Elias focused on the next open slot in the radios, the spaces where clean data lived. If units reported sooner than their call signs, he would read failure. If they reported on ti, the math held.
The newcors dismounted.
Clean helts, modern gear. One had a banner sewn loosely to his jacket — Saint-eater, bold and bright. Elias would have snorted if he’d had the breath. Now he didn’t. He had to be precise.
A flare popped from their front line, a bright circle that took the world apart and put it back wrong.
n shouted, and the Saints shot blindly.
The yard turned into the ss they wanted and also feared. Chaos is not an equation you solve by papering over the numbers; it requires hands that adapt.
He moved with purpose to the Humr’s flank. Sera’s presence was on the truck like a small gravity. She watched the bikers without widening her eyes. She didn’t command; she catalogued.
One of the newcors stepped forward, boot on the crate line, voice too loud: "Where’s your leader? Co out. Let’s see your monster."
He said monster like a challenge. Elias felt the creature lurch. It liked the word. It wanted to show what it could do, to demonstrate the law it understood that n only pretended to.
Elias thought about stitching the man up if he got too close and failed. He thought about sedation doses, about the collapse of clotting factors, about the ways a bullet can turn a map into an all-new problem.
He also felt the creature, patient and hot, wanting to make this quick so it could warm itself in the aftermath.
Control, he told himself. Control and center.
He moved closer to Sera. He kept his posture neutral, a dic at the flank.
The creature sighed, like a thing that had been denied a feast. Then it did sothing small and dostic: it settled, not because Elias had convinced it, but because Sera’s quiet made it fold in on itself like a cat curling on a lap.
Later, she said to soone — not a command, a note. Later.
It cald the thing enough for Elias to breathe. He let himself think about rhythm: pulse rates, breathing counts, a line he could asure and re-asure. Numbers returned like a tide.
Zubair called for brief recon. Alexei lted into the western ring and returned in three breaths with a clean report: two scouts, a heavy transport at the back, and a man with a scar who looked like he’d tasted too many fights and wished he’d been better at losing.
Zubair’s plan folded the new data into the old: carry on, bait and trap, keep the yard intact when needed.
It was pragmatic. It was also the sort of calculation that kept others alive. Elias liked that sort of math.
It let him sleep.
The bikers edged forward, testing, their swagger not yet replaced by the reality of the dead in cages.
A boy, maybe twenty, stepped to the crate line and leaned against the top like a man who wanted to be seen. He whistled through his teeth. The sound was presumption made audible.
The creature inside Elias tightened. He looks at her like he owns her, it said. That type of disrespect cannot be tolerated. Take him out.Make him an example so that no one else is foolish enough to ss with our Queen.
Elias tightened his fingers on the rifle. Logic. Protocol. He was a clinician, not a murderer. He hated that even that distinction had started to feel like a preference that could be bent.
He checked the boy’s wrist for a pulse only because the impulse for accuracy beat him often: data first, action second. The boy’s wrist flexed, warm and arrogant. Nothing obvious.
You could hit the strap on his bag. You could make him drop his pack. You could make it loud and final.
No. He would not make that choice without a reason.
Zubair leaned forward and hissed into the comm. "If they push too hard, we break the line. Keep him occupied."
The creature in Elias growled at the restraint. He answered with a breath.
He leaned over to check the clip on Lachlan’s rifle—routine maintenance mid-action—because a dic’s hands always needed to be useful. He tightened the sling, thumbed the safety, and felt the rational parts line up again.
The boy with the swagger stepped forward, close enough now that his bag brushed the crate. His fingers drifted over the zipper like a man playing with a toy.
He laughed at sothing one of his mates said. The sound carried.
Elias counted down under his breath. Five. Four. Three.
The creature inside him bristled for a mont and then softened when Sera’s gaze slid to him and back to the boy.
She wasn’t ordering him to act; she was noticing the imbalance. That small observation carried an authority the creature recognized.
"Hold," Elias whispered to his own blood-buzz. "Let them misjudge."
He felt the prick of a second shot — Alexei — and a saint’s shout that turned to nothing. The yard convulsed. The boy flinched and reached for his bag anyway.
Elias moved because he must. He moved because dicine made him move. He moved because in a ti long before he put on a uniform, his hands had saved n who had been told to die.
He moved because Zubair expected him to.
He hooked the strap with the back of his hand and saw the shape of the world change: a spray of dust, the boy’s eyes widening, a pack tumbled to the ground.
The creature inside him settled like a child given a toy. It humd, satisfied, not because blood had spilled but because order had been restored on terms Elias could accept.
Then the horn blew again, three long, one short, and the yard shifted in a way that made math useless.
Elias’s fingers hovered over the zipper on the dog-tagged pack.
He kept them there and breathed.
He counted another stitch in his mind and let the rhythm hold him while the world raced toward whatever ca next.
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