"They’re moving," Dain said.
Revan stepped beside him and followed the Marshal’s gaze to the ridge. It took a mont. The Dead Zone’s gray-on-gray palette swallowed everything, but then he caught it.
Two figures at the base of the ridge, splitting apart. One east, one west. Low and fast.
"Any chance they’ll just surrender and walk away?" Revan asked.
"Absolutely not."
’Fuck, ’ Revan cursed inwardly.
They watched for another few seconds. The western figure disappeared behind the ridge’s far slope. The eastern one was angling toward the tail end of the wreckage, toward the cargo wagon.
"The one going west," Revan said.
"The assault team ca from the northwest ridge during the attack. I pulled thirty bodies. Their gear loadouts were staged, not carried long-distance. ans they had a forward camp nearby. Behind that ridge is the only terrain with enough cover."
"I noticed the sa thing," Dain said.
"Boot trails from the initial assault all converge from the northwest slope. If they cached communication equipnt anywhere, it’s there."
"Then we’ve got maybe twenty minutes before soone who matters finds out we’re alive."
Revan looked at Dain. Dain looked back. Neither of them needed to explain what happened after that.
"The eastern one is heading for the cargo," Revan said. "They’ll want to know if the crystals survived."
"Great. So one is about to call for backup and the other is poking around a sleeping monster." Dain shifted his weight off his wounded shoulder with a grimace. "I’d go myself, but I can barely lift this arm above my chest."
"I’ll take the western one. The signal device is the priority. If that transmission goes out, nothing else matters."
"And the eastern one?"
Revan glanced toward the southern exit. Lyra sat in the shadows of the dining carriage, short swords across her thighs. Her eyes were already on them.
She’d been listening the whole ti.
Dain followed his gaze. His expression soured, but he didn’t argue.
***
They moved out three minutes later. No elaborate planning, there wasn’t ti.
At the last mont, Revan switched the assignnts. Pointed Lyra west, himself east. Then reversed it again. Lyra east toward the cargo, himself west toward the signal device.
He wanted the harder target. But he also wanted to see how Lyra moved when she thought the job was routine.
The Dead Zone at night was absolute. No ambient mana ant no luminescence from the earth, no warmth from living things. Pure darkness, broken only by thin gray sky above.
Revan moved along the ridge base, keeping low. His ribs protested every step. He stopped listening to them sowhere around the second minute.
The western scout’s trail was clear in the frost, even spacing, no limp. This one was healthy and moving with purpose. Ten-minute head start, but the man was pausing at intervals to check his surroundings. Professional caution. It cost him speed.
Eight minutes of tracking. The cold had moved past discomfort into sothing architectural. It wasn’t attacking him anymore, it was simply part of the landscape, like gravity.
His fingers were numb inside his gloves. His breath ca out in short white bursts that vanished the instant they left his lips.
Then, there. A figure crouched at the ridge’s far slope, pulling at sothing half-buried under frozen tarp. A shallow cache.
Revan could make out the rectangular shape of a signal device, compact and military-grade. The scout was working fast, fingers moving with the practiced urgency of a man who’d done field assembly in worse conditions than this.
If that thing transmitted, dawn wouldn’t matter. They’d have a second wave before midday.
Revan drew Volkar’s sword slowly. No sound. The frozen mud was firm enough to move on without crunching if he placed his weight carefully.
Thirty ters. Twenty. Fifteen.
The scout heard him at fifteen. Maybe a boot edge catching a pebble, maybe instinct. He spun. Short blade drawn with the kind of speed that ca from years.
The scout lunged first. Tight thrust, center mass. Textbook.
Revan pivoted. Let the blade pass through empty air. His fractured ribs scread at the rotation, but screaming was all they could do.
He caught the scout’s wrist. Twisted until the joint popped. The man grunted, didn’t scream, and dropped the blade. Second knife appeared in his other hand, fast slash at Revan’s neck.
Revan ducked it and drove the poml of Volkar’s sword into the man’s solar plexus.
The scout folded. Hit one knee. The knife clattered on frozen ground.
Six seconds start to finish.
Revan kicked the weapons away and put his blade flat against the man’s throat. Up close, young, mid-twenties, lean face weathered by years outdoors.
The last ti Revan had captured one of these n alive, the man had killed himself. He wasn’t making the sa mistake twice.
His free hand shot forward and clamped the scout’s jaw shut, thumb pressing hard under the chin, fingers locked around the mandible. If there was a capsule in a hollow molar, it wasn’t getting bitten.
"Don’t," Revan said. Quiet. Firm. "Your team is dead. All of them. You’re the only one who gets to walk away from this, but only if your mouth stays shut, literally."
The scout’s eyes went wide. With surprise.
For a half-second, Revan thought it would work.
Then the man’s tongue moved. Not a bite, a push. The capsule wasn’t in a molar. It was tucked under his tongue, and he crushed it against the roof of his mouth with a motion that didn’t require jaw movent at all.
Revan felt the man’s body seize under his grip. He let go. There was nothing to hold onto anymore.
Three seconds of rigid convulsion. Then nothing.
Revan stayed crouched over the body for a long mont. His hand was still shaped around a jaw that no longer needed restraining.
"Fuck."
He couldn’t even find the energy to complain about his life anymore.
He searched the body thodically. Hands still numb, working by feel. Garden tattoo on the inner wrist, orchid and thorns, sa as every corpse tonight.
Decommissioned military dog tag. No na, just a serial number filed down to illegibility. And in the breast pocket: a thin leather folio, sealed with wax.
Inside, operational orders. Rows of encrypted numbers, unreadable without a cipher. But he didn’t need a cipher to understand the stamped insignia on the header.
A wilted flower wrapped in chains.
Revan stared at it.
In his coat pocket, the obsidian coin pulsed. Once. Warm.
He pulled the coin out. Held it next to the folio in the thin gray light. The coin’s surface was unmarked, flat, black, featureless. But the warmth was there, steady, like a recognition.
He didn’t understand it. Filed it. Shoved both into his coat.
The signal device was still sitting in the cache, half-assembled. Revan smashed it against the ridge rocks until it was components and scrap.
Then he turned east.
Lyra was already walking back when he found her. Swords cleaned. Sheathed. Breathing normal. There was frost on her shoulders and a thin line of mud on her left boot where she’d slid on a patch of ice, the only evidence she’d been doing anything at all.
"Gone," she said before he asked. "He reached the cargo wagon before . Spent about a minute looking through the breach in the door. The crystals are visible even at low glow. Then he spotted and ran. Fast. Knew where he was going."
"Which direction?"
"Northeast. Open ground. No cover for to close the gap without him seeing."
"So he knows the weapon is intact."
"He knows. And he knows soone ca after him, which ans he knows we’re alert."
Silence. Boots on frozen earth. The camp’s faint glow ahead.
Revan let a few seconds pass.
"The engineering compartnt on the train," he said. Light tone. Like it had just crossed his mind. "The one with the maintenance toolkit. That was locked with a master key, right?"
"Yes."
"Who had access?"
"Captain, chief engineer, and whoever held a carriage master key. Three existed. Captain, Marshal, and one at the Valorheim station office."
Clean. Imdiate. The kind of answer from soone who’d morized the security layout before boarding.
Then Lyra’s stride hitched. Just barely, a half-step that corrected itself almost instantly. But Revan felt it the way you feel a wrong note in a song you know by heart.
A maid wouldn’t know that.
Neither of them said anything. They kept walking. But the quality of the silence changed. It beca sothing careful, sothing aware.
Two people who both knew sothing had just happened. And both chose to let it sit.
Neither of them spoke again until the camp periter.
Dain was exactly where they’d left him, broadsword against the wall, eyes on the dark.
"One down, one loose," Revan reported. "The loose one confird the cargo status before he ran. Signal device is destroyed, but he doesn’t need it anymore. He’s the ssage now."
Dain exhaled through his nose. The slow, heavy exhale of a man recalculating odds he didn’t like.
"Dawn. Four hours. Sleep."
"Is that an order or a suggestion?" Revan asked.
"It’s a dical opinion. You look like sothing I’d scrape off the bottom of a siege trench."
Revan almost laughed. Almost.
He found a corner inside the dining carriage, wedged between the bar and collapsed wall. Sat down. His body gave up negotiating and simply dropped.
He pulled the coin from his pocket. Held it beside the folio.
Wilted flower in chains on the operational orders of a dead man. And a coin he’d been carrying since an alley in Valorheim, warm against his skin in a place where nothing was supposed to be warm.
Four hours until dawn.
Outside, the Dead Zone was silent. But it no longer felt empty.
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