, then knelt and pressed her palm flat against the toad's cool, damp skin, and Maren was already marking her name off the list before the girl had finished letting out the breath she'd been holding. What was that? Ant asked, once the toad had settled and Rikku was still staring down at her own hand like she didn't quite believe it belonged to her. Just needed some gentle persuasion, Mahkir said. Was all. That didn't sound gentle. Everything's relative.

Raven looked less like someone bracing for disaster by the end of it, and more like someone who'd just found out she was good at something new.

"Seven for seven," she said, mostly to herself.

"Told you you'd be fine," Ant said.

"You didn't know that. You were guessing same as me."

"Wasn't guessing about you." Raven didn't have an answer for that, which was its own kind of answer.

"You'll be heading out yourself soon, won't you," she said, "now that this is done."

"Portal back to HQ, then straight out again. Mahkir and I are working through every vortex on the list."

"Where do you even start," she asked, "with a list that long?"

"Nearest first. Work outward." Ant looked past her toward the portal, already half a step toward it in his mind.

"I'm not looking for the hardest fight out there. I'm looking for enough of them, back to back, that neither of us has a weak point left standing by the time we're done." Raven nodded slowly, already turning the answer over for her own future use, then turned back to Hannah and the lizard without saying anything more. Ant found Mahkir waiting by the portal back to HQ, already turned toward it, already reading Ant's intent before Ant had finished forming the thought himself. Ready when you are, Mahkir said.

Everyone else has somewhere to be. So do we. Ant looked back once at the pens, at Hannah still kneeling with her hand resting along the lizard's banded back, at Raven watching the two of them with something unguarded on her face, and then he stepped through the portal into whatever came next.