Chapter 104: The Ones Who Were Afraid

The first thing Dinraal recognized was the way the Ashen stood.

The image was damaged. Half the lower horizon had dissolved into interference, and every few seconds the recording lost enough frames that movement became a series of disconnected positions.

He knew them anyway.

Tall figures beneath a red sky.

Weapons held close.

Bodies turned with the same terrible economy he remembered from battles fought before Hearth had a name.

Beside him, Isolde stopped writing.

The laboratory had gone quiet.

Asha replayed the last section.

The Ashen line shifted.

Something pale crossed the foreground too quickly for the damaged recorder to follow.

Then the image ended.

Dinraal leaned forward.

“Again.”

Asha obeyed.

He watched the line rather than the pale shape.

One figure stepped back.

Another turned toward it.

A third raised an arm and pointed beyond the edge of the recording.

Dinraal felt the old readiness move through him.

Silver spread over the backs of his hands.

“Where?”

Arcturus answered from the wall display.

“An outer survey relay. Beyond our regular patrol boundary.”

“How old?”

“The first signal reached one of the remote receivers eleven days ago. Most of it was noise. This came through the reconstruction this morning.”

Isolde looked up.

“Was anyone transmitting live?”

“We don’t know. The emergency marker repeats exactly. It may be automated.”

“Any names?”

“None.”

Dinraal watched the recording again.

The Ashen had not formed for an advance.

He had seen that arrangement before, across ruined ground, at the mouth of a passage his father had ordered held.

A withdrawing line.

Something was pushing them back.

“What about the pale shape?” Isolde asked.

Asha enlarged it.

The result was mostly broken light.

Something jointed.

Something moving too fast.

Dinraal thought of the pictures from Avalon.

Bone-colored bodies.

Wings.

Mouths.

He refused the conclusion before he could turn it into certainty.

“Can you recover more?”

“We’re trying,” Eve said.

Alexander stood beside the window with his arms folded.

“If there are people at that relay, they’ve been waiting a long time.”

“If,” Arcturus said.

Dinraal looked at the frozen Ashen line.

His father’s war had found them again.

Only this time, the Ashen were looking in the other direction.

“We send a reconnaissance ship,” he said.

Alexander’s gaze moved to him.

Dinraal did not pretend he meant someone else.

Isolde waited until they were alone before she spoke.

They had walked back to the house together. Dinraal carried the briefing in one hand, folded so tightly that the edge had begun to split.

She closed the kitchen door.

“How long?”

“Four days on site at most. Less if we find survivors we can bring out.”

“And the journey?”

“Cressa is calculating the route.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

He put the briefing down.

“I don’t know yet.”

She nodded.

The answer was difficult enough without making him disguise it.

Dinraal watched her.

“I can send Alexander.”

“Yes.”

“He knows what to look for.”

“Yes.”

He looked toward the window.

Isolde waited.

Finally, he said, “I know those formations.”

“I know you do.”

“If they’re withdrawing from something, I need to see what it is.”

“Then say that.”

He turned back.

She stood beside the table with her hands resting against the chair.

“Don’t ask me to make you feel better about leaving by pretending you haven’t decided.”

The words struck him hard enough that he looked down.

For a moment, she worried she had been cruel.

Then he nodded.

“You’re right.”

She came closer.

“I’m frightened.”

“So am I.”

“Of what you’ll find?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

He looked at her.

“Of leaving you here while I go looking for the thing I’ve spent my life trying to get away from.”

Isolde touched his wrist.

The silver had withdrawn again, but she could feel the tension in his hand.

“You aren’t going alone.”

“No.”

“You have a ship. A crew. A way back.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re going to look.”

He understood the emphasis.

“To look,” he agreed. “And to bring out anyone we can reach.”

“You’re not going to settle Bahamut’s war in four days.”

Dinraal closed his eyes briefly.

“No.”

She put her arms around him.

He held her at once.

For a little while, neither said anything.

The kitchen smelled faintly of bread. Someone had left the repaired rug crooked in the doorway. Above the table, a strip of afternoon light reached the edge of her notebook.

He had never had so many reasons to come back.

Isolde drew away enough to see his face.

“I’ll work with Eve. If there’s more in that transmission, we’ll find it.”

He nodded.

“And when you can send word, send word. Even if all you have to say is that you haven’t found anything.”

“I will.”

She rested his hand against her middle.

Nothing moved beneath it.

He looked down anyway.

Then back at her.

“I’m coming home.”

She wanted to ask him not to promise what the universe might refuse him.

Instead, she kissed him.

“Keep making decisions that help you do that.”

They left before dawn.

Aurelius came to the landing field with Isolde.

He did not give Dinraal a speech.

He checked the clasp at his shoulder, though it did not need checking, and kept his hand there for a moment afterward.

“Listen to your crew.”

“I do.”

“Then keep doing it.”

Dinraal nodded.

Gilgamesh waited beside the shuttle ramp with a bag that seemed too small for him.

Alexander was already aboard, reviewing the reconnaissance plan with Cressa.

Arcturus would keep the fleet at Hearth.

Tiamat had taken responsibility for the outer watch while the reconnaissance ship was away. No one wanted the investigation to become an invitation left open behind them.

Rhiannon had sent food.

Of course she had.

Dinraal took Isolde’s hands.

Around them, the landing field crew moved through the familiar tasks of departure.

Fuel connections released.

Cargo secured.

The pilot confirming clearances.

Ordinary work, carrying the weight of an extraordinary goodbye.

“I’ll be here,” Isolde said.

He smiled faintly.

“I know.”

“I mean when you come back. Don’t go straight to the laboratory and make me find you.”

He hesitated.

She narrowed her eyes.

“Dinraal.”

“I’ll send someone.”

“You’ll send yourself.”

Gilgamesh cleared his throat.

“For the record, I am willing to carry him.”

Dinraal looked over.

“You would enjoy that.”

“Immensely.”

Isolde smiled, though her eyes were bright.

Then she stepped close and kissed her husband.

Aurelius turned away.

The workers found other things to look at.

When they separated, Dinraal rested his forehead against hers.

He wanted to say something she could keep through the waiting.

Something stronger than reassurance.

All he could find was the truth.

“I love our life.”

Her fingers tightened around his.

“So do I.”

He carried that with him up the ramp.

The reconnaissance ship went dark before they reached the relay.

Cressa brought them in along the shadowed side of a broken moon, using its bulk to hide the last change in course. The bridge lights dimmed. The low vibration beneath Dinraal’s boots changed as the main drive fell quiet.

Beyond the forward display, the planet turned beneath long bands of red cloud.

Fire showed through them.

Not one battlefield.

Several.

Alexander stood at the tactical station.

“No traffic matching the old survey codes.”

“The relay?”

“Still repeating.”

“Can it hear us?”

“We haven’t called.”

Dinraal nodded.

They would listen first.

A passive probe separated from the ship and drifted ahead.

For several minutes, nothing changed.

Then its instruments cleared the edge of the moon.

The image sharpened.

Dinraal saw the Ashen ships first.

Dark shapes above the atmosphere, their fronts closing inward around structures he remembered too well. They occupied different heights, forming a broken lattice over one continent.

Below them, long streaks of darkness cut through the clouds.

Where the streaks touched the surface, fire spread.

Gilgamesh came to stand beside him.

“That is a great deal of effort.”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

The probe turned.

Something entered the upper atmosphere.

Long.

Pale.

Ribbed along its sides.

For an instant, Dinraal thought he was looking at the wreck of a ship falling end over end.

Then it opened.

The sides peeled apart.

Shapes poured out.

Wings spread in the thin red light.

The bridge became very quiet.

Alexander enlarged the nearest.

The recording held long enough to show six legs.

A pale body.

A head that opened into four parts.

Dinraal felt his mouth go dry.

He had seen drawings.

He had read accounts.

Neither had prepared him for the movement.

The creature folded its wings and struck an Ashen vessel from above.

More followed.

The image blurred as the probe adjusted.

“Save everything,” Dinraal said.

His voice sounded unfamiliar.

Cressa glanced back at him.

“Withdrawal route is clear.”

He looked at the tactical display.

Then at the swarm descending through the clouds.

“Keep it clear.”

On the first day, the Ashen held the upper plain.

The terrain beneath the clouds rose in broad shelves, cut by channels that might once have carried water. Towers stood along the highest ridge. Some had already fallen.

Dinraal watched through remote instruments from behind the moon.

He did not go down.

That decision would return to him afterward, carrying all the arguments he had already made and none of the comfort they should have provided.

They searched for people.

Signals.

Moving vehicles.

Shelters with power.

Anything that might explain the distress marker beyond an old emergency system repeating because nobody remained to silence it.

They found heat, but the battlefield was full of heat.

They found structures, but the Ashen had occupied or destroyed most of what the probe could resolve.

They found no voice.

At the plain’s edge, the first creatures reached the defensive line.

Dinraal watched the Ashen turn together.

For a moment, memory supplied a different landscape.

Another sky.

Bahamut’s voice giving orders behind him.

He blinked, and the red plain returned.

The Ashen fired.

Pale bodies broke.

Wings burned away.

A towering creature fell sideways into the channel below the ridge, striking two smaller ones as it went.

Gilgamesh exhaled.

“They can kill them.”

“Yes,” Alexander said.

Neither sounded relieved.

More creatures crossed the fallen bodies.

The Ashen shortened their line.

Dinraal recognized the command before the movement finished.

He pointed.

“They’re refusing the flank.”

Alexander marked it.

“Why?”

“The ground on that side won’t hold. They know it.”

The pale creatures struck there a few minutes later.

The Ashen yielded the broken shelf and burned everything trying to climb it.

For a while, it worked.

Then the probe showed the ground behind the attackers.

Dinraal leaned closer.

Bodies were moving.

Not rising.

Being dragged.

Creatures pulled their own dead away from the line.

Others brought pieces of Ashen armor and bodies they had seized in the first assault.

They carried them into a depression beyond the ridge.

The probe could not see the bottom.

“Change the angle,” Dinraal said.

Cressa checked the moon’s position.

“We can release another. We cannot move this ship farther out without giving them a better look.”

“Another probe.”

She nodded.

It took nearly an hour.

Dinraal remained standing the whole time.

When the second image resolved, Gilgamesh stopped speaking halfway through a sentence.

The depression was full.

Pale bodies bent over the dead.

Mouths opened and closed.

Behind them, beneath a trembling mass of wings and limbs, something new began to move.

Alexander lowered his hand from the console.

“No,” he said softly.

The new thing pulled itself free.

It turned toward the ridge.

Then it ran.

Isolde learned how many tasks could fit inside a day when she was trying not to count the hours.

She worked at the relay.

She visited the clinic.

She helped Nessa mount the nursery panel beneath the covered reading space and listened while three children argued about whether their names should go above or below the older ones.

She went home for supper because Aurelius came to collect her.

Then she returned to the laboratory.

Eve did not tell her to stop.

She gave her a chair and the part of the transmission that still needed language work.

The Ashen designation had no clean equivalent in the old dictionary they shared with Avalon.

They had described enemies before.

They had sent accounts of battles and fragments of history.

But descriptions were not enough now.

Isolde opened a new entry.

Ashen.

She wrote what the word meant to them.

Not simply a color.

Not the remains of a fire.

A people.

An enemy whose name had survived longer than the banners under which generations had fought them.

She stopped at Bahamut’s name.

Then added it carefully.

Eve read over her shoulder.

“Do you want this sent now?”

“Not without the new pictures. We’d give them questions and no means to answer them.”

Eve nodded.

Asha sat at the far table with the damaged initial recording.

She had enlarged the pale blur again.

“It could be the same.”

“Yes,” Isolde said.

“The structure suggests—”

“I know.”

Asha looked up.

Isolde heard the sharpness in her own voice.

“I’m sorry.”

Asha shook her head.

“No. I’ve been saying it for hours.”

They sat in silence for a little while.

Then Asha said, “He has a ship.”

Isolde looked at her.

“A good one. Cressa knows how to get it out.”

“Yes.”

“And Alexander won’t let him decide alone.”

“No.”

Asha folded her hands.

“I’m trying to be helpful.”

Isolde reached across and touched them.

“You are.”

Outside, the field lay dark beneath the stars.

The relay kept its hour.

Three.

A pause.

One.

Isolde listened to the familiar rhythm.

Then she went back to the dictionary.

On the second day, the Ashen lost the ridge.

They did not break.

That was what Dinraal would remember.

The withdrawal remained orderly even when the ground beneath the nearest tower gave way. Units turned in sequence. The rear line held while the others crossed the next shelf.

An Ashen ship descended through the cloud and cut a black path across the advancing mass.

The probe lost its image for several seconds.

When it returned, the shelf was empty.

For one impossible moment, Dinraal thought they had cleared it.

Then something pale climbed over the far edge.

Behind it came another.

Then so many that the ground disappeared.

The Ashen ship pulled up.

The swarm rose after it.

Cressa shifted the display.

“Movement above the western limb.”

A pod was passing beyond the planet.

Not falling.

Drifting along a course that would take it across the moon’s shadow.

Toward them.

Dinraal turned.

“How close?”

“Close enough that I don’t want to light the drive.”

Alexander was already shutting down the probe link.

The bridge fell darker.

The last battlefield image froze on the screen.

Gilgamesh took his hand off the back of Dinraal’s chair.

Nobody spoke.

The pod moved across the external view.

It was farther away than the image made it seem.

Dinraal told himself that.

Then stopped, because distance was not the same as safety.

A seam opened along its side.

Pale movement showed within.

Cressa made a small correction with the cold maneuvering system.

The ship drifted closer to the moon.

Rock filled half the display.

The pod turned.

Dinraal’s silver rose over his throat.

Alexander looked at him once.

Not a warning.

A question.

Dinraal shook his head.

No weapons.

No signal.

No reason to become something the creature needed to investigate.

The pod continued turning.

Its open side faced them.

For several seconds, Dinraal could see wings folded against bodies packed too closely together.

Then the moon passed between them.

The screen went black.

Cressa held the ship motionless against the slow curve of rock.

One minute.

Two.

Dinraal heard someone breathing too fast behind him.

He did not turn.

At last, the passive sensor caught the pod moving away toward the planet’s night side.

Cressa waited another ten minutes before bringing the bridge lights back.

Gilgamesh sat down.

It was the first time Dinraal had seen him do so without making a remark.

Alexander looked at the frozen battlefield.

“We have enough to establish the threat.”

Dinraal nodded.

“We still don’t know if anyone is alive down there.”

“No.”

They looked at each other.

Then Cressa said, “One more passive sweep. From here. We don’t move closer.”

Dinraal accepted it.

A compromise.

A limit.

A way to keep the promise he had made in his kitchen.

On the third day, the Ashen tried to leave.

Dinraal saw it before the instruments confirmed the change.

The ships lowered.

Their formation tightened over the remaining ground position.

Figures moved toward the landing zones.

Alexander watched the same image.

“They’re extracting.”

“Yes.”

One ship rose.

It reached the cloud layer.

A second followed.

The first opened a path through the circling swarm, and for several seconds the maneuver held together with such precision that Dinraal almost admired it.

Then a pod struck the second vessel.

It broke across the hull.

Creatures spilled over the dark surface.

The ship turned too sharply.

The first slowed.

Dinraal leaned forward.

“Don’t.”

Gilgamesh looked at him.

On the screen, the first vessel came back.

Not to rescue.

To cover the damaged ship’s climb.

Fire crossed the space between them.

For a moment, the creatures burned away.

Then the second ship’s side opened.

Not an explosion.

A collapse.

Something had gone through the hull.

The vessel fell into the landing zone.

The first pulled up again.

Too late.

The swarm closed around it.

Dinraal stood very still.

He had fought the Ashen long enough to know what they looked like when they were angry.

He knew how they moved when an attack failed, when a flank broke, when an officer died.

This was different.

Ships abandoned their formation.

Signals crowded the channels their instruments could hear but not translate.

On the ground, units began moving before the units behind them were ready.

The last retreat narrowed into a struggle for space beneath the ships that remained.

The Ashen were frightened.

The recognition struck harder than the sight of them dying.

Fear made them familiar for an instant.

Not innocent.

Not forgiven.

Alive, and desperate not to stop being alive.

Dinraal thought of Bahamut.

Then of every person whose name had been erased by the war.

He could not turn the enemy into something simple.

Not even now.

Below the ridge, the pale bodies kept feeding.

Alexander cut the magnification.

“We withdraw at first clearance.”

Dinraal looked at him.

Then at the screen.

He wanted one more answer.

A name.

A signal.

Someone they could save.

The instruments offered none.

“Yes,” he said.

The Ashen position ended on the fourth day.

There was no final charge.

No single blow that made the difference between holding and losing.

The line became three lines.

Then isolated pockets.

Then moving points on a plain that belonged to something else.

The last tower fell while they were preparing to leave.

Dinraal watched it lean into the smoke.

The insects did not pause to celebrate.

They went to the fallen.

Their own.

The Ashen.

Everything.

A new mass stirred behind the ruins.

Cressa turned the ship away.

Dinraal made himself let her.

They withdrew along the moon’s far side, waited until the planet had fallen beneath the sensor horizon, and brought the drive online.

No contact followed.

No weapon struck them.

The escape was quiet enough to feel unreal.

Gilgamesh came to stand beside Dinraal.

For a while, they watched the stars stretch across the display.

Then he said, “We didn’t leave anyone calling.”

Dinraal stared ahead.

“We don’t know that.”

“We searched.”

“Yes.”

“With everything we had.”

Dinraal said nothing.

Gilgamesh rested a hand on his shoulder.

It was unusually gentle.

“Come sit down.”

“I need to finish the report.”

“Alexander is finishing the report.”

“I need to check the images.”

“They will still be dreadful after you’ve slept.”

Dinraal almost laughed.

Almost.

He went to the small cabin assigned to him.

He took off his boots.

Sat on the bed.

Closed his eyes.

The depression beneath the ridge waited for him.

The new creature pulling itself free.

The Ashen ship turning back.

He opened his eyes again.

Hours later, when Alexander came to check on him, the boots were still beside the bed.

Dinraal had not slept.

Isolde was waiting when the shuttle landed.

She saw him before the ramp reached the ground.

For a moment, relief was so complete that she did not notice anything else.

Then she saw his face.

Dinraal came down slowly.

His armor was withdrawn.

There was no blood on him.

No wound she could identify.

She put her arms around him.

He held her with such force that she knew something terrible had happened before anyone spoke.

“You’re home,” she said.

He nodded against her hair.

“Everyone?”

“Yes.”

She drew back.

His eyes moved over her face, checking.

Always checking.

“I’m all right,” she said.

He swallowed.

“Good.”

“What happened?”

For a moment, he seemed unable to answer.

Behind him, Alexander spoke quietly with the landing crew. Cressa remained at the ramp, watching the sealed data case being carried down.

Gilgamesh stood beside it with both hands hanging at his sides.

Dinraal looked toward the laboratory road.

“We need to call Lucas.”

Isolde did not remind him that he had promised to come home first.

He had come to her.

She could see that it had taken effort.

“All right.”

He looked at her again.

“The Ashen lost.”

She waited.

He shook his head.

“No. I don’t mean a position. I don’t mean a ship.”

His voice had become rough.

“They knew what was coming. They fought it for days.”

Isolde felt the cold begin beneath her ribs.

“The creatures?”

He nodded.

“The ones in the pictures?”

“I need them to tell me.”

She took his hand.

They walked to the laboratory together.

Asha saw the first clean image and began speaking too quickly.

She knew she was doing it.

That did not stop her.

The body.

The wings.

The mouth.

The reproductive mass behind the line.

She had diagrams from Avalon, incomplete records, sketches based on sketches, observations stripped of coordinates and carried across the relay with meanings that had not always survived translation.

Now the image before her had depth.

Movement.

A world being consumed behind it.

“It’s the same structure,” she said. “Look at the joint placement. And the feeding mass. Eve, the Merrow record—”

“I have it.”

“No, the earlier one. The eaten world. The—”

“Asha.”

She did not hear.

Dinraal stood at the long table with both hands flat on the wood.

Isolde sat beside the dictionary.

The laboratory filled around them.

Aramaeis came in with a stick because his knee had been troubling him. Aurelius arrived a few minutes later. Enna stood near the relay cradle with her arms folded.

Nobody asked whether the call could wait until the hour.

Eve opened the channel.

Asha began sending.

Too much.

Images, descriptions, fragments of the report.

The relay filled with lines.

Isolde saw the translation buffer begin to fail.

“Asha. Slow down.”

“I need them to see—”

“They won’t see it if they can’t read it.”

The scientist stopped.

Her hands hovered above the controls.

For the first time, Isolde saw how badly they were shaking.

Then the answer came.

Slower.

One line.

One word.

We are here.

Asha covered her mouth.

Eve took over the transmission controls.

Isolde put a hand on Asha’s shoulder.

“Start with the ship.”

So they did.

The distress marker.

The damaged first recording.

Dinraal’s journey.

The red sky.

The Ashen.

Isolde entered the new word herself.

Then its meaning.

The ones Dinraal had fought all his life.

The war his father had known.

And his father before him.

She did not look at Dinraal while she wrote Bahamut’s name.

She knew he was looking at it.

The next picture showed the pale creature.

The relay went quiet.

Dinraal leaned forward.

“Ask him.”

Isolde looked up.

He kept his hands on the table.

“Lucas. Have you seen these?”

The answer took most of the night.

They knew parts of it.

That made hearing the whole worse.

Vessa’s sealed arch.

The world beyond it stripped to stone.

The damaged correctors.

The iron eaten through.

The valley where everything taken from a world had been gathered and made into more.

Dinraal listened.

He did not interrupt.

Isolde sat beside him and wrote the words that needed to survive the night clearly.

Some of the earlier reports had been careful summaries.

This was not.

Lucas was telling him what he had seen.

What he had felt.

What had answered when he reached toward it.

Nothing.

Only the recognition of something warm enough to take.

The queens’ loss came next.

Silver consumed beyond recovery.

Isolde looked at her bracelets.

For the first time in years, she was conscious of them as something that could be lost in a way mending would not answer.

Beside her, Dinraal’s hand closed.

Merrow followed.

The children in the pens.

The bait.

The Hands brought down into the swarm.

They had heard the outcome.

Now they heard what it meant to the people who had stood beneath that sky.

When the final name came, Isolde had already written it.

The Hungry.

Dinraal stared at the page.

They had never seen them before this journey.

Not like this.

Not near the routes that led toward Hearth.

He looked up.

“The Ashen had.”

Eve waited.

“They knew what they were fighting.”

Isolde translated.

“They weren’t surprised.”

Another pause.

Dinraal swallowed.

“They were frightened.”

His voice broke slightly on the last word.

Isolde turned toward him.

“I have never seen them frightened.”

No one tried to reassure him.

Aurelius stood behind his chair.

One hand rested on his shoulder.

The answer from Avalon came slowly.

Two fronts.

The same enemy consuming different edges of wars they had mistaken for separate.

Dinraal looked at the maps.

Their own system.

The survey boundary.

The unknown reaches beyond.

Then the maps Avalon had sent.

Useful places with no shared coordinates.

Distances they could not put on the same page.

Isolde rubbed her eyes.

They had been trying to build a defense from fragments passed through a piece of silver.

She could see the insufficiency now as plainly as a gap in a wall.

The next message named it.

This was no longer enough.

Dinraal looked toward the relay.

“No,” he said.

Isolde wrote it.

“No. It isn’t.”

He remembered a question Lucas had asked him long before.

Whether Bahamut had known the silver was never only theirs.

At the time, Dinraal had not known how to answer.

He still did not.

He looked at his wrist.

The same material held the relay open.

The same material lived in people on a world he had never walked.

Children had been born with it.

Queens carried histories in it.

And now something was eating it.

Dinraal drew a slow breath.

“I would like to stand in the same room as him.”

Eve looked up.

“Lucas?”

“Yes.”

He repeated the old question.

Isolde put it into the dictionary as carefully as she could.

Then his answer.

He would probably never know what his father had understood.

But he wanted to stand beside the person who had asked.

For a while, nothing came back.

Dinraal sat down.

He had reached the end of something.

Not endurance.

He could keep standing if he needed to.

But the certainty that one more hour of his own attention might somehow make every distance manageable had finally failed him.

Isolde took his hand.

On the other side of the table, Enna watched the relay cradle.

It held without anyone touching it.

A small piece of shared work.

They had once believed that impossible too.

The next messages were strange.

A discussion.

A proposal.

Kyria could cut an arch where she stood.

Someone had to stand at the far end.

Someone who belonged.

Dinraal looked toward the floor.

Then back at the incoming words.

He could stand.

But he could not do what Kyria’s cutters did.

No one pretended otherwise.

The silence lengthened.

Then the silver changed.

Isolde felt it first as a small movement beneath her fingers.

Dinraal lifted his head.

Asha stepped toward the cradle.

“What was that?”

No one answered.

Something had passed through.

Not a voice.

Not the ordinary pulse.

A question.

Dinraal could not understand it.

Yet the stone beneath his feet seemed suddenly less inert than it had a moment before.

Asha crouched.

She put her hand near the floor, then drew it back.

“Eve.”

“I see it.”

“No. Not the reading.”

Asha looked up.

Her fear had not gone.

Something else had joined it.

“The floor is listening.”

They moved the table.

That was the first practical thing anyone could think to do.

Gilgamesh had arrived sometime during the night. He took one end while Alexander took the other, and the long table that had held their maps, meals, quarrels, and reports slid away from the window.

Dinraal stood where it had been.

Isolde remained beside him.

The relay carried instructions and descriptions.

Cutters gathering on Avalon.

A new arch rising there.

Corin at the relay.

Thessaly beside him.

Dinraal looked at the little piece of silver on its cradle.

A child.

The thought nearly undid him.

He had come home with images of a battlefield he could not understand, and somewhere on another world a child was trying to make a way to him.

“What do I do?”

Isolde read the answer.

“Stand where you belong.”

He looked at her.

Then down at the floor.

He knelt and put both hands against the stone.

It was cold.

Familiar.

He had crossed it thousands of times.

He remembered entering this room with mud on his boots after the first survey. He remembered the window looking over unfinished ground. He remembered Isolde standing there with a packet of seeds.

He thought of the house.

The marks on the door.

Aurelius’s laugh.

Their child.

Here.

He belonged here.

The silver flowed from his wrists into a thin shining contact against the floor.

He did not pull.

He did not command it to become a door.

He waited.

Something answered from very far away.

And the stone moved.

Isolde stepped back.

Dinraal stayed where he was.

A ridge rose between his hands.

Slowly at first.

Then higher.

The laboratory fell so quiet that they could hear the small sounds of grit settling.

Stone curved upward.

Their stone.

Grey beneath the lamplight.

A pattern formed along it.

Isolde leaned closer.

She knew that shape.

Water, caught in lines that seemed to move when she tried to follow them.

She spoke the word.

Eve sent it.

Minute followed minute.

Dinraal’s hands remained against the growing arch.

He could feel effort somewhere beyond him, but he could not measure whose, or how much.

He did not reach for more.

He held his place.

At eleven minutes, the space inside the arch changed.

The far wall disappeared.

In its place stood a courtyard beneath another sky.

Nobody moved.

Dinraal had imagined meeting Lucas.

He had pictured a doorway.

A handshake.

Some awkwardness over words.

He had not imagined the shock of seeing another world occupy the space where his own laboratory wall should have been.

Stone beneath lamplight.

People in nightclothes and armor.

A woman with a baby against her chest.

A grey-haired woman kneeling behind two small children.

And Lucas.

A face that had once arrived a line at a time.

Now whole.

Now looking back.

Dinraal took his hands from the arch.

The stone remained.

Beside him, Isolde made a small sound.

He turned.

Her notebook was pressed against her chest.

She was staring through the doorway with tears running silently down her face.

He reached for her.

She caught his hand.

Then something large moved between their legs.

The First Weapon settled directly in the opening, occupying the part of it anyone would need to use.

Even now.

Even here.

A laugh escaped someone on the other side.

Dinraal almost joined it.

Then he saw the boy beside the relay.

Corin.

Small enough that the distance from the floor to Dinraal’s face would have made a conversation absurd.

He was looking at him very carefully.

Dinraal knelt.

On his own side of the arch.

No one crossed.

No one hurried him.

He looked into the child’s eyes.

Then he said hello.

His own language.

The simplest word he had.

The boy watched him for a long time.

Dinraal waited.

He had learned, at great cost, how much could be lost by making someone answer before they were ready.

At last, Corin spoke.

Dinraal did not know the language.

He knew the word.

Behind the boy, the woman kneeling with her hands on the children’s backs drew a careful breath.

Lucas looked down at his son.

Then back at Dinraal.

Something passed between the two men that no dictionary could have carried.

Not agreement.

Not a promise.

The recognition that the other was there.

At last.

Okafor was the one who said they should wait until morning.

Dinraal knew her before the translation reached him.

He knew the stance.

The tired eyes.

The person measuring how much could be asked of everyone before exhaustion began making decisions in their place.

He listened.

Then nodded.

“In the morning.”

Isolde wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.

“She’s right.”

She looked through the arch toward Lucas.

Then, with an expression Dinraal knew very well, she added that he ought to rest.

The woman holding the baby laughed.

The sound crossed the threshold without delay.

Dinraal looked sharply at the clock above the laboratory door.

Eve was already comparing it with the reference coming through the relay.

Asha whispered something he could not hear.

“What?”

She looked at him.

“They agree.”

He looked back through the arch.

No drag in the conversation.

No uncertain interval.

No image waiting to become complete.

The same moment.

Isolde stood beside him.

Their hands found one another.

On the other side, people began moving with the reluctant practicality of those who knew that sleeping was sensible and had no desire to leave.

The children were gathered up.

The baby turned her face toward the doorway.

Dinraal watched her for a moment.

Vessa.

The girl whose arrival had accompanied that distant opening in the silver.

He did not know whether any of those things belonged together.

Tonight, he had no strength left to force them into an explanation.

A woman with a hammer arrived later.

Hesk.

She inspected the arch with the severe attention of someone whose trust was earned by stone and workmanship, not wonder.

Dinraal watched her prepare the means to close it if necessary.

He understood.

The arch was a road.

Roads carried danger too.

Nobody objected.

A young woman from Hearth took the opposite watch.

Two sides.

Two people standing where each could see the other.

Dinraal looked at Isolde.

For the first time since the red sky, he could imagine closing his eyes.

They did not go home.

Not yet.

Aurelius brought blankets to the small room adjoining the laboratory.

Rhiannon brought food and refused to discuss whether anyone wanted it.

Dinraal ate because Isolde put the bowl in his hands.

She ate beside him.

Outside their open door, the new arch stood quietly in the place where their world had ended that morning.

Voices came through occasionally.

Unfamiliar footsteps.

A cup being set down on stone.

Ordinary sounds from an impossible distance.

When the bowl was empty, Dinraal set it aside.

His hands had begun shaking.

Isolde took them.

“You can stop now.”

He looked at her.

“The report is sent. The ship is home. Alexander has the watch.”

He tried to answer.

Nothing came.

She moved closer.

For days, he had held the images away from the people he loved because they were not yet here to see them.

Now they were here.

Now she knew.

The Ashen falling back.

The dead dragged into the depression.

The new bodies running out.

He bent forward until his forehead rested against hers.

“I couldn’t do anything.”

She held him.

“You brought us what you saw.”

“I watched them.”

“Yes.”

“I watched.”

Her fingers tightened around his.

She did not tell him that made it easy.

She did not ask him to decide tonight what mercy he owed an enemy that had shaped the grief of his whole life.

“You came back,” she said.

He swallowed.

Then looked toward the open door.

Beyond it, people on two worlds kept watch over the same threshold.

Isolde followed his gaze.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we talk to them in the same room.”

He nodded.

Tomorrow there would be maps.

Questions.

A council that included people who had seen the same horror and lived long enough to begin preparing for it.

Tonight, there was a narrow bed, his wife beside him, and a door he did not have to hold open with his own hands.

Dinraal lay down.

Isolde settled against him.

For a while, he listened to the voices beyond the wall.

Then, at last, he slept.