Vol 2: Chapter 60

The Mule sat where they'd left it, hatch open, its idle engine ticking over in the cold air. By the time Alex made it back down the slope, most of the gear was already loaded, cases stacked in rows along the cargo wall, nobody talking much as they worked.

He climbed the last stretch of loose rock and set his own case down next to the others. His hands felt heavier than the case did.

Fia was securing a strap across the last row of cases, her knuckles scraped raw, one sleeve torn open at the shoulder. She didn't look up.

"Room for one more?" Alex asked.

"Always." She shoved the case in without waiting for him to hand it over.

Nobody moved fast. Lyra sat on the edge of the Mule's ramp, cleaning grit out of her rifle's action with slow, mechanical patience, the same motion she probably could have done with her eyes closed. Outside, helmet off, Rhian leaned against the Arosaurer's leg, staring at nothing in particular. Seraphine crouched near her open kit, checking supplies she'd already checked once.

Alex left the loading to the others and crossed the last stretch of open ground toward the Liger Zero, still standing where the fight had ended, weight canted onto its left side.

The right leg held its position, but barely. A thin line of hydraulic fluid had dried down the plating below the knee joint, and the actuator itself sat at an angle that no undamaged leg would hold on its own.

Alex rested a hand against the Liger's flank, over a plate still warm from the fight.

"Let's see what we're working with," he said.

He crouched by the leg and ran his fingers along the seam where the actuator met the housing, tracing the misalignment until he found where the joint had slipped out of its proper seat.

GRRNK.

The sound came low, rattling at the end, nothing like the sharp servo-clicks the Liger used when it wanted to move.

Alex pulled a wrench and a pressure clamp from his tool satchel and got to work, bracing the actuator housing with one hand while he forced the joint back into alignment with the other. The hydraulic line had shifted loose from its coupling. He reseated it, tightened the clamp down over the seam, and ran a manual reset through the leg's control cluster from the small panel below the knee.

The leg settled with a soft hiss, weight distributing evenly across all four joints for the first time since the fight ended.

"That'll hold until we get you back to a proper bay," Alex said, wiping his hands on his pants. "Don't push it, but you can walk on it now."

The Liger's head turned toward him, enough that one optic caught the gray afternoon light.

RRRT. RRT-RRT.

Alex allowed himself something close to a smile. "Yeah. You are." He gave the leg one last visual check before stepping back. "Come on. Let's get you moving."

Anya climbed the Mule's ramp last, favoring one side, and Alex made his way back over, casting one glance behind him at the Liger shifting its weight more evenly across its remaining three good legs.

Fia was already stretched out on an empty crate by the time Alex found his own seat, and he let his shoulders drop for the first time in what felt like hours.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"She's dead," Alex said finally. "The Ashwing."

It came out flatter than he meant it to. Not cold, just tired, the kind of sentence a person says once and doesn't know what else to add to.

Rhian's head tilted at that, but she didn't say anything back. Fia's hands stilled on the strap for a second before she kept working. Nobody argued with it, nobody tried to make it feel like more or less than what it was. The words just sat there in the cargo hold with the rest of them, and after a moment, the quiet felt easy again, the same way it had before anyone spoke.

Ziya broke it, eventually, holding up the pendant Rhian had recovered, turning it slowly between two fingers under the Mule's overhead light.

"Anyone want to guess what this is supposed to be?" she asked.

She held it out for a beat, the pendant's dark metal catching the light at an angle, the symbol on its face too worn or too deliberately strange to place at a glance. Fia glanced over and shook her head. Lyra looked up from her rifle just long enough to squint at it before going back to work.

"No idea," Rhian said. "Never seen anything like it."

Neither have I. Alex leaned forward, elbows on his knees, studying the symbol from where he sat. A guild mark would have meant paperwork somewhere, a name attached to a registered contract. This didn't look like it belonged to anyone who filed paperwork.

Ziya brought it back in close, tilting it another few degrees, tracing the edge of the symbol with her thumbnail like that might tell her something the eye couldn't.

"It's not guild issue. Not Warden issue either." She caught the light against the symbol one more time. "No maker's mark, no serial etching, nothing standard about the metal."

"So it's nothing," Fia said.

"So it's nothing yet." Ziya set it down in her lap, still looking at it. "There's a difference."

Maybe it's not supposed to mean anything to us. That thought lodged uncomfortably in Alex's chest. Whoever wore it probably never expected to lose it, and definitely never expected six strangers on a ridge to be the ones turning it over afterward. Or maybe that's exactly the point of it, something meant to be recognized by the people who already know what it is, and invisible to everyone else.

He thought of the Lynx again, the way it had simply stopped the moment its work was done. Whatever that pendant belonged to might move through the world the same way. Quiet until it wasn't. Gone before anyone could ask it a real question.

Nobody had an answer for that either. Alex watched Ziya tuck the pendant away in a sealed pouch on her belt, careful and unhurried, the same way she filed anything that didn't have an answer attached to it yet.

The quiet stretched out again, easier this time, less a hole than a rest.

"Your rifle's going to end up cleaner than the day you bought it," Fia said, eyeing Lyra. "At this rate."

"Better clean than jammed."

"Didn't say it was a bad thing." Fia tied off the last strap and dropped down onto the crate beside Alex, stretching one leg out in front of her. "Just saying you've been at that for twenty minutes."

"It settles me." Lyra didn't look up. "You've got your own ways of doing that. This is mine."

"Fair enough."

Seraphine snapped her kit closed, finally satisfied with whatever count she'd been running, and glanced over at Rhian.

"You holding up okay?"

Rhian shrugged, the motion small and automatic. "Tired. Nothing new."

"Good tired or bad tired?"

"Tired-tired." A faint smile pulled at one corner of Rhian's mouth. "It's a whole separate category, apparently."

That got a small laugh out of Fia, quiet, more relief than humor, and for a moment the cargo hold felt almost normal again, six people crammed into a space too small for all their gear, teasing each other because the alternative was silence.

Anya reached over and pulled the hatch control, and the ramp began to rise, sealing off the gray light of the ridge outside.

"Everyone strapped in?" she asked, not really waiting for an answer before she moved forward toward the cockpit.

Outside, the Liger Zero straightened at the sound of the Mule's engines, testing its weight on the repaired leg before easing into a relaxed stance.

The Mule lifted off a moment later, engines catching with a low groan, and the Liger fell in beside it on the ground below, keeping pace easily now that the joint held, the two of them moving out together the same way they'd traveled every stretch of this journey so far. Alex watched the site shrink through the narrow viewport, the scorched rock and broken ground already turning into just another patch of gray on a gray ridge, indistinguishable from a dozen others they'd flown over these past few days.

Anya sank back into her seat once the climb leveled out, wincing as she shifted her weight.

"We'll head straight back," she said, to no one in particular and everyone at once. "Report to the guild, get everyone looked at properly, and then everyone rests. No exceptions this time."

"No arguments here," Fia said.

Lyra didn't answer, but she finally set the rifle down across her knees, done for now.

Alex leaned his head back against the Mule's cold wall and let his eyes close, one hand still resting on the comm panel that kept him linked to the Liger's slow, steady progress below. The pendant's shape still sat somewhere behind his thoughts, unanswered, the same way the Lynx's wrongness had never quite gone away either. Whatever it was, it would still be there waiting when he woke up.

For now, the only thing that mattered was that both of them were still moving, and everyone in the Mule was still breathing.

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