Vol 2: Chapter 61

The trip back to Ironwood Junction took most of the day, the Iron Mule eating up distance at a steady, unhurried pace now that nothing was chasing them. Alex spent most of it half asleep against the cargo wall, the adrenaline long since drained out of him and replaced with the kind of tiredness that sat in his joints instead of his head. By the time the Canopy Quarter's tiered lights came into view through the viewport, the sky had already gone the deep blue of early evening, and the Warden Hall was waiting the way it always did, lit up and patient, like it had nowhere else to be.

Thane was already at her desk when Alex was shown in, a stack of permit paperwork pushed to one side and a fresh page waiting in front of her. She didn't stand when he came in. She never did until there was a reason to.

"Sit," she said. "Walk me through it."

Alex dropped into the chair across from her, still feeling the Liger's damaged leg in his own back somehow, a phantom ache from hours of favoring it through the descent.

"It was supposed to be the Ashwing. Just her." He rubbed a hand over his jaw before he kept going. "It turned into four."

Thane didn't react beyond a slight narrowing of her eyes, the kind of look that meant she was already sorting the information into whatever mental ledger she kept for things like this.

"Four Titans."

"An Obsidian-Wing Petras. Two Spine-Ridge Boars. And the Ashwing." Alex counted them off without much drama, the way you'd list parts off a manifest. "None of them should have been working together. A Petras and a pair of Boars don't hunt the same ground, let alone side by side."

"But they did."

"They did. It felt wrong the second I saw it, before I could even say why." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees. "There was someone directing them. A figure, off at a distance, not fighting, just watching and moving pieces around like we were the ones on a board."

Thane set her pen down.

"You're saying someone was controlling four Titans at once."

"I'm saying it looked that way, and we found a way to test it." Alex kept his voice level, the way he always did when he wanted to sound more certain than he actually was underneath it. "Lyra took a shot at the figure from range. Right after, one of the Boars lost whatever coordination it had. Dropped out of the fight completely, like the leash on it had just been cut."

She's going to ask who it was. She always asks who it was.

"Did anyone get a look at them?"

"No." Alex shook his head once. "They were gone before we could close the distance. No face, no marks, nothing we could put a name or a description to."

Thane held his gaze for a long moment, the furrow between her brows deepening slightly, and then let it go with a short exhale through her nose.

"That's not nothing," she said. "But it's not something I can act on yet either. Note it. If it happens again, we'll have more to work with."

"That's what I figured you'd say."

"Good. Then we agree on something." A trace of dry humor sat under the words, gone almost as soon as it appeared. "Now tell me about the Ashwing herself. And the leg."

Alex walked her through the rest of it in short order, the way she liked her reports, facts first and feelings kept out of it entirely. The Ashwing's death got exactly one sentence, said plainly, no more weight put on it than the words themselves already carried. The Liger's leg came next, the field repair he'd done on the actuator, solid enough to get them home but nothing he'd trust for another real fight without proper tools. Anya's ribs got a mention too, bruised, not broken, already being looked at by the Hall's own medic.

Thane took it all in without interrupting, and when he finished, she gave a single nod, the kind that meant the report itself was closed.

There was one more thing.

Alex reached into his jacket and set the pendant on the desk between them, the metal catching the lamp light in a way that still bothered him for reasons he couldn't fully explain.

"Ziya found this at the fight site. It doesn't match anything we've seen before. No guild mark, no maker's stamp, nothing." He nudged it an inch closer. "You ever seen anything like it?"

Thane picked it up and turned it over once, twice, her thumb running along the edge the way she'd run a hand along a wall she was checking for weak spots.

"No." She set it back down, slower than she'd picked it up. "I haven't. And I don't like that I haven't."

"That's about where I landed too."

"Leave it with me." Thane's eyes stayed on the pendant a moment longer before she finally looked back up at him. "I've got contacts who might recognize the work, even if I don't. I'll find out what I can."

"I appreciate it."

"Don't thank me yet. Thank me if I actually find something." The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile, more the ghost of one. "For now, it's just one more question sitting on a pile of them."

She pulled open the top drawer of her desk and came out with a sealed permit folder, setting it down where the pendant had been a moment before.

"The contract's closed. Crag-Stalkers, and now the Ashwing. Both confirmed." She slid the folder across the desk toward him. "This is yours. Same as we agreed."

Alex looked down at it before he picked it up, the Chasm's seal pressed into the wax closure, unmistakable even upside down.

"That was fast."

"You did the work. I don't see a reason to sit on it." Thane leaned back slightly, the chair creaking under the shift in weight. "Get some rest. All of you. That's not a suggestion."

"Wasn't planning on arguing."

"Good."

Two knuckles came down once against the desk, quiet and final, the small sound she made whenever a decision in her own head had finished settling. Alex had noticed it before without ever asking what it meant. He still didn't ask.

The meeting ended there, brief and businesslike in the way most of their conversations were, and Alex found himself back out on the Canopy Quarter's open walkway a few minutes later with the folder tucked under one arm and the evening air doing more to wake him up than anything all day had managed.

He didn't open the permit again until he'd walked half the length of the tier, past the shuttered stalls and the last few Wardens heading off duty. When he finally did, the wax seal cracked clean under his thumb, and the paper inside said exactly what he already knew it would say. Access granted. His name, spelled correctly this time.

I finally got it.

He should have felt something bigger about that. Instead what came was quieter, and a lot less comfortable. He thought about the fight on the ridge, four Titans instead of one, the Liger's leg buckling under a hit that never should have connected in the first place, the whole team stretched thinner than he liked to admit even to himself. That was the fight that nearly broke them, and the Chasm was supposed to be worse. Everyone who'd ever talked about it said so, Thane included, in her own clipped way.

If four Titans almost put us on the ground, what happens down there.

He kept walking, the permit's weight in his hand doing very little to answer that question.

The honest answer, the one he didn't love, was that he wasn't ready. Not yet. Maybe not for a good while longer. It wasn't the kind of thought that came with any particular sting to it, no shame riding along behind it, just a plain, unflattering fact sitting where he could finally look straight at it instead of around it.

He kept the permit anyway. He'd earned it, and there was no sense pretending otherwise just because he wasn't ready to use it. But somewhere between the Warden Hall and the lower tier stairs, his thinking moved off the Chasm entirely and landed somewhere else.

The production facility. Thane had already said yes to that, weeks back now, back before the Ashwing job had swallowed every hour he had. He'd asked for it, she'd agreed to it, and then he'd let the whole idea sit untouched while he chased the next contract instead, and the one after that. A proper facility. Real tools, real space, something that wasn't a leased room with barely enough clearance for one Zoid at a time and a field kit for everything else.

I've had the yes this whole time. I just never did anything with it.

That was the thought that stuck, more than the Chasm, more than the fight, more than the four Titans and the figure who'd gotten away clean. He was standing on solid ground with somewhere to build, and he'd spent months looking past it toward something he wasn't ready for yet.

By the time he reached the stairs down to the lower tier, the decision had already made itself, quiet and unhurried, the same way most of the real ones did. The Chasm could wait. It would still be there once he'd built something worth walking into it with.

For now, there was a facility sitting on paper that had waited long enough.

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