Vol 2: Chapter 56

The Mule lifted off the Roost's landing platform with a groan of overworked servos, and Ziya didn't wait for altitude before she started talking numbers.

"Two days out to the site if we push the engines," she said, tablet balanced on her knee. "One day for the recovery, if it goes clean. That leaves us four days of the weather window for the Ashwing, assuming the front holds."

"Assuming," Alex said.

"Assuming." She didn't look up from the screen. "I'll have a better number once we're on the ground."

Nobody argued with the math. Nobody needed to. The silence that followed said enough about what everyone already understood: the margin had gotten thinner, and thinner margins didn't leave room for anything going wrong twice.

Alex watched the ridgeline scroll past the viewport, gray rock cutting into a paler gray sky, and his mind kept snagging on the same loop it had been stuck on since the Roost. The Lynx hadn't run from the Zoids. It hadn't fought for the Rams either. It had simply stopped, the moment its work was done, like a foreman calling off a shift.

"You're doing it again," Fia said from across the cabin.

"Doing what."

"That thing where you go somewhere else behind your eyes."

Alex almost answered. The shape of the thought was right there, close enough to touch, and it slipped away from him anyway. "It's nothing I can put into words yet."

"That's not actually an answer."

"I know."

She let it go. Nobody pushed him on it, and he was glad for that more than he could easily explain.

The site came into view an hour later, and it was worse than Dallin had made it sound. A quarter mile of scrub had been burned black in patches, the fire pattern uneven, jagged, like something had swept through in more than one direction at once. Broken rock littered ground that should have been open scree. A support strut from a Warden's field pack lay half-buried near a boulder, twisted at an angle no fall could explain on its own.

The Mule set down at the edge of it, and for a moment nobody moved. Rhian stood at the open hatch with one hand braced on the frame, looking out at ground she'd never see the same way again, and she didn't say anything. Nobody did. The scale of it did what it needed to do without a single word.

Anya broke the quiet first, stepping down onto the scorched dirt with a data-slate already in hand.

"Grid pattern," she said. "Fia and Lyra take the north half. Seraphine's with me on the south. Ziya, hold comms and log whatever we call in."

"And us?" Alex asked.

Anya's eyes moved briefly to Rhian, then back to him. "Work the middle with whoever's steadiest. This isn't complicated. It's just slow, and it doesn't get easier because you go faster."

"Understood."

It wasn't complicated, and it was still slower than Alex expected. He crouched near the twisted strut, turning it over once before setting it in the collection case Seraphine had handed him, and beside him Rhian was doing the same with a scorched glove, working it free from the dirt with more care than the object probably needed. She didn't say anything about it. She just did it, methodically, the way someone does a task that matters more than it looks like it should.

"You don't have to do this part," Alex said, quiet, not wanting the others to hear.

"I know."

"You're doing it anyway."

"Somebody should." She set the glove down in the case, lining it up straight, and moved on to the next patch of ground without looking at him.

The search stretched on. A spent charge here. A drag mark there, long and shallow, cutting through the dirt toward what had clearly been the kill zone. Nobody spoke much beyond the calls needed to log a find, and each one landed a little heavier than the last, not because any single item was dramatic, but because the pile of them kept growing.

Then Seraphine called out from a shallow depression near a burned collar of scrub, crouched low with something small pinched between two fingers.

"Marks," she said. "More than one."

The group gathered around her. Half-buried in the ash sat a cluster of Warden identification tokens, three of them, the metal scorched dark on one side but still readable once angled into the light. A rank number. A name etched too small to read from where Alex stood.

Ziya crouched beside her, careful not to disturb the ground before Seraphine had logged the position.

"Those go in their own case," Ziya said. "Not mixed in with the rest of the gear."

"Already on it." Seraphine slid a gloved hand beneath the first token and lifted it clear.

Nobody said much while she worked through the other two. Rhian watched from a step back, the scorched glove she'd recovered earlier forgotten now in the case at her feet. This felt different. A Warden's mark wasn't just another piece of salvage. It was the one thing that outlasted everything else a person carried, the proof of a name that still had somewhere to go.

Seraphine sealed the three tokens into a case of their own, small enough to close one-handed, and carried it back to the Mule herself instead of stacking it with the rest of the haul.

"This one rides up front," she said. "Where I can see it."

Nobody argued with that.

It was Lyra who found the tracks, near the north edge where the scrub thinned into bare rock.

"Over here," she called, not raised, just carrying. "You'll want to see this."

The group converged. The tracks ran in a shallow arc through a patch of softer ground, three distinct print types overlapping in the same stretch of earth, moving the same direction, at what looked like the same time.

"They're not crossing each other," Fia said. "They're running parallel."

"Like a formation," Lyra said.

Nobody answered that right away. Ziya crouched low near the edge of the tracks, tracing one set with a gloved finger without touching it, and her brow drew tight in the particular way it did when a number wasn't adding up somewhere.

"Duskfangs don't den anywhere near the Ridge Line," she said, mostly to herself. "They're a scrubland species. You'd find them out past Millcross, maybe as far as the forest fringe, never up here."

"Maybe this pack wandered," Alex said.

"Maybe." She didn't sound like she believed it. Her finger moved to the next print, the elongated drag-belly pattern of something that had no business being anywhere near open rock either. "And the Serpent-types stay in the Fault Scarp tunnels. They don't come up to altitude. There's no food for them up here, no cover, nothing."

She trailed off there, still looking at the ground, and didn't finish the thought out loud. She didn't have to. Alex could feel the shape of it forming anyway, the same way he'd felt the Lynx's wrongness without being able to name it, a kind of pressure behind an idea that hadn't fully surfaced yet.

"So they didn't wander," Fia said slowly.

Ziya didn't answer that either. She just stood, brushing dirt from her knee, and looked out at the wider stretch of tracks like the answer might be sitting somewhere further along them if she looked hard enough.

Nobody filled the silence. Rhian glanced between the adults, waiting for someone to say the rest of it, and when nobody did, she looked back down at the tracks herself, like she might find it there instead.

"We should finish the grid," Anya said finally. "We're losing light."

It wasn't a dismissal of what Ziya had almost said. It was just true, and everyone treated it that way, turning back to the search with the same quiet focus as before, the unfinished thought riding along with them instead of getting resolved.

The rest of the recovery went quickly after that. What could be found, was found. What couldn't, wasn't dwelt on. Seraphine sealed the last case with a soft click, and the group stood for a moment at the edge of the site, not speaking, before Anya gave the signal to move out.

They loaded back into the Mule as the light started to shift toward late afternoon gold, and nobody brought the tracks up again on the ride out. It sat there anyway, unspoken, the way a held breath sits in a chest even after the danger's supposedly passed.

The terrain changed as they climbed. Scrub gave way to bare stone, and the wind picked up in a way that meant altitude, the kind of thin, constant push that scoured everything down to rock and grit. Alex watched it happen through the viewport, and somewhere in that climb, the weight of the recovery site started to loosen its grip on him, replaced by something sharper, more immediate.

Then the ridge opened up ahead of them, a long spine of stone cutting into the sky, and there it was: the territory the Ashwing had claimed as her own, visible at last, close enough now that there was no pretending the fight ahead was still someone else's problem.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.