First light doesn’t feel like dawn out here so much as exposure. Like the sky is yanking the blanket off the world and daring it to pretend it isn’t cold.
I take the line the way I always do: heel to toe on packed frost, shoulders square, eyes forward. The border itself is a razor-straight scar cut between two kinds of hunger, and the markers stand like teeth: white posts, black bands, numbers stenciled so clean they look freshly painted even when they’re not. My boots find the same shallow divots from yesterday’s patrol, and I let the repetition steady me.
Under my breath, I recite the Skyhold Accord statutes. Not loud enough for the patrol behind me to catch every word, but constant enough that my own pulse starts to match the cadence. Article Seven: transit permits. Article Nine: contraband classification. Article Twelve: emergency exemptions and the exact conditions under which mercy is permitted to masquerade as protocol. I know them the way I know the seams of my gloves.
The line tells stories if you stop believing it’s silent. A scuff in the gravel at marker thirty-four: too wide for a fox, too irregular for wind. Thread caught on a thorn bush: cheap wool, Ashline gray, snagged and left behind like a confession. A faint, sweet medicinal smell clinging to the air, camphor or menthol, gone as soon as I notice it, as if the border itself inhales and swallows evidence.
My patrol rounds the next marker and I lift a hand without looking back. Two fingers down: slow. A fist: hold. They obey because I’ve earned it, because I never waste a signal.
I kneel where the snow has been brushed aside, touch the ground with two gloved fingertips, and feel the leftover warmth. Someone was here recently. Someone who moved fast and thought the dark would cover them.
I stand again, breath tight in my throat, and keep walking. The statutes keep coming, prayer and blade all at once, because if I stop saying them I might start thinking about why the Ashline would risk the line at dawn. What they’re carrying, who it’s for, and how many of my rules are built on the assumption that need can be rationed.
Back at the outpost, I don’t hand the ration ledgers off like they’re beneath me. I drag them onto the mess table, flatten the curled corners with my palm, and start where the ink is thickest. Every crate seal has a matching number; every signature should have the same pressure, the same slant. When it doesn’t, I feel it in my teeth.
“Temporary adjustment” is what quartermasters call theft when they want it to sound like weather. “Quiet favor” is what they call it when a superior looks away. I don’t.
I run my thumb over a wax stamp, catch the smallest crack, and my stomach drops: not because it surprises me, but because it confirms what I keep refusing to say out loud: the line isn’t the only place rules get breached. I cross-check the tally against last week’s issue log, then against the infirmary requests, and the numbers don’t reconcile unless someone decided certain mouths don’t count.
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. I slide the ledger back across the table, tap the discrepancy once, and order it corrected before the next distribution: names attached, stamps redone, inventory recounted. No excuses. No grace that isn’t written into statute.
By midday, the wind has found every gap in our gear, and it shows in small betrayals. They don’t ask for leniency outright. They don’t have to. Fatigue has its own language.
I answer it the only way I know how: by making the line sharper. Spacing tighter. Reports cleaner. Gloves inspected. Water measured. If hardship becomes negotiable, so does the border, and I won’t be the first link to stretch.
When the watch roster comes up, I take the longest shift without pausing, the one posted on the exposed ridge where the snow needles your eyes open. I tell myself it’s leadership. Proof. Duty. And yet my chest aches anyway. Because I can see what this costs them, and I keep paying it in their names.
The relief caravan shows up with its canvas flapping like it’s trying to look innocent, wheels rimed with salt and haste. The manifest says twelve crates. I count nine. The lead driver starts in with weather and bandits and the kind of tired honesty that tries to pass for permission, and I feel something in me tighten. “Detain,” I say. We break seals. We lay the numbers bare. They account for every absence out loud, in front of my patrol, until goodwill stops sounding like a shield.
The local commanders bristle under my questions, shoulders squaring like I’ve insulted their mothers instead of their math. I let them. I keep my voice level, my hands still, my pulse loud in my ears. Convenience is how the line starts to warp: one “just this once,” one missing crate forgiven, one rule treated like a suggestion. Tomorrow, it isn’t missing food. It’s missing people.
I sit over the border reports the way some people sit over prayers, palms braced on the table, eyes burning from the lamp and the wind still trapped behind my ribs. Ink blots where my glove dragged across a fresh line. I don’t let myself wipe it away until I’ve read the numbers twice. Three patrols short on rations. Two missing flare cartridges. A gate log with a neat gap where a name should be, as if absence can be smoothed into acceptability by a clean edge of silence.
Protection isn’t a feeling. It isn’t goodwill. It isn’t the soft lie you tell yourself because you’re tired and the mountains are hungry and everyone wants to go home. Protection is a system that keeps working when nobody is brave enough to be good.
Clear rules. Clear duties. Clear consequences.
I write it in the margins like I’m carving it into stone. If we start improvising because the weather is cruel, we’ll keep improvising when the stakes get uglier. If a commander can shrug off a discrepancy with a story, then a quartermaster can sell a crate and call it “resourcefulness.” Then a patrol can take a bribe and call it “mercy.” Then someone disappears and we all pretend we don’t know which small compromise opened the door.
The paper smells like iron and smoke. My pen scratches out questions that will make people hate me by morning: Who signed for the missing medical kit? Why is the outgoing tally lower than the intake? Which seal number doesn’t match? I can already hear the excuses: late deliveries, broken locks, border scavs, the Ashline’s shadow blamed like a storm system you can’t control.
I exhale slowly and force my hand to stop shaking, because I know the truth no one wants to say out loud: structure is the only kind of kindness that scales. Anything else is favoritism wearing a halo.
I set the reports in a stack, squared so precisely the corners line up, and stand. The line holds because someone insists it does. Tonight, that someone is me.
I call them in one by one like I’m pulling threads from a fraying hem and daring the fabric to admit it’s coming apart. No speeches. No theatrics. Just names, dates, signatures. I make them say the numbers out loud, make them look at the ink as if it can bite. The lieutenant tries to smile it off, all polished confidence and “Captain, surely you understand,” as if understanding is the same thing as excusing.
I don’t.
Influence is just another kind of currency, and I’ve watched too many people spend it on other people’s hunger.
When the quartermaster’s jaw tightens and he says, carefully, that he has “standing” with the council, I feel my pulse go hot behind my teeth. I ask him which regulation grants standing over inventory. I ask him to point to the line where a uniform becomes permission. Silence is an answer, even when it comes wrapped in resentment.
I write reprimands with the same steady hand I use to write orders. Rank doesn’t protect you from consequences. It makes you responsible for them.
I’ve heard the argument a hundred ways. Let the rule bend, let the ledger blur, let a box slip through uncounted because someone is cold and coughing and desperate. And part of me, the part that still remembers what it feels like to be the one begging, wants to let relief outrun procedure. But fear is a solvent. It eats the soft promises first. If I trade the Accord’s law for a moment of quiet, I’m not buying mercy; I’m taking out a loan against tomorrow and handing the interest to whoever is willing to threaten people for it.
The shield isn’t my goodwill. It’s the standard that doesn’t change depending on who is crying loudest. Or who is paying.
I issue the new directives like I’m cinching a strap until it bites: tighter audits, surprise inspections, no “lost” paperwork accepted as an answer. Anyone who’s been turning shortage into leverage, jacking prices, rationing medicine behind a grin, selling access to blankets like it’s a favor, finds the net closing fast. I don’t care if they wear silk or a sash. I care who suffers.
When my advisers start circling with their careful voices I feel something in me snap taut. I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. I tell them crisis doesn’t rewrite law; it tests it. Hunger isn’t a bargaining chip, and fear isn’t anyone’s permission to skim.
Riven Calder keeps his name off the ledgers and on the street, and that alone tells me what kind of man he is. Paper is where you can be pinned, quantified, made small enough to file away. He refuses that. He lives in the gaps the Accord pretends aren’t there: between a stamp and a signature, between a patrol’s turn and the next watch’s boredom. He moves like the Ashline is an extension of his body: slipping through alleys that look like dead ends until a panel lifts; taking stairwells that belong to no building on any map; vanishing into crowds with the kind of ease that makes my skin prickle.
I’m not supposed to know his routes. I’m certainly not supposed to know the pattern of his timing. How he waits for the shift change, how he uses our predictability against us, how he never hits the same seam twice. And yet I do, because I’ve spent too many nights studying the places our numbers don’t add up, watching shortages ripple outward from one block like a bruise. His handiwork is everywhere, precise and irritatingly efficient. Nothing wasted. Nothing sentimental. The Ashline doesn’t get to survive on ideals; it survives on outcomes, and he delivers them.
He’s not a myth, no matter how the street talks about him like one. He’s a man with a face witnesses can’t agree on and a voice people swear they heard in the dark telling them where to run. That’s what makes him dangerous: not the guns, not the smugglers he leans on, not even the way he can make my border look porous. It’s that he’s built a kind of order of his own: an order that answers hunger faster than my decrees ever could.
I tell myself it’s arrogance, that he’s playing hero. But the truth I don’t like to touch is quieter: he’s filling the silence where our system should have been. And I can’t decide if I want to arrest him for it or understand how he keeps getting there first.
His authority isn’t stamped or sworn; it’s proved in motion, in the way relief appears where my maps show only blockade and rubble. A crate of antibiotics doesn’t just “clear” a checkpoint: it passes through a chain of choices I’ve tried to close off: a guard who looks the other way for ten seconds, a clerk who misfiles a manifest, a runner who knows which stairwell drops into a service tunnel that shouldn’t exist. He buys those moments with leverage I can’t measure. Not coins, always: sometimes it’s a favor called in, a cousin moved out of a draft, a debt paid quietly so a child can keep both lungs.
And when the shells start walking a street, he’s already counting beats, already shifting bodies like pieces on a board I pretend I control. Families vanish from a bombed block before the second strike, not because they’re lucky, but because someone told them exactly when to run and exactly where not to look back.
I hate how clean it is. I hate how much it works.
He hears the question under the question, the cough behind the complaint, the empty pantry behind the righteous speech, and he answers that, not the neat paragraph of statute I can quote in my sleep. In his world, a pledge is just breath until it hardens into something you can carry: a sack of grain, a vial of insulin, a blanket pulled up over a feverish chin. People learn to measure him in mornings. Did the child wake up? Did the old man’s hands stop shaking? Did the ration line move before the anger did? He doesn’t ask for belief; he asks for coordination, for silence at the right door, for someone to run even when their legs are already done. It’s brutal, practical faith. And it works.
In his hands, rules aren’t commandments: they’re instruments. A regulation gets folded like paper and slid through a gap in a gate; a signature becomes a commodity, bartered for a guard’s ten-second blindness or a clerk’s “mistake.” And when there’s blood in the street and breath running out, he doesn’t negotiate. He snaps the rule in half, steps over the line, and keeps moving.
In the Ashline, results are currency, and he spends them like matches. Every delivery, every clean escape, every life pulled back from the edge stitches another name to his roster. But success is a flare in a dark city. The more he wins, the more eyes start tracking the pattern. Hungry rivals, frightened officials, anyone who needs him stopped to feel safe.
The border changes shape first, not in the maps but in the way the air tastes when you get close. Skyhold doesn’t announce the tightening like a policy. It arrives as hardware. A second set of barricades welded in front of the first. Floodlights that turn night into interrogation. New boots on the gravel with faces I don’t recognize, because the ones who used to wave me through have been rotated out or taught to stop smiling.
I watch the checkpoint become a throat.
They add a lane, then close it whenever the line gets too orderly. They slow the whole machine on purpose, long enough for tempers to rise and mistakes to bloom. They’ve got dogs now. They’ve got scanners that make my molars ache and my skin crawl, and a new script they recite with the crispness of people practicing cruelty until it feels like procedure.
Routine runs turn into math I can’t balance. How many minutes can insulin sit in heat before it turns into nothing. How long before a fever breaks a child’s brain. How much bread you can crush before it isn’t food, it’s crumbs you hand to someone who is too proud to cry.
Detentions stretch, elastic and quiet. They pull drivers aside for “verification,” for “irregularities,” for the sin of looking tired. Hours become overnight becomes a holding room with no windows and a form that never comes. I’ve heard they’re keeping people on the slightest pretext: an expired permit, a mismatched stamp, a last name that sounds like Ashline. If they can’t find contraband, they manufacture uncertainty. They let you watch your cargo spoil while you sit and think about compliance as if it’s a virtue and not a weapon.
I tell myself I’m only angry at the policy. But when a young guard’s gaze slides past my face like I’m already guilty, my pulse kicks hard, stupidly personal. Because they aren’t just choking smuggling. They’re choking the space between need and help, and calling it security. And every time the gate clanks shut, I feel the noose cinch on people who will never be the ones to sign the orders.
I don’t ram the same door twice when someone’s braced their shoulder on the other side. I reroute. I break the river into streams so thin they slip between fingers.
Big runs become a liability, a billboard, so I chop them down into hand-carry sizes: cool packs strapped under coats, vials tucked into false heels, antibiotics sealed inside cans with labels so boring even a bored inspector won’t bother. I stop trusting engines and start trusting legs. Quiet couriers with forgettable faces. A grandmother with a basket of laundry. A kid on a delivery bike who knows every alley that doesn’t show up on a map.
I build decoys, too. Loud caravans full of clean paperwork and useless goods, a little too perfect, meant to snag the dogs and the scanners and the attention while the real supplies move like a held breath two streets over.
And I call in favors I hate owing. Clerks who loathe forms more than they fear uniforms. Mechanics who can “lose” a serial number. A medic across the line who won’t say my name, but will still meet my eyes and nod once, like we’re both tired of choosing who gets to live.
The tightening doesn’t just pinch my routes; it squeezes everyone who can’t afford to wait. Shelves go bare in a way that feels deliberate, like absence with fingerprints. People start counting pills the way they used to count coins. A clinic I supply stretches one vial across three patients and calls it “triage” like a prayer that might pass for ethics if you say it softly enough. In the streets, hunger makes saints into thieves and friends into judges. Skyhold mouths stability while my side mutters freedom, and somehow both sound like excuses when a parent is begging for antibiotics I can’t get across. The region heats up on blame. Every act of mercy gets tallied as risk, and every risk becomes another reason to clamp down harder.
Then the hits stop looking like luck or good policing and start looking like choreography. A safehouse goes dark hours after I reroute a drop. A cache I haven’t even logged gets torched like someone’s reading over my shoulder. The people who used to trade rumors for cigarettes suddenly parrot identical lines, same cadence, same buzzwords, as if they’ve been handed a pamphlet on fear.
The whispers stop being whispers and settle in my gut like a stone: someone else is paying for the blood, sliding coins under doors on both sides, buying raids and “retaliation” like they’re shopping a menu. Every crackdown gets answered with a bolder run, every run with a harsher sweep, and the rhythm feels guided. Like a hand on our backs, steering us toward the moment the border finally breaks.
The summons comes stamped in slate wax, heavy enough to feel like a weapon in my hand before I ever break it. I tell myself it’s another briefing, another set of coordinates, another tidy problem with a tidy solution. That lie lasts exactly as long as it takes the seal to crack.
Directive Seven. Public deterrence. Exemplary action.
No discretion. No “containment.” No extraction under cover of night with a file that never sees daylight. The language is clipped, almost bored, like they’re ordering new boots. The Ashline’s influence must be ended in a way that can be photographed, repeated, and understood by people who don’t read policy: by people who only understand fear when it’s hung like a banner.
I read it twice, then a third time, because some part of me keeps expecting the words to rearrange into something I can live with. Negotiate is struck through in red, as if the idea itself is treasonous. Quiet arrests are dismissed as ineffective. “Truth” appears once, in quotation marks, attached to a line about how the Accord can’t afford it right now.
The room smells like ink and metal and that cold cleanliness Skyhold loves. Across the table, Commandant Halden doesn’t look up from his slate. “We need a deterrent more than we need an investigation,” he says, like he’s explaining weather. “The border is restless. The markets are spiking. People are beginning to admire criminals.”
Criminal. That’s what they call him, the same way they call hunger a supply issue.
My mouth goes dry around my oath. I can hear the cadence of it in my head (order, discipline, sacrifice) and it lands wrong against the image I can’t stop carrying: hands held out for medicine, empty, shaking. I’ve seen the Ashline runs from a distance, swift as shadows. I’ve also seen what follows our raids: crying that doesn’t make noise anymore, because sound draws attention.
Halden finally looks at me, and there’s something like pity in his eyes, or maybe it’s calculation wearing a human face. “Captain Vance,” he says softly, “make it public. Make it clean. Make it final.”
I nod because that’s what a good officer does, and because refusing would only put someone colder in my place.
And all I can think is: if they’re asking for a spectacle, it means they already decided what story they want told.
I don’t get the mandate from a courier or a proclamation. I get it in the way the city breathes differently overnight: checkpoints doubling like bruises, patrols moving with new confidence, informants suddenly rich enough to buy silence. And then a scrap of it reaches me anyway, folded into a warning from someone who still owes me their life: Directive Seven. Public. Clean. Final.
My first instinct is to laugh, because of course the Accord wants theater. My second is to count. I tighten everything until it squeaks. Drops get split into smaller bones, carried by people who don’t know what they’re carrying. Escorts change faces, change coats, change the way they walk. Names come off lists; I burn the paper and keep the map in my head.
Because if I yield even once, they don’t just take me. They take the enclaves that leaned on my runs like a cane. They punish the sick for trusting I’d show up. And I can’t let the Accord make that lesson stick.
The opening comes disguised as routine: a crate flagged at a riverside checkpoint, manifest too clean, seals too perfect. I crack it expecting contraband and find medicine packed beneath bartered luxuries no Ashline runner would waste weight on. There’s a stamped mark I’ve never seen in our ledgers, and a witness attached in the worst way: a dockhand trembling so hard his teeth click, swearing he was paid to look away by someone who didn’t wear either uniform.
I don’t report it. I can’t, not without turning it into another prop for Directive Seven.
And when I slip the dockhand to a shadowed alley to meet the only man who knows these routes like pulse points, Riven’s eyes go flat. If he confirms the mark, he exposes the names he keeps unspoken to keep them alive.
We try it once, one small exchange, a nod instead of a threat, a message passed through the dockhand like a match in the dark, and the city seems to smell it on us. By dawn, whispers have teeth: fraternization, compromise, treason. My lieutenants watch me like I’m a cracked compass. His runners start asking whose pocket he’s in. Both our worlds demand blood to prove we’re still theirs.
Scrutiny closes in like a noose I can feel with every salute that lasts a beat too long. Casualties climb in the spaces between “procedure” and hunger, and I tell myself mercy is what got us here. So I draw up the plan to parade Riven Calder in irons, clean, public, final, because a warning has to have teeth. And somewhere across the river, I know he’s sharpening his own.
Reports keep breeding on my desk like mold in a damp barracks. Thin sheets stamped and initialed into respectability, each one insisting everything is under control while my gut knots tighter with every page I turn. “Inspection,” they call it, but the descriptions read like raids with better handwriting: doors kicked in, floors turned over, civilians lined against walls and asked to prove they deserve to breathe on this side of the river.
A missing crate is logged as “misplaced during transfer.” Another as “damaged beyond use.” The numbers never quite add up. They’re careful about that. Careful enough that if I bring it up in briefing, someone can blink innocently and ask if I’m questioning my own quartermaster. I can already hear the insinuation: Captain Vance has gone soft. Captain Vance is distracted. Captain Vance is… compromised.
The worst ones are the medical requests, because they’re written in the language of procedure, and procedure is my native tongue. A medic from the southern ward turned away because her seal was smudged. A quarantine pass denied because a clerk transposed two digits. A field kit held for “verification” until the verification outlasted the fever. I can picture the faces behind the ink. Hands shaking, someone’s child wheezing, a stretcher that never makes it through the gate because a form is missing a witness signature.
I tell myself there are explanations. Bad actors. Overzealous lieutenants. A few men padding confiscation tallies to look diligent. But the pattern is too neat, too consistent, like someone is pressing on the same bruise again and again to see how long it takes before the whole body flinches.
I drag a finger down the margin of one report and feel the paper cut sting. It’s a stupid, sharp little pain, and it makes me furious because it’s honest. I’ve been bleeding quieter than this, and the border is learning it.
In the safehouses, I don’t have to ask for the bad news. It comes to me anyway, carried in on damp coats and hollow eyes, traded like cigarettes. Same story, different mouths. The river’s choking. The last shipment sat “under review” until the ice packs turned to warm water and the vials went cloudy. Prices for clean gauze and antibiotics climb like they’ve got somewhere to be, and every time a runner comes back empty-handed, the market rats get fatter.
A kid with a split lip tells me his sister’s ration cough syrup got cut with sugar water. A woman who used to stitch sails shows me her hands shaking too hard to thread a needle, and still she’s trying to sew bandages out of old shirts because what else do you do when the shelves are naked? In the corner, someone hacks into a rag and pretends it’s nothing. I can hear the wetness in it. I can smell the fever.
If the next run doesn’t land, they won’t just hurt. They’ll disappear (quietly, efficiently) like the city’s been practicing how to forget them.
The logisticians file into my office like pallbearers, boots polished, eyes emptied. They don’t accuse; they don’t have to. They lay the figures down between us: clean columns, neat decimals, a death sentence in arithmetic. One more disruption at the cordon, they say, and the chain doesn’t bend, it breaks. Three days before flour runs thin in the east garrison. Five before fuel allotments get “adjusted.” Seven before we’re cutting portions and calling it efficiency. They talk about throughput and redundancy like prayers, like if they name the system precisely enough it won’t fail.
I keep my face still while something sour rises in me. Hunger doesn’t just hollow stomachs. It hollows obedience. It turns uniforms into factions, blame into currency, and discipline into a story we tell ourselves right up until the first man decides the rules don’t feed him.
Across the river, word reaches me in fragments: intercepted chatter, a runner’s breathless confession, a smudged note passed palm to palm. Riven’s people are doing the math too, only theirs is written in coughs and closed eyes: stop the medicine and the sickness won’t stay politely quarantined. It will seep through anyway, slow, invisible, until the checkpoints are just costumes and everyone’s applauding a lie.
So I sign my name to orders that cinch the cordon tighter, turning the border into a vise I can pretend is a safeguard. More inspections. Fewer passes. Harder consequences. Across the river, Riven doesn’t fold. He threads new routes through the cracks, lines up bodies and boats and bribes like a countermarch. We both call it prevention. It feels like laying rails toward impact.
The runner finds me in the corridor outside Records, breath tearing at his throat like it’s trying to escape. He’s too thin for the uniform they stuck him in; the jacket hangs off his shoulders, and his cap is crooked like it was slapped on as an afterthought. His eyes flick past me (past the seal on my collar, past the clerks pretending not to listen) and then lock back onto my face with a kind of terrified resolve.
“Warden,” he says, and the word lands like a weight. Not respectful. Not mocking. Just urgent.
I don’t let him hand it to me in full view. Habit. Paranoia. Call it what you want. I pivot him into the narrow gap between filing cabinets where dust and old ink live, and I take the folded paper from his shaking fingers.
The message is short, which is how you know it’s real. No flourish. No excuses. Just the bones of a betrayal: the antitoxin convoy hasn’t failed to arrive: it’s been diverted. Off the declared route. Away from the inspection gates I tightened last week, away from my stamped permissions and my neat little rules. Reassigned to the waterfront under false paperwork, the kind that slides through hands that have already been paid to feel nothing. A “quiet-payoff schedule,” the runner writes, and even the phrase makes my jaw go hard.
My mind does what it always does when panic tries to claw up my throat: it turns everything into a map. Waterfront. Which slip? Which warehouse takes deliveries after dusk? Which clerk’s signature has been forged well enough to pass my own office?
I see, for a heartbeat, the faces in the infirmary waiting on my competence like it’s mercy. And right behind that, I see Riven’s smile, calm as a ledger, like suffering is just another line item.
“Who else saw this?” I ask.
The runner swallows. “No one, Warden. I ”
Good. Or disastrous. I can’t tell anymore.
I fold the message until the creases bite my skin, as if pain can keep me honest. The docks are a knot of noise and shadow where laws go to drown. And someone has just dragged the only thing keeping my people alive into that water.
I take the fastest way out of the Records wing, not the official stair that spirals down past portraits and polished brass, but the service steps that smell like damp stone and bleach. My boots strike too loud; I don’t care. I don’t send for an escort. I don’t pin on the sash that tells the city to part for me. Ceremony is a luxury for days when people aren’t coughing blood into rags.
Outside, the night hits like a slap: cold and wet, the kind that gets into your joints and stays. I cut through alleys instead of avenues, keeping my cloak close, my hand under it on the hilt. Every second I lose is a face I’ve already seen in the infirmary, eyes glassy with fever and trust, waiting for my rules to mean something.
The waterfront stench rises before I see it: brine, rot, coal smoke. I follow the sound of wheels on planks, the low murmur of men who don’t want witnesses. I tell myself I’m hunting paper and stolen cargo.
I don’t tell myself the name I expect to find.
Lanternlight gutters under canvas stretched between pilings, turning every face into a smear of amber and shadow. The tide slaps the posts in a steady, impatient rhythm, like it knows what’s being traded here. Men shoulder through the narrow lanes between wagons and water with the same efficient hush I’ve seen in evidence rooms: no chatter, no laughter, just hands on rope and wood and the shared understanding that noise is a kind of confession. The air bites: salt, spilled pitch, damp wool, and something medicinal that shouldn’t be anywhere near the docks. Crates thud softly, padded, controlled; each one is guided, not dropped, as if the contents are fragile or expensive or both. A boat rocks in readiness, lantern hooked to its bow like a lure.
I stop just past the lantern’s reach and let the dark hold me while my eyes pick the scene apart. Those crates are stamped with clinic seals, edges waxed and banded: handled with gloved care like relics, yet moved under tarps like stolen guns. Dockhands keep their faces blank, palms too quick to tuck coins away. And the men posted at the lanes? Not stevedores. Sentries. Watching for me.
Riven is there like he belongs. Centered beneath the tarp’s sag, coat dry where everyone else shines with mist, hands loose at his sides as if he couldn’t imagine needing them. He talks low to a man with a ledger, voice smooth, patient, the cadence of numbers and terms, not sirens and dying lungs. Like antitoxin is just another line item, and panic is a bargaining chip.
I move before I can talk myself out of it, boots finding the dock planks by memory more than sight. The boards flex under my weight with a tired, wet complaint, and every step feels like an announcement I didn’t authorize. The sentries clock me (shoulders tightening, hands drifting toward coats) and for a heartbeat I picture how fast this turns into bodies in the water and a shipment slipping away in the confusion.
Not tonight.
I cut through the narrow lane between a wagon tongue and a stack of tarped crates, shoulder brushing rough canvas. A man starts to pivot into my path, and I don’t slow; I let my stare do the pushing. He yields with a curse swallowed into his teeth, like he’s afraid of making noise.
Riven’s crew fans subtly, a practiced shift that turns open dock into a funnel. They expect me to hesitate at the mouth of it, to do the safe thing: call for backup, shout for witnesses, make it procedural so they can make it ugly. My pulse hammers at my throat anyway, hot and stupid, but my hand stays steady.
Steel clears leather with a whisper I feel in my bones. I hold the blade low at my hip, not raised like a threat, not tucked like a secret: just present, a line drawn in the air. The lanternlight catches the edge and fractures into a thin, cold ribbon.
My other hand snaps the warrant open with the crisp finality of a door slamming. The paper looks obscene out here, clean and official against salt and theft, but the seal is real and the ink is still sharp. I angle it toward him, toward the men around him, toward the whole corrupt little geometry of this deal.
“By order of the Civic Authority,” I say, voice tighter than I want, “you’re done.”
I plant myself in the only place that matters, between Riven and the path to the boat, and let my body become the barrier they have to solve. If they want those crates, they have to go through me first.
Riven doesn’t flinch. Not a twitch toward a hidden knife, not the instinctive jerk I’ve seen in men who know they’re caught. He stays exactly where he is, weight balanced like he has all the time in the world, and that almost-calms me in the wrong way: like staring at deep water that looks smooth until it takes you.
He turns his head just enough for lanternlight to find the sharp plane of his cheek and the dark cut of his mouth. His gaze slides over my warrant first, not my blade, and the insult of that lands hot behind my ribs. Paper, to him, is the real weapon. The law reduced to ink he can smudge with one well-placed bribe and a shrug.
The dock holds its breath around us. I hear the drip from a rope, the creak of a mooring line, my own pulse trying to crawl out of my throat. He looks at me like I’m a number that won’t sit neatly in his ledger.
A corner of his mouth lifts: not quite a smile. More like recognition. Like he’s been waiting for me to show up so he can enjoy it.
He brings his hands up like he’s about to pray and chooses, instead, to applaud me.
The first clap cracks through the damp air (unhurried, perfectly placed) then another, and another, each one measured like a gavel strike delivered by someone who’s never stood on the receiving end. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. The sound threads between tarps and rigging, clean and wrong, and it turns heads the way a sudden flame does. Men pause mid-shift, fingers hovering over crate ropes, eyes snapping from the cargo to me as if they’re checking who’s losing.
I can feel the heat creep up my neck, the old reflex to justify myself. I don’t. I tighten my grip until the warrant bites my palm, and I stare back, refusing to let his applause turn me into a performance.
“That badge,” he says, and his voice is almost gentle in how it cuts, “is a leash for people who fear freedom.” His eyes don’t even flick toward my knife. He treats the steel like a childish prop, something I brought to feel brave. The dismissal lands harder than a threat, like he’s already decided what I am: and it isn’t dangerous.
I shift, subtle as a breath, angling my body so the sealed crates sit in his line of sight: the wax stamps, the council crest, the cure that’s already late. It’s the closest I’ll come to begging. He doesn’t take it. His gaze stays pinned to my warrant like it’s the only thing worth reading, like villages can rot off the map and still not interrupt his interest in who gets to command.
My eyes cut over the scene the way they’ve been trained to (fast, ruthless, counting exits and hands and threats) but the numbers don’t settle into anything clean. There’s a ledger open on a barrel, pages curled from salt and use, ink dark and fresh enough that someone has been keeping accounts even while people cough themselves raw across the river. I catch columns, quantities, dates. A string of names that aren’t names so much as disguises: “Dry Fish,” “Lamp Oil,” “Sailcloth.” All the harmless nouns smugglers love. All the lies that let them sleep.
Behind him, the crates sit in a neat row, stenciled with the council crest like a promise, each one guarded like it’s gold. In a way, it is. Not because the antitoxin is precious in itself: because the panic around it is, because scarcity is a weapon that doesn’t leave bruises on the men holding it.
I hate that I understand the machinery of it. Hate that my mind automatically maps how you would do it if you wanted to make suffering profitable: delay the shipments, spread rumors, let a few vials “leak” into the streets at an impossible price so the desperate learn the cost of hope. People don’t buy medicine like they buy bread; they buy it like they buy mercy, with shaking hands and a family member’s ring pressed into a palm.
And he stands there, calm as a clerk, as if this is just commerce, supply, demand, a tidy system that doesn’t care what the product is. Like the fevered bodies in the quarantine tents are just a chart going up.
Something in my chest goes tight and thin. Anger is easy. What’s harder is the sick, humiliating clarity that he has built himself a market out of contagion, and he’s daring me to call it theft when the law I carry can’t name the crime fast enough to stop the dying.
I keep my blade low: not hidden, never hidden, because this isn’t a parlor argument and he knows it. The point is angled toward the planks at his feet, close enough that he has to account for it, far enough that I can still pretend I’m choosing restraint. My wrist aches with the discipline of it. One wrong twitch and it becomes a story about an officer who lost her temper, not a man caught red-handed with other people’s lives stacked in crates.
So I let the warrant sit between us like a second weapon, flatter and sharper. Ink, seals, signatures: the thin little rituals that keep a city from tearing itself apart every time someone decides they’re right. I can feel the weight of eyes from the dockworkers, the way tension spreads in a crowd like spilled oil. If I draw fully, if I make this personal, they’ll pick sides. They’ll start moving. Someone will get brave or stupid.
Restraint is the line I cling to: order on one side, collapse on the other. I’m not here to win; I’m here to keep it from breaking.
Riven never even flicks his eyes toward the crates. He studies me instead, slow and clinical, like I’m a document he’s deciding whether to counterfeit. His attention snags on the seal pressed into my warrant, on the clean edge of the paper that hasn’t been dampened by river fog or handled by shaking hands. Then my uniform. Its sharp seams, the polished buckles, the kind of order you can only maintain if you have spare time and safe streets to maintain it in. I can feel him tallying what those details mean: distance from the coughing tents, proximity to council halls, a life where “procedure” is possible. His mouth twists, not quite a smile. To him I’m proof of a city that stays immaculate by letting the border go septic.
He speaks to the insignia, not my face, like there’s nothing under the polished buttons but a pulse trained to obey. “You’d bleed for a clause,” he says, voice flat and cutting, “and call it justice.” He tells me I protect rules the way starving people protect crusts, ferociously, irrationally, then names it what he thinks it is: stability sold as sanctioned neglect.
His accusation hits the part of me that’s been trained to turn hurt into posture. I fire back before I even choose the words because it’s easier than admitting he’s aiming at something real. He answers with tyrant, like it’s my given name. The space between us fills with our factions’ ugliest legends, and I stop hearing his argument at all. Only the threat underneath it.
I lift the warrant high: not for him, not really, but for the whole hungry audience the docks always collect. Dockhands with rope-burned palms pause mid-knot. A couple of buyers in clean coats angle their bodies like they’re not watching while their eyes do nothing else. The paper catches a slice of weak daylight, and the seal flashes red and official as a fresh bruise.
“By order of the Council,” I call, and my voice comes out sharper than I intend, bright enough to cut through the slap of water against pilings and the mutter of the crowd. I hate how practiced it sounds. I hate that I need it to sound that way. My arm doesn’t shake. I don’t let it.
I point without looking away from Riven. Because if I give him even a heartbeat of inattention, he’ll use it like a blade. “Seal the pier. Gates, now. Keep civilians back. No one crosses this line.”
My escorts move on my signal, a familiar choreography snapping into place. Boots thud in unison; leather creaks; metal rings as someone shoulders the gate shut. A dockhand starts forward on instinct, then stops short when a guard’s outstretched arm blocks him. The man’s mouth opens like he wants to argue, like he wants to tell me there are families who’ll go without if I take what’s on those wagons, and my stomach twists because I already know that. It doesn’t change the warrant in my hand. It doesn’t change what happens if we let hijacked antitoxins disappear into private holds.
“Back,” I repeat, lower now, aimed at the ones who are inching closer, smelling profit or salvation. “This is a seizure. Interference is an offense.”
Somebody spits. Somebody laughs. Too loud, too careless. The crowd shifts in a ripple that could become a wave with one wrong shove. The air tastes like salt and smoke and old resentment. I can feel the dock tightening around us, narrowing, turning every plank into an argument. I keep the paper raised like it can hold the line by itself, like ink and wax are heavier than desperation.
Two of my escorts break from the line and move toward the convoy like they’ve done this a hundred times, like the pier isn’t holding its breath around us. One carries a tin of chalk; the other keeps a hand hovering near his baton, eyes scanning hands, pockets, shadows: everything that can hide a knife or a match. The crates are stacked tight, rope-cinched, the wood darkened with spray and fingerprints, and for a split second I see only what’s inside them, what they mean when fever hits and the throat swells shut.
Then the chalk squeals.
Three quick slashes across the first lid, then the next. The marks look obscene on the rough grain: clean, confident, irreversible. Official. Mine. A claim made in public so no one can pretend later that they didn’t see where the Council’s hand landed.
A man in a dock apron lurches forward, jaw working, but my guard angles his body, quiet and absolute. No words. Just a reminder that an argument here becomes a spark.
I taste iron. I keep my face still and my pulse hidden, and I watch the chalk turn medicine into evidence.
Riven’s eyes cut past me, not flinching from the warrant, but measuring the dock like it’s a ledger. He clocks the dockhands, the clean-coated buyers, the curious bodies pressing closer for heat. Then he gives this little flick of his fingers, dismissive, almost bored, and it lands like an order.
His people answer instantly. The loose scatter of men I’ve cataloged as thieves and opportunists tightens into something else: a line. Boots slide on wet planks. Shoulders meet. Elbows lock out the gaps. They don’t shout; they don’t posture. They just close ranks until the pier feels slimmer, until my escorts are suddenly outnumbered by intention.
It’s infuriating: how disciplined he can be when it serves him. How calm. Like he’s done this with my kind before and learned exactly how to make the crowd hold its breath.
At his signal, someone at the edge of the ship moves like it’s a rehearsed gesture: no hesitation, no flourish. A boot plants, a shoulder dips, and the gangplank jolts free with a crack that makes heads snap around. Wood screams against wood as it’s hauled back, inch by stubborn inch, until the gap yawns dark. The easy crossing is gone.
The pier tightens around us like a fist. Bodies bunch, shoulders brush, slick planks hem me in until there’s only one miserable lane between their line and mine. I can’t sidestep; I can’t breathe without someone feeling it. One shove becomes a wave, a wave becomes a crush. I hear my own pulse in the wood, waiting for the first stupid spark.
I drive forward anyway, shoulder-first, because if I hesitate the lane will narrow and swallow me. The warrant stays high in my left hand, parchment slapped flat against my palm like a second skin, the seal catching what little light leaks through the fog. It isn’t magic, it isn’t armor, but it’s the one thing in this dockside circus that’s supposed to mean something, and I need them to see I’m not just a woman with a blade and a temper.
Bodies press in from both sides: salt-stiff coats, damp hair, breath that smells like fish and cheap spirits. Someone’s elbow digs my ribs; someone else mutters my name like a curse. I keep my gaze on him.
Riven stands at the center of his neat line like he’s the hinge it turns on. Close enough now that I can see the fine spray on his lashes, the way his mouth is already shaped around a reply he hasn’t given yet. That calm hits me like an insult. Like he’s watching weather roll in, not a warrant with his name on it.
“By authority of the city,” I say, and my voice comes out louder than my lungs feel capable of. The rigging creaks above us, a slow complaint, and the water slaps the pilings like it’s keeping time. “Riven Vale, you are under warrant for the hijacking of the antitoxin convoy out of Eastgate. Three wagons. Six guards injured. Two missing.”
A ripple runs through the crowd at antitoxin: fear dressed up as curiosity. They know what’s at stake. They’ve all heard the coughing.
I lift my blade and level it at his chest, the tip steady even as the pier shifts under our combined weight. “You don’t get to hide behind speeches and soft hands. You don’t get to dress theft up like righteousness and call it survival.”
My jaw tightens until my teeth ache. I can taste the words before I say them, bitter and hot.
“You’re a parasite,” I tell him, and I mean it so hard it makes my throat raw. “Pretty rhetoric, sharper than any knife: feeding off panic, off sick children and desperate mothers, and pretending you’re the cure.”
Riven doesn’t flinch from the blade. He doesn’t even glance at the warrant like it might burn him. Instead he lifts both hands. See? he says without words. I’m not the danger.
His gaze stays on mine, steady as a coin on a counter. “Parasite,” he repeats, like he’s tasting it. Then he tilts his head, almost sorry for me, and it hits harder than a shout. “That’s what you call anyone you can’t file and chain.”
A few people shift, drawn by the shape of his voice. He knows it. He uses it like a lever.
“You hold up paper and steel and you think it’s morality,” he says, hands still raised (reasonable, harmless) while every syllable slides under my ribs. “You call it order. You call it safety. But it’s just control with a seal pressed into it.” His mouth twists. “Tyranny in polished boots. Shined until people can see their fear reflected and mistake it for protection.”
The ring around us draws tight, not with ropes but with hunger. Dockhands crane over crates; buyers with coin still in their fists stop pretending they’re above it. Every breath I take gets answered by someone else’s, louder, faster, as if the crowd is teaching itself how to panic.
“Tyranny,” I repeat, and my jaw locks so hard my molars grind. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of a flinch. I keep the warrant up where everyone can see the seal, because if I let my hand drop even an inch, this becomes a private grudge instead of public law.
Riven’s mouth curves: not a grin, a cut. He watches my restraint like it’s a weakness he can peel open. The air thins, sharp with salt and sweat, until it feels like there’s only one way left to breathe: violence.
I move first, because letting him choose the moment feels like handing him the knife. My steel whispers out, a thin, bright sound swallowed by fog. He draws, too, smooth, almost bored, and slips sideways into the open stretch of planks like he owns the tide and everyone on it. We start to circle, slow and exact, measuring reach, watching the crowd as much as each other, their eyes turning into pressure points.
We trade feints the way some people trade gossip. I press him with clean angles and measured steps, forcing him to answer me, to retreat without looking like he’s retreating. He meets every push with a lazy parry and a sharper line, like dignity is something he can’t afford to drop. The crowd tightens, a single body learning riot.
I drive him back in clean, incremental cuts, the way you herd a nuisance animal without ever admitting it could bite. One step, then another: my boots thudding steady, my shoulders square, my blade always where it needs to be. I keep my weight centered like the manuals taught me, like discipline is a shield the whole dock can see. Arrest. Contain. End it.
He gives ground with a kind of insultingly graceful patience, as if I’m doing him a favor by letting him retreat. That smirk stays hooked on his mouth, a bright little lie that says he’s already gone, already slipping through my hands, and the only thing left is to watch me realize it.
I don’t let him. I don’t even let myself think the words.
To me he’s just a dockside thief with a clever tongue and a talent for making other people feel stupid. I’ve dragged men like him off planks still slick with fish blood. I know the rhythm: pressure, corner, cuffs. The crowd doesn’t scare me; it stabilizes me. Witnesses mean he can’t disappear. Witnesses mean he can’t twist this into some back-alley tragedy where he’s the hero and I’m the monster with a badge.
Except: every time I close distance, he reads me too fast. He watches my feet, my shoulders, my breath, like my body is a ledger and he’s fluent in the numbers. When I feint high, he doesn’t flinch. When I cut low, he’s already not there. And when our blades kiss, brief, bright contact that jolts up my arm, his grip doesn’t shudder the way a desperate man’s should.
I tell myself it’s arrogance. I tell myself it’s theater.
Still, I keep driving him, because the edge of the dock is behind him now. The drop is real. The water waits, black and impatient. I angle my stance to take away his exits, convinced he only has one trick left: run.
He meets my eyes, and in that thin space between breaths I catch the truth I’ve been refusing: he isn’t cornered.
He’s choosing where to stand.
He talks while we move, and it’s not random. He times his words to my breath, to the fraction of a second it takes me to reset my stance. A remark about my uniform, about how clean my boots stay, and my temper answers before my training does. He wants that. I can feel it in the way his shoulders loosen whenever I press.
“Go on,” he says, voice pitched for the people behind me, for the ears that will decide later whether I was justice or cruelty. “Do it. Show them.”
He’s betting I won’t. He’s betting I’m tethered to the gaze of strangers, to procedure, to the neat little story my badge is supposed to tell. That I’ll never risk a messy grapple on wet planks, never drive him down hard enough to draw blood where everyone can see. He keeps offering openings that aren’t openings, keeps making me choose between control and optics, and every time I hesitate, he smiles like he’s already won.
His gaze won’t stay on me. It skims my shoulder, slides past my blade, flicks to the stacked crates and the open water and the narrow throat of the gangway like he’s counting beats in a song only he can hear. At first I want to call it fear, the animal part of him hunting for a hole to bolt through. But the pattern is too clean. He isn’t searching: he’s checking. Angles. Distances. People. The slack line of a mooring rope, the sway of a crane arm, the way the crowd compresses and loosens with each of our steps.
I feel it then, sharp and unwelcome: this isn’t a man improvising his way out.
He’s taking inventory of the whole dock, like he came with contingencies and I’m just one variable.
His attention flicks off my blade and into the bodies between us. Not panic: pattern. A dockworker shifts two paces without thinking, a vendor drifts aside, a knot of onlookers loosens where I want space and tightens where I want a wall, and I never raise my voice once. I feel him register it, feel his smirk falter. I’m not just a badge. I’m control made quiet.
The blast hits like a fist in my ribs: sound first, then pressure, then the world turning white with splinters. A row of crates detonates into shrapnel, grit peppering my cheeks, smoke crawling low over the planks. People scream and run, bodies colliding, a stampede where my line of sight was. I taste rust and realize, coldly, we’ve both been interrupted on purpose.
I trail the ripple of panic like it has a scent, hot, metallic, the sharp tang of fear rubbed into air, and it leads us off the marketline to the only office door that isn’t hanging off its hinges. The building’s front is a blackened shell, but this room survived, stubborn as a secret. The frame is soot-stained, the sign half-melted. Inside, the light is wrong, thin and gray through a cracked window, and everything that could burn already did.
The runner is wedged behind a metal desk that looks like it took a hit and decided to keep standing out of spite. They’re young enough that their cheeks still have softness, but their eyes are old. They don’t rise when I step in. They don’t look at me first, either.
Their gaze snaps to my badge and sticks there, then flicks to Riven’s weapon like it’s the same kind of stamp. Authority. Violence. Two ways to end their life and call it necessary.
I keep my hands where they can see them, palms open, empty. “We’re not here to, ”
“Don’t.” Their voice is hoarse, scraped raw, like they’ve been bargaining with their own fear for hours. “I talk to both or to no one.”
Riven shifts beside me, a minimal movement that still makes the room feel smaller. I hate how my skin reacts to him being close: every nerve registering heat, threat, presence. I hate more that the runner’s shoulders loosen the tiniest fraction when I don’t step in front of him, when I don’t try to own the space.
“Both,” I repeat, because fighting the phrasing will cost us everything. “We’re both here.”
Their eyes keep pinging between us, measuring the distance, the angle of our bodies, the exits. Like they’re calculating which of us will lie better. Like they’re deciding which of us will hurt worse. Their fingers worry a strip of cloth tied around their wrist until it’s almost string.
“If you want it,” they say, and swallow hard, “you stand there. Together. And you don’t, ” They nod at my badge, then at his gun. “You don’t do that thing. Either of you. I’m not picking a side. I’m not dying for your stories.”
The words hit like a shove. I feel Riven’s attention cut sideways toward me, sharp as a blade, and I don’t look at him. I can’t afford to. The runner’s stare is a tripwire, and the only way forward is to let them believe we can hold our own impulses in check.
The runner doesn’t ease into it. They lay down rules like they’re stacking sandbags against a flood: the door stays open, no matter what the hall sounds like; our hands stay where they can be seen, palms out, fingers spread; and nobody else comes in: no “backup,” no escorts, no friendly shadows hovering just outside the frame. “Intimidation’s not a look,” they rasp. “It’s a habit. It can wear a uniform or a grin.”
I start to say we can secure the perimeter, that protocol exists for a reason, and Riven makes a sound: barely a scoff, barely breath. The runner’s chin tucks as if yanked by a string. Their shoulders fold inward, arms wrapping tight around their middle, gaze dropping to the desk like the metal might swallow them.
Silence slams down, heavy and absolute.
I feel the urge to step forward, to fix it, to take control of the room the way I’m trained to. Riven shifts at the same time, a predator’s impatience contained by skin. The runner flinches at both movements.
So we stop. Together. Holding ourselves still like that’s the only proof we can offer.
We have nothing to trade that won’t shatter them. No promise I can make without sounding like a threat, no reassurance Riven can offer without it tasting like a lie. So we do the only thing left: we hold the line of our bodies and let the runner see we’re still capable of choice.
Riven stands close enough that I can feel the tension rolling off him in waves. My shoulder nearly brushes his, and the awareness is maddening, intimate in the worst way. I keep my palms open, my face neutral, my heartbeat loud in my ears.
We’re not cooperating. We’re performing restraint, two rivals in the same frame, because if either of us lunges for control, the lead evaporates.
The runner’s words come out in jagged little pieces, like they’re cutting them off before regret can. Lights on the ridge that blinked wrong, too steady, too clean, and a burst-code neither of our channels uses. Then: a scorch-mark on a crate lid, three slashes through a circle, something neither my office stamps nor Riven’s crews carve. They go silent, throat working. “I want guarantees,” they whisper. “Safe passage. My name gone. Somewhere to vanish.”
I can’t give immunity but I can say this much, and make it true: we’ll corroborate what you saw. Riven’s jaw works like he’s biting back a laugh, then he nods once, sharp and unwilling. “You breathe,” he says. “Long enough to prove it.” The floor gives a nervous tremor. Wind hits the boards and keeps hitting, turning the air cold-wet and metallic.
The wind doesn’t build so much as it decides. One minute it’s an annoyance threading through the broken boards, worrying the soot-stained curtains like restless fingers, and the next it punches the waystation hard enough to make the whole place flinch. The warped shutters start to rattle in uneven bursts. Wood on rusted nails, a sound like teeth chattering. Rain follows in sheets, not drops, and it hits the roof with a frantic, metallic insistence that makes conversation feel optional and pointless.
I cross to the radio because I need something that isn’t guesswork. The set is old, the kind that hums like it resents being asked to do its job. I twist the dial and get static that swallows the room, a white roar that seems to match the storm’s temper perfectly. Riven’s shoulder is a solid heat at my side, close enough that every small movement turns into awareness. I don’t look at him. Looking would make this feel like reliance.
“Come on,” I mutter, not sure if I’m talking to the radio or the universe.
A voice snaps through the noise in clipped fragments: official cadence, stripped of comfort. Lowland pass. Conditions deteriorating. Slide reported at the eastern cut. Then the words that land like a thrown rock: washed-out span. Route impassable until further notice. I hold the receiver closer as if proximity can change meaning, as if I can coax an alternate outcome out of the same syllables.
Riven reaches past me to adjust the antenna, his hand brushing mine for a fraction of a second. It’s nothing but my skin reacts like it’s been singled out. His expression doesn’t change. Mine probably does.
The broadcast repeats, thinner now, the signal chewing itself apart. Outside, the wind shoves again, testing the weak points of the building. The waystation smells like wet ash and old smoke, and the map on the wall flutters in its tacks like it’s trying to lift free.
I let the receiver settle back into its cradle with a carefulness I don’t feel. “That’s it,” I say, more to myself than him. “That’s the pass.”
Riven doesn’t take my word for it. He never does. He shoulders past the warped jamb and yanks the door open into a wall of rain like he’s picking a fight with the weather. For a second all I see is his outline (broad, stubborn) then the gust swallows him and the door slams half-closed with a wet, sucking sound.
I tell myself I’m listening for the hinges, for the boards, for anything structural. Not for his footsteps.
When he comes back he’s dripping in sheets, hair plastered to his forehead, water streaming off his coat and pooling on the already-scarred floor. His jaw is set in that way that means he’s angry at reality for refusing to bend.
“It’s going,” he says, and his voice has that rough edge like he’s holding it tight so it won’t crack.
I catch a glimpse past him before he kicks the door shut. Our track has turned into a brown, fast-moving skin of water, swallowing the ruts, eating the edges. The marker posts are half gone, just dark stumps, and beyond them the drop-offs have vanished under spray like the land is erasing itself.
I shove the map flat on the only table that isn’t slick with rainwater, pinning the corners with a tin cup and a busted flashlight like they’ll keep the world from shifting again. The paper is damp and soft at the folds, smelling faintly of smoke. My finger follows the main road out by habit, then stops where the pass is marked. Now a lie. I drag my nail along the next option, a thin thread skirting the river, and I can already hear the muzzle pops from the militia that owns that stretch. Another route cuts through the scrublands where my badge gets me shot on sight. The last detour runs straight into a checkpoint that knows Riven’s face like a wanted poster. Every line leads to a trigger.
We go methodically, because panic wastes time. The generator coughs on the second pull, then settles into a sickly rattle; the fuel gauge sits too close to empty to argue with. Outside, the lone vehicle’s starter grinds like it’s chewing glass and losing. Inside, the radio signal stutters. Any gap we had to move separately is sealing shut, and neither of us is stupid enough to give the other that kind of opening.
The storm doesn’t pass through: it squats, heavy and relentless, and the lowlands turn into a moving trap. Water owns the road; everything else is owned by people who’d love a clean shot at either of us. The waystation is the only roof that isn’t trying to kill me, and there’s no version of leaving where I don’t end up alone in someone’s sights. So we stay. Together.
I take stock the way I always do when my pulse is trying to pretend it isn’t. Not with hope (hope is sloppy) but with numbers and edges and what still works.
The radio sits on a crate by the window, wrapped in someone’s old tarp like that could keep the damp out. The dial crackles when I touch it, a thin, irritated hiss that never quite resolves into a voice. I twist it anyway, slow, listening for anything that isn’t weather and static. Nothing. Just the storm chewing at the roof and my own breathing coming too fast.
On the shelf behind the counter: three flares, all different brands, all expired by the look of the casings, but a flare is a flare when you’re desperate. A box of matchbooks so waterlogged they’re basically paper mush. Two canteens, one with a hairline crack. A coil of rope with burn marks in the middle like it got too close to the fire that gutted this place. I pull the map back toward me and flatten the ripped edge with my palm. Half of it is missing, but the ink that’s left feels like a taunt. Routes without outcomes.
My badge is dead weight here. My gun is comfort and consequence. I keep both within reach anyway.
Behind me, Riven moves like he’s made of impatience. He doesn’t hover; he can’t. He disappears into the burned-out bays where the waystation used to house vehicles, and I hear him testing doors, pushing at warped metal, kicking at debris. Every sound he makes is a question he won’t ask out loud.
When he comes back, rainwater stripes his hair and the set of his mouth says he found exactly what I expected: nothing clean. No unmarked exit. No back road that doesn’t funnel into somebody’s sights. No miracle.
“There’s a service hatch,” he says, wiping his hands on his pants like dirt is the problem. “Collapsed. You’d have to crawl. You’d get stuck.”
“Noted,” I murmur, and my finger taps the map where the pass should be open. Where it isn’t.
We don’t look at each other when the conclusion lands, because we both hate how obvious it is. Without the ledger, we’re guessing. Without each other, the witness stays silent and safe behind that door.
I hate that the only way forward has his shadow in it. I hate that my plan and his survival intersect in the same narrow corridor. And I hate, most of all, how the storm makes it feel less like a choice and more like gravity.
The voice comes through the thin wall like it’s rationing syllables the way we’re rationing fuel. “One escort,” they say. “One relay point. No detours. No hero stuff. If either of you walks out that door alone, I go quiet and the ledger goes with me.”
I press my forehead to the cool plaster, letting my breath fog it. “State the terms again,” I say, because if I can pin it to language, maybe I can pin it to something I control. “You hand over the ledger at the relay. We provide protection en route. If contact is made, ”
“You don’t negotiate,” the witness cuts in. “You comply.”
Riven’s laugh is all sharp edges. “And we’re supposed to trust you’re even holding it?”
I can feel him behind me, prowling for a crack in the rules. “Describe it,” he adds. “Ink color. Binding. Names.”
Silence, just long enough to make my throat tighten, then the witness drops the first detail like a stone. A code phrase nobody outside the ledger should know. A date. A transfer number tied to an incident I never put in a report.
My stomach goes cold.
Riven goes still. “Okay,” he says softly, like it hurts. “They have it.”
We argue anyway, because arguing is how we keep our hands from shaking. Route first: low road versus ridge line, where the mud will suck at our boots and where a sniper would perch if they were smart. Time-on-foot, daylight, the way the storm turns sound into a blanket and then suddenly doesn’t. What we do if we’re tailed: do we run, do we mislead, do we circle back and risk the witness deciding we’ve “detoured.” Riven wants speed; I want margins. He says my caution is a leash. I say his instincts are a match in a dry room.
Then the roof gives a wet groan and somewhere outside the pass answers with a long, sick collapse.
“Later” dies. “Now” takes its place.
We pick a departure window and one story until our mouths say it the same way.
Custody is where our truce almost bleeds out. I want seals, signatures, a chain that can survive a tribunal; he wants it moving, split, impossible to lose in one bad second. We snarl it down to an ugly balance: I keep the originals against my chest, he photographs the key pages and tucks the copies away. Each of us walks out holding leverage.
With the plan scratched into the map and the minutes counted down, the witness finally unlocks their door. But only a crack, only when both of us are framed in the same sightline like we’re the threat. I lift my hands, slow, open-palmed, reciting protocol. Riven shifts his weight, reading angles, ready to catch a lie. Even our first “together” move turns into a tug-of-war over which kind of caution keeps us breathing to the relay.
The witness keeps the door wedged with something heavy and stubborn, the kind of weight that says they’ve survived by making every choice twice. When it opens, it’s only far enough for one wary eye and the blunt end of a pistol to exist at the same time. Their voice comes out thin, scraped raw.
“Both,” they say. Not please. Not now. A requirement. Like I’m a form they’ve filled out in their head, and the checkbox has to match reality.
Riven’s shoulder shifts beside me and I hate that the witness flinches harder when he moves than when I speak. I hate that I understand why.
I take a slow step to the left, giving them my full face, my hands, my badge. Riven mirrors me without looking at me, angling so his profile stays visible in the crack. It’s ridiculous, the choreography of two people who would rather be anywhere else than aligned, forced into the same frame like a photograph neither of us agreed to take.
The witness’s gaze flicks between us, counting. Measuring. Trust, apparently, is not something they’re willing to risk on a single set of intentions.
Outside, wind hammers the half-burned walls and the storm drags grit across the broken windows like it’s trying to sand us down to nothing. The pass’s collapse is a pressure in the air, a door slamming shut miles away. No exit, no backup, no clean line home. Just this scorched room and the knowledge that if the witness bolts, we can’t split up to chase. Not without losing them, not without losing each other.
“Closer,” the witness says, and my skin prickles with the wrong kind of heat. Riven and I move in, shoulder to shoulder, close enough that I can feel the tension in him like a second pulse.
For one breath, the witness seems satisfied that neither of us can make a private threat without the other seeing it.
For one breath, I realize the trap isn’t just the weather.
It’s the requirement that we be seen together if we want the truth.
Inside the waystation, everything useful feels like it survived on a technicality. There’s exactly one door that still fits its frame and takes a lock without coughing splinters. One room we can actually seal, like the building is rationing safety. The rest is open wounds: buckled boards, a window that’s more hole than glass, char lines climbing the studs like someone tried to burn the decisions out of this place and failed.
The radio sits on a crate in the corner, strapped to a half-charged pack with frayed cord. When I turn the dial, it answers in bursts of static and distant voices that never quite resolve into words, like the air itself is arguing with me. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of silence or of someone answering.
And the map, God. It’s spread on a table blackened around the edges, soot-smudged fingerprints marking routes that are no longer routes. Supply drops circled in red like baited hooks. Dead zones crosshatched in angry ink, warnings so thick they look like bruises. Every line says the same thing: out there is choice, and every choice costs.
I move on instinct that feels like training and stubbornness braided together. I start at the door (hinges, latch, the bite of the lock) and then I walk the perimeter like the walls will confess if I look hard enough. Window openings get measured for sightlines, for how fast someone could climb through, for where I can put my back without giving away my spine. I count entry points out loud under my breath, marking them with soot-smudged chalk from my kit, pretending naming a threat shrinks it.
The radio gets rules before it gets use: short bursts, fixed intervals, no names, no emotional tells. I lay out angles of fire that I hope I won’t need, and I hate how calm it makes me. Like procedure can substitute for control when the storm has already decided otherwise.
Riven slices through my circuit like he’s done this dance in worse places. “Those markings?” he says, chin toward the map without stepping closer. “Someone wants you to follow them.” He taps the radio pack with two fingers. “And if you ping on a schedule, you’re just teaching them where to aim.” His gaze drags over the scorched beams. “Fortify if it helps you breathe: but this box already knows how to burn.”
Every choice we make turns into a tug-of-war I can’t afford to lose. I reach for rules because rules are rails, and I’m terrified of what happens when we go off them; he reaches for instinct like it’s a knife he’s never without. Between us, the witness sits too quiet, too fragile, and the radio keeps breathing static. I won’t say he’s right. I just keep moving.
I spread my kit on the warped table like I can flatten chaos by naming it. “We’ve got ten minutes before the temperature drops again,” I say, counting off with the stub of chalk. “Hammer, nails, wire. We brace the door from the inside, seal the gaps with cloth, and we don’t make noise doing it. Quiet buys time.”
Riven doesn’t answer. He’s already at the door with his shoulder under the frame, testing it the way people test a lie, push, listen, push again. The hinge screams, a thin metal complaint that makes the witness flinch in the corner.
“Tools,” I repeat, sharper. “We do this in steps, so we don’t, ”
He grabs a charred plank from the collapsed shelf and jams it across the door at an angle that makes my teeth itch. No measuring. No checking the grain. Just force and leverage like that’s a plan.
“That,” I say, “is improvisation dressed up as confidence.”
He finally looks over, eyes bright with that infuriating calm that isn’t calm at all. “And your plan is obedience dressed up as survival.”
“It’s procedure,” I snap, because procedure is what kept me alive long before him. “Procedure means we don’t get surprised.”
“Procedure means you waste daylight debating with yourself,” he says, and then he’s back to it: boot heel against the plank, weight shifting until it bites into the doorframe. He uses a strip of wire like a tourniquet, twisting it with the handle of my screwdriver. My screwdriver. Like he’s always had a claim to it.
I stalk over, bite down on the urge to yank it out of his hand. The brace holds. It shouldn’t, but it does, and the ugly efficiency of it lands in my chest like a small betrayal.
“You could’ve asked,” I mutter.
“You could’ve watched,” he says, not unkind, which somehow makes it worse. Then, as if he’s read the thought I hate having: “I’m not trying to make you lose. I’m trying to keep the door on the outside.”
I hate that my breath stutters, hate that the witness’s eyes flick between us like we’re the storm. I crouch to wedge cloth into the bottom gap anyway, because my hands need something to do besides reach for him or reach for control.
We lay the batteries out on the table between my kit and his knife like they’re neutral territory. Four AAs, two spares I didn’t know we had until he tipped my bag and made the secrets fall out. I hate how fast he found them. I hate that I’m relieved.
“We run the radio at the top of every hour,” I say, because structure is the only thing in this room that isn’t burned. “Two minutes. Listen. Log. Off.”
Riven leans back in the one chair like he owns the concept of comfort. “And when the top of every hour is exactly when they expect you to light up?”
“It’s called a check-in,” I shoot back. “Not a beacon.”
“It’s called predictable,” he says. “We keep one battery warm, one battery hidden, and we don’t transmit unless the witness talks.”
The word talks sits there like a dare.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, feel my pulse behind it. “You are a professional inconvenience.”
His mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “And you’re a walking warrant. You ever try trusting a person instead of a protocol?”
“Have you ever tried not treating the world like it’s waiting to jump you?”
His eyes flick to the door brace, then back to me. “Only when it is.”
The witness jerks at the edge of another argument, shoulder to ear, eyes too wide, and it’s like a switch flips in both of us. Our voices drop at the same time, low and tight, and irritation flashes hot in my throat because of course he notices, of course I do, of course we’re tuned to the same tells.
Riven angles his body so he blocks the draft and half the room without even looking like he’s trying. “Relax,” he murmurs, like he’s anyone’s comfort.
“Oh, look,” I whisper back, “the guardian returns.”
His gaze slides to me, sharp. “Says the woman who’s been staring at the bed like she’s deciding if sleep is legal.”
“I’m deciding if they should get it,” I hiss, then hate the way my own words give me away.
We test the radio in quick, stingy bursts, five seconds on, ten off, like we’re rationing oxygen. I count signal strength under my breath; he watches the window for shadows that aren’t there until they are. “Don’t,” I clip, and it means you’re lighting us up. “Fine,” he grinds out, and it means your caution is expensive. We pretend it’s contempt.
When the door brace stops shuddering under the storm and the radio coughs up a vein of static that almost sounds like a voice, our fighting doesn’t end. It sharpens. He hands me tape without asking; I hate that it’s the right kind. I correct his knot; he snorts, then redoes it cleaner. Every jab is really: I saw that. Don’t get cocky. Don’t leave.
The first real groan of the waystation comes from the bones of it, not the wind: timbers flexing, nails complaining, a long animal sound that makes the witness flinch and makes me move.
I don’t decide. My body does. I’m already across the room, boots sliding on ash-dusted boards, hands on the cot frame. The broken window is a mouth full of missing teeth, coughing cold into the space. If the glass had survived, it would be rattling itself to death.
I haul the cot away on instinct, bracing my shoulder against rusted metal, and my grip meets another grip hard enough to sting. Riven’s hand. His knuckles white, his palm hot, like he’s been waiting for the same moment.
We look at each other for half a second (too long to be nothing, not long enough to mean anything) and neither of us says sorry because sorry is a kind of softness neither of us can afford right now.
“Move,” I breathe, not loud enough for the witness.
“Already am,” he answers, and his voice is low, like we’re conspirators instead of enemies.
We shove from opposite sides, hands clashing, fingers catching on the same bolt. The cot jerks an inch, then sticks. I push harder. So does he. It turns into a silent contest where the prize is control of a piece of furniture, which is ridiculous, except it’s never just a cot. It’s where we’ll sleep. It’s where we’ll be helpless.
The waystation groans again, and the draft slices under my collar. The witness makes a small, broken sound. It cuts through my stubbornness like a blade. I adjust without thinking, angling the cot not toward my side or his, but away from that window’s open throat.
Riven feels the change and matches it like we’ve rehearsed. Our shoulders bump. His forearm brushes mine as we pivot, and my skin spikes hot in the cold. I hate that my body registers him as immediate, weight, heat, steadiness, before my mind can label him dangerous.
We wedge the cot into a corner where the wall blocks the worst of the wind. It settles with a dull thud, finally still.
For a second we’re both bent over it, breathing hard, hands still on the frame like we’re holding the whole place together.
Then we let go at the same time, and the empty space between our hands feels louder than the storm.
The radio squats on the scarred table like a single warm brick of hope, its casing faintly heated by our own desperation and the cheap battery pack Riven rigged. We treat it like it can bite. Like whoever holds it gets to decide what’s real.
I reach for the dial and he’s there, fingers closing around my wrist with a restraint that feels practiced. Not a squeeze. A stop. A reminder. My pulse jumps anyway, stupid and loud in my throat.
“Careful,” he says, barely air.
“As if you’re not the one slamming it on and off,” I murmur back, but I don’t yank away. I twist, just enough to reclaim my hand without giving him the satisfaction of a flinch. My glove drags over his skin; heat leaks through the seam.
He leans in, head tilted like he can coax words out of the hiss, and I plant my elbow between us. Not hard. Just a barrier. My forearm presses to his for a beat too long, the contact steadying and infuriating at the same time.
Static spills out, the sound of nothing pretending to be something. We separate like touching is a concession neither of us can afford.
There’s no clean surface left that isn’t already claimed by soot or splinters, so I shove the map onto the cot, smoothing it with my forearm like I can iron the storm out of paper. The lantern throws a weak, trembling circle, and to read the tiny print we have to lean in until his shoulder hovers close enough to feel like a threat.
I trace the collapsed pass with a gloved fingertip, following the jagged ink like it’s a wound. “Here,” I say, and my voice comes out too tight.
Riven doesn’t argue the collapse. He just taps an alternate line that skirts the low ridge and slides, not accidentally, toward his side of the world. Our knuckles bump over a contour. We both lock up.
Then, worse, our hands shift, automatically, making room. Like we’ve done this before. Like my body trusts the geometry of him even when I don’t.
Night drops like a lid, turning the burned room into a throat that holds every sound. “Watch” means sitting close enough to feel the other’s heat through layers, my back to one wall while his claims the other, both of us pretending his inhale doesn’t set the tempo of mine. I drift, then snap awake at a gust, Riven’s boot already braced to stop the door, his shoulders arranged like it’s just comfort, not coverage.
In the dark, there’s no graceful way to exist without crossing him. The canteen passes hand to hand, metal clinking soft, my fingers grazing his knuckles because the space refuses to widen. We tug at the same blanket from opposite ends until it gives up and lies between us like a truce. When we trade places by the map, his shoulder skims mine, my whole body goes tight, ready to fight, then, infuriatingly, just…adjusts. Like this is survivable.
Something flickers at the edge of my vision and I halt on instinct, breath catching like my body knows before my brain does. The road is quiet in that thin, strained way that never means safe. My boot is already committed, heel lifting, weight shifting forward.
Riven’s hand snaps out and closes around my wrist.
Not a yank. Not a grab meant to show ownership. Just pressure, exact, controlled, the kind you’d use on a lockpick instead of a limb, enough to stop my momentum without bruising my pride. My pulse jumps anyway, hot and immediate. For a fraction of a second I’m furious on principle. I don’t like being handled. I don’t like being slowed.
I twist to glare at him, ready with something sharp, something that will remind him who I am and what I can do, but the words skid in my throat. His grip doesn’t tighten. It doesn’t linger. It’s purely functional, like catching a falling glass before it shatters.
And he still doesn’t look at me.
His eyes are pinned ahead, jaw set, expression unreadable in that maddening way of his: like arrogance until you get close enough to realize it’s just… focus. The air between us hums with the argument I’m about to start and the one I’m already losing, because there’s no smugness to fight, no victory to deny him. Only a kind of calm I don’t trust, not from him.
“Trap?” I whisper, even though there’s no one to hear but dust and sky.
His thumb shifts once, a minute adjustment, and I feel the answer in the way he steadies me: yes. Stay. Don’t make it worse.
My pride wants to rip my arm free and step anyway, prove I’m not dependent on his reflexes. My survival wants to stand perfectly still and let him lead me through whatever invisible math he’s doing with the ground.
I hate that my survival is winning.
He still doesn’t give me the satisfaction of eye contact. His attention stays locked on the strip of road like it’s a page only he can read, lashes barely blinking, as if blinking might miss something. Two fingers lift from my wrist and hover over the dirt, not touching, just following the contour of nothing.
Then I see it. Because he makes me see it.
A faint, wrong straightness where everything else is chaos. A thread so thin it might be a stray hair, stretched low across the path, dust clinging to it in tiny beads like the world itself is trying to warn us. My stomach drops, delayed terror arriving late to the scene. One careless step and it’s not the trip that kills you, it’s the sound it makes. The signal. The invitation.
Riven’s fingers trace the line in the air again, measuring distance, angle, slack, all of it in a single, arrogant-seeming sweep that’s actually… precise. Disciplined. Like he’s done this a hundred times and survived.
I swallow, quiet, and let him have the lead without saying the words.
I expect the easy brutality, knife, snap, done, because that’s what men like him are supposed to do when something’s in their way. He doesn’t. He shifts, slow as a thought, settling his weight like he’s listening through his boots. Two fingers pinch the line, not cutting, just worrying it with a tiny twist that makes the dust tremble. He tests it the way you’d test a pulse. Then his other hand dips into his pocket and comes out with a sliver of something dull and unassuming, a wedge no bigger than a thumbnail.
He slides it under the thread, breath even, and I watch the tension change without the sound changing. Like he’s stolen the trap’s voice while leaving its mouth intact. My throat tightens. I hate how impressed I am.
The ambush comes anyway. A boot scuffs gravel somewhere off to our left. Riven doesn’t flinch. He guides me with two fingers at my elbow, shifting us a half-step at a time into open lanes and clean cover, arranging sightlines that say wait, talk, think. Before anyone decides to bleed.
For a heartbeat I read his stillness as a dare, like he wants me to watch him be untouchable. Then the trap’s silence holds, the unseen bodies out there hold, and I feel the work in it. The restraint clenched under that calm, the choice not to make noise, not to make a point with someone’s throat. My shoulders ease around his lines of safety before my pride can snap them back.
My certainty has always been simple, the kind you can carry like a blade and never question: Ashline breaks. Ashline bleeds. And everyone else pays later for whatever he leaves behind. I built plans around it: routes that avoid his territory, contingencies that assume scorched earth, a mental list of people I’d have to soothe or bury after he’d made his point. It was efficient, in a grim way. It meant I didn’t have to wonder what he’d do.
Wondering is dangerous.
And yet here I am, watching him take a situation that’s practically begging for a lesson in cruelty, wires in the dust, men in hiding, the righteous confidence of an ambush, and he treats it like a lock. Like a problem with an answer that isn’t blood.
The attackers show themselves in pieces. A flash of metal. A shoulder against scrub. A whisper too close to the road. They’re not professionals; I can tell by the way their courage jitters, by the way their fear leaks into their timing. They expect us to panic. They expect him to do what I’ve told myself he always does.
I taste the old assumption in my mouth like iron and force myself not to reach for it. Because he doesn’t lunge. He doesn’t snarl. He doesn’t turn it into theater.
He sets his body between us and their need to be violent, not like a shield. Like a suggestion. He gives them space to rethink. He looks toward the shadows where they’re hiding, and there’s no promise of mercy in his face, just a kind of steady, terrible competence that says: you can stop now.
It should irritate me more than it does.
I keep waiting for the punchline. The moment restraint snaps and proves I was right all along. But it doesn’t come. The silence stretches, not empty, but held. And in that held space, my certainty starts to feel less like wisdom and more like a story I told myself so I wouldn’t have to see him clearly.
Riven doesn’t rush into it. He watches the line they’ve drawn with fear and bravado, the invisible boundary where they’ve decided we’re prey, and he treats it like something you can edit. He shifts a fraction to the side, so small I almost miss it, and the first attacker commits anyway, because men like that always do. The swing is all momentum and anger. It should land. It should make a sound I don’t want to hear.
It doesn’t.
Riven is just… not there. He lets the air take the hit. His hand snaps up, not to strike, but to catch a wrist and redirect it, a clean angle that turns violence into emptiness. No bone-crunching correction. No punishment for the attempt. Just a quiet, humiliating miss.
My throat tightens in a way that isn’t fear, exactly. It’s disbelief. He could have ended it right there: could have taught the whole group what happens when you try him. Instead he gives them an out, like he’s more interested in controlling the next ten seconds than winning the last one.
And I hate that part of me is relieved.
He moves like he’s reading them a half-second ahead, like their anger is a script he’s already memorized. A forearm becomes a hinge, a shoulder a door he can close without slamming. He doesn’t hack through the group; he rearranges it. One man stumbles into another, not from a strike but from a borrowed step and a stolen center of balance, and suddenly they’re clustered where the road widens and the brush thins: where there’s nowhere heroic to hide. Riven keeps angling them toward open ground, toward each other, toward choices that don’t require him to become the monster they came expecting. It’s infuriating, watching him win without vengeance. It’s worse realizing how effective it is.
Weapons vanish into his palms like they were always meant to be there. He doesn’t break fingers; he just finds the joint and reminds it who’s in charge. A knee dips, a man folds, not hurt so much as unmade. Riven keeps feeding their momentum back at them as panic, low commands cutting through it: “Drop it. Back off. Go.” And somehow surrender becomes the safest thing they can reach for.
When it’s over, the road is still a road: no slick red proof, no bodies piled into a story someone can weaponize. Just men clutching at empty hands, limping on pride more than injury, backing away because he gave them a way to leave alive. I stand there breathing too hard, staring at the quiet kind of defeat. Nothing to avenge. Nothing to justify. Only the fact that it worked.
A bolt hisses past close enough that the sound feels personal, a thin, vicious line of air that lifts the hairs along the back of my neck and turns my skin into a map of alarm. For half a beat I don’t even know what hit me: only that something missed and my body files it under never again. My hand is already reaching for a weapon that isn’t there, my boots already finding the angle of the slope, my mind already drawing a clean path up the ridge: straight line, hard climb, take the high ground back with my teeth if I have to.
It’s the oldest reflex I have. Get above them. Get close. Make the danger stop by becoming the bigger one.
My pride loves the simplicity of it. My plans do, too. Because plans don’t have to feel fear, and they don’t have to admit that one stupid piece of metal can end everything in an instant.
I can almost taste the dirt and pine needles, the burn in my lungs, the satisfying snap of advantage returning to my hands. I’m halfway into motion, muscles coiling, when my gaze flicks down the road and catches what my charge would cost. A cart in the distance, slow and oblivious. A pair of travelers hugging the shoulder like they’re trying to make themselves smaller than bad luck. If I rush that ridge, the shooter adjusts. If the shooter adjusts, the bolt doesn’t have to find me next time.
The anger in my chest stutters, forced to share space with arithmetic. I hate that. I hate being the kind of person who sees strangers and can’t unsee them. I hate that the right choice feels like swallowing broken glass.
Another whisper of movement in the brush. Not the shooter: something closer, a shift in the air, a shadow cutting across my peripheral vision.
I pivot, ready to bite someone’s head off for touching my momentum. And then the world lurches as fabric bites into my throat, fingers snagging my collar with brutal certainty.
Riven moves first. Too fast for thought, too sure for permission. His fingers hook my collar like a handle and the jerk yanks air out of me, boots skidding, balance gone. For a split second my pride flares hot and stupid (don’t drag me) and my hands come up on instinct, ready to break the wrist that dares.
But then I feel the angle of it: not control, not punishment. A correction. A hard, precise reroute. He hauls me off the road and into the scrub with the kind of force that doesn’t waste itself, as if he’s already measured my weight and the distance and the exact moment the next bolt would arrive.
Pine needles rake my palms. Dirt bites my cheek. The world becomes a blur of brown and green and the metallic taste of adrenaline.
His knuckles stay fisted in my collar for one more beat, holding me down when every muscle in me wants to spring up and take the ridge anyway. I hear myself suck in a breath that sounds like a snarl.
I don’t thank him. I can’t. Not with my throat still in his grip, not with my heart pounding like it’s furious to be alive.
He twists with me like we’re one clumsy unit, like my fall is his to manage, and suddenly the sky is gone. Blocked by the hard plane of his shoulder, the spread of his coat, the uncompromising fact of his body between me and the ridge. His back is turned to the threat without hesitation, a blunt refusal to let me be the target again. He plants a knee in the dirt beside my hip and leans in, not crushing, not coddling. Bracing. Close enough that I catch the heat of him, the sharp edge of sweat and road and something clean underneath. For one suspended heartbeat he’s a shield, and the terrifying part is how naturally he does it, like he’s already decided where the next bolt should land.
I go still under the sudden, infuriating fact of being covered. My anger bunches up behind my teeth, useless, caught on the surprise of it. His breath is steady against the hush, controlled, counted, like he’s already filed this moment under solved. Mine comes too fast, too loud in my own ears, sharp enough to cut. I hate that it steadies when I match him.
The instant the pressure lifts, no second bolt, no scream, he lets go. Not gently. Like he’s cutting a line. He steps back and his jaw locks into something brutal, eyes already gone past me. His fingers drag over his own palm, a quick scrape like my collar burned him. Then he’s up and moving, angles and intent, barking a signal low, ending this clean.
The ambush doesn’t end with a clean snap, the way plans always look on paper. It unravels. It frays at the edges first, someone’s courage, someone’s grip, until the whole thing sloughs off the road in ragged pieces. I hear boots skid on loose gravel, the panicked, ugly music of metal on stone as a weapon gets dropped instead of swung. A crossbow clatters, then another; a short, strangled curse follows, like the sound itself might call the bolt back.
For a second nobody moves because everyone is waiting for the other shoe: the finishing stroke, the punishment, the part where Riven does what people like him are rumored to do when they’re done playing precise.
But it doesn’t come.
Instead, shapes start to rise from the brush in slow, reluctant increments, as if they’re surfacing from water that’s too cold. Hands come up, not fully surrendered, not proud either, hovering at shoulder height with fingers spread wide like they’re afraid any sudden curl will be misread. They’re shaking, and it isn’t performance; it’s tremor-deep, exhaustion and adrenaline and hunger all tangled together. Their faces are smudged with dirt, and their eyes keep flicking to the trees behind us, to the road ahead, to each other. Checking for a leader that never steps out because there isn’t one, not really. Just bodies arranged around an order they didn’t write.
I catch myself cataloging them the way I was trained to: count, weapons, exits. And then, because I can’t help it, I catalog what’s missing. No triumph. No hard laughter. No clean cruelty. Just a line of frightened people who look more like they got lost than like they chose this.
Riven doesn’t gloat. He doesn’t even raise his voice. He shifts his stance, subtle, economical, and the motion isn’t a threat so much as a boundary being drawn in the dirt: Stop here. Breathe. Think.
My throat tightens around words I don’t offer. The fight isn’t over, but the killing, somehow, might be.
One of them peels off the line like his body makes the choice before his brain can veto it. He’s too young. Not in the dramatic, tragic way people like to say it. Just literally too young, all sharp elbows and hollowed cheeks, a face that still carries the soft uncertainty of training yards. His jacket hangs on him like it was taken off someone bigger, the sleeves swallowing his wrists, the collar chafing his throat raw. When he moves, I see ribs shift under the fabric with each shallow breath.
He’s holding a short blade, but it doesn’t look like an extension of him. It wobbles, dragged along at his side as if it’s heavy, as if he’s afraid to lift it and afraid to drop it. His eyes won’t land anywhere for more than a heartbeat, road, trees, our hands, the ground, searching for the version of this moment he’s been warned about. His mouth works once, soundless, like he’s trying to remember the right words to beg with.
And I can’t tell whether he steps forward because he wants out, or because he thinks stepping forward is the punishment he’s owed.
Riven doesn’t advance like he’s collecting a debt. He angles in, slow enough that the kid can track every inch, and he keeps his palms open at his sides like a promise. No sudden reach. No flourish. His voice stays down in that calm, flat register that makes it impossible to pretend this is just noise. He talks to the boy like he’s real, like he’s not a target: like he’s a person who can still choose.
“You’re hungry,” he says, and the kid flinches like the word is a jab. “You’re scared. And whoever put you on this road isn’t coming back for you.”
I hate how accurate it is. I hate, too, how the truth settles the boy’s breathing more than any threat could.
His knuckles go white around the hilt, then, at Riven’s low, steady counting, color leaks back into his fingers. “In,” Riven murmurs. “Out. Good. Now let it go.” The blade trembles once like it wants to argue, then drops, a blunt little thud in the grit. The others watch, swallowing hard, and one by one their weapons follow, as if permission can spread.
The silence that follows isn’t peace, it’s a collapse. Words start falling out of them anyway: stammered justifications, names they don’t want to say, roads they were told to watch, a “handler” who pays in bread and pain. I catch the way their eyes keep darting to the treeline like they’re bracing for punishment. This isn’t devotion. It’s starvation with a schedule.
I swing the rifle up on instinct, the familiar weight settling into the notch of my shoulder like it belongs there more than my own pulse does. The lane ahead is a straight seam cut through scrub and churned earth, dust hanging in it the way smoke hangs after a fight, lazy, deceptive, begging you to forget what’s moving inside it. For half a breath the pursuers drift out of cover, silhouettes sliding between ripples of heat.
There it is. The gift.
One clean line. A long, unbroken corridor of air and grit, and at the end of it a throat I can close with a single squeeze. I draw the sight picture in, the world narrowing to a circle and a hard little post, all the clutter of road and sky pushed away. The lead rider’s head bobs with the rhythm of the horse (up, down, up) his jawline flashing pale where his scarf slipped. I time it automatically. There’s a place between beats where even a moving target feels like it pauses for you. I live in those places.
My finger finds the trigger. Pressure, not a jerk. Patience, not mercy. I can already feel the recoil in my bones, the way the shot will punch through my shoulder and leave my mouth tasting like metal. My breath goes shallow, held at the edge of itself. Everything in me becomes the shot I’m about to take.
And it isn’t just him I see.
I see the second man tucked behind his flank, the angle of his spine, the way they’re riding tight because they think the dust hides them. I see the lane stretching past them, past the churn of hooves, past the point where the air gets thinner and the ground dips.
If I take this, it ends. The chase breaks. Our options open like a door kicked in.
My cheek presses harder into the stock. The barrel steadies, and for a terrifying second it feels easy: like the world is offering me a simple answer.
Like I deserve it.
The angle clicks into place a beat too late, like a lock turning when I’ve already started to shove the door. My sight picture doesn’t stop at the rider’s throat: it keeps going, a straight, indifferent line through dust and distance, through the empty air I’m pretending is empty.
Behind them, the road isn’t road anymore. It’s a wagon. It’s canvas patched so many times it looks like scar tissue. It’s bodies packed close beneath it, shoulders and knees and hands braced against every rut, faces turned forward because looking back would be worse. I can’t see their eyes, not clearly, but I can see the way the wagon sways and how the driver leans into the reins like stubbornness can become a shield.
If I fire, the bullet doesn’t stop because my problem is solved. It keeps going. It doesn’t care who paid whom, who chased, who deserves. It will punch through leather and bone and then find soft, anonymous weight.
My pulse does something ugly. For one breath I hate the physics of it. For the next, I hate myself for forgetting it.
My finger tightens to the brink and freezes there, a wire pulled so taut it sings. I let the breath I’ve been hoarding leak out through my teeth, slow, angry, like I can sand down what I almost did with air alone. The barrel dips. The sight picture breaks. The world rushes back in. I don’t look at Riven. If I do, I’ll see whatever he’s thinking and I’ll either fight it or fold. Instead I slice my hand sideways, sharp and final, and point us off the lane.
We veer into a gulley where the ground is chewed up and slick, where ruts grab at wheels like teeth. Mud. Broken axles. No straight lines. No easy speed. Only consequences I can live with.
The wagon line lurches after my hand signal, wheels complaining as they bite into the gulley’s suck and slap over stones. We lose clean speed immediately; I feel it like a bruise blooming under my ribs as the riders behind us fan wide, smart, recalculating. I swallow hard, tasting dust and my own temper, and I shove my pride down with both hands. Choosing strangers’ lives over the quick, sure end.
Riven’s attention doesn’t follow the riders fanning out; it pins itself to me, to the decision still vibrating in my hand. His eyes go flint-bright, not accusing, assessing, tallying the distance I just chose to make our lives harder. For a second I’m braced for a remark sharp enough to draw blood. Instead his jaw shifts, and he gives the smallest nod, like it costs him to spend it.
I break first.
Not with a shout, my throat’s too tight for that, but with my hand, two fingers slicing up toward the ridge we’re skirting. The line of scrub and rock above us looks harmless from here, sun-bleached and still, but I can still see it the way it would’ve been: clean high ground, easy angle, a straight shot to end this fast.
“We could’ve taken that,” I say, and the words come out rougher than I intend, like they’ve picked up grit from my teeth. I keep my eyes forward, on the gulley’s churned mud and the wagon wheels fighting it. “We’d be past them by now.”
I hear a harness creak, a wheel slip and catch. Behind us, someone mutters a prayer that sounds more like a curse.
My fingers stay lifted longer than they should, an accusation without a target. The ridge isn’t at fault. Neither are the people who would’ve been in the way.
“It would’ve been clean,” I add, because part of me wants him to contradict me, to call it what it was: a fantasy of efficiency. Part of me wants him to admit he saw it too. “No mud. No crawl.”
Riven doesn’t answer right away. His silence isn’t punishment; it’s process. Like he’s laying the thought on a table and turning it until all the sharp edges show.
I risk a glance. He’s watching me with the same attention he gives a man about to draw. It’s infuriating, being measured like that, and worse, being understood.
I drop my hand, wipe my fingers on my thigh as if I can erase the impulse.
“I’m not saying I don’t know why,” I say, quieter, and I hate that it sounds like a confession. “I’m saying it costs.”
The riders’ spacing shifts again behind us, shadows moving where they shouldn’t, and my pulse keeps trying to sprint even though the wagon can’t. I set my jaw hard enough to hurt.
“Tell me,” I push, breath quick, “that you didn’t see it.”
Riven’s mouth tilts like he might laugh, but it never reaches his eyes. “I saw it,” he says, and there’s no heat in it: no gloating, no lecture. Just the flat certainty of someone counting steps in the dark.
He ticks it off like he’s reading marks on a map. “Ridge is one hundred yards higher than it looks from here. You put wagons up there, you’re stalled in open sky. Sun’s still high: no shadow cover. We’ve got, what, nine clean shots between us before we start scraping barrels and praying?” His gaze flicks past me, past my shoulder, measuring the riders’ fan like he’s already drawing lines between their positions. “And there were witnesses. Farmers, kids, anyone within earshot. You don’t end it clean; you end it loud.”
Every word lands with weight, not spite. It makes my teeth grind anyway.
He keeps looking at me, steady as a sightline, like I’m the risk he’s managing. “You want me to tell you I didn’t see it,” he adds, softer, “or you want me to tell you what it would’ve cost?”
I draw my chin up until it aches, like pain can hold me in place. “Don’t do that,” I say, and it comes out clipped, precise, the way orders do when you can’t afford to sound like you’re pleading.
He waits, and the waiting makes my skin feel too tight.
“I’m not asking you to bless it,” I go on, breath quick, hands empty at my sides so he can’t call them weapons. “I’m telling you there are lines. Mine.” I bite down on the rest, mercy, decency, whatever word he’d twist into weakness, and keep only the math. “If the price is my timing, my leverage, my pride. Fine. I’ll pay that. I won’t pay with strangers.”
My gaze locks on his, daring him to make me name it softer.
He starts to snap back then something in him catches. His jaw works, and I watch him swallow whatever cruel, effortless thing he used to reach for. He looks past me, past the wagons, recalculating. “Fine,” he says at last, and the word is all grit. He shifts the route, surrenders a fraction of control like it’s just another number.
When we start moving again, my hate won’t come when I call it. It catches on the image of his hands turning an ambush into surrender without a single body dropped to make a point. And I feel him tracking me the same way, remembering I chose strangers over leverage. The truce rides between us, wordless, heavy as law.
Second watch settles in with the kind of cold that feels intentional, like the night is making a point. It creeps under my collar and down my spine, finds every seam in my gloves and pries until my fingers ache. The wind worries at the scaffolds, nosing into the gaps between planks, tugging the ropes until the knots groan in protest. Metal shrinks and clicks. Wood flexes. The whole structure complains in small, exhausted sounds, as if it’s been asked to hold up a world that keeps getting heavier.
I keep my posture loose on purpose. Loose means quiet. Quiet means I don’t have to look down and see what we’re guarding: or what we’re not.
The handset is warm from my palm, a small stubborn heat against everything else, but it keeps hissing like it’s full of sand. Static drags over the speaker in waves, sometimes thin enough that I can hear my own breathing between bursts, sometimes so thick it feels like drowning. I turn the dial in tiny increments, slow enough not to tear the signal, patient like I haven’t been doing this every night for too long. My thumb moves the way it has learned to move: careful, controlled, obedient.
A part of me is waiting for nothing. Routine, check-ins, weather codes. Names I don’t recognize. Orders that don’t touch us.
Another part of me, smaller, meaner, waits for proof that my instincts are right, that the Accord is exactly what I’ve always said it is. I hate that part because it’s never surprised. It just… collects.
The wind gusts hard enough to sway the scaffold. My stomach lifts with it, then settles. I swallow, my throat raw from cold air and silence, and tilt the handset closer. The static shifts pitch, spikes, then thins like someone dragged a curtain aside. A voice comes through, broken and distant, clipped by interference. I freeze without meaning to, the dial pinned beneath my fingertips.
Words snag and tear, but the tone is crisp, administrative, bored with consequences. I catch a code. A location I know by the shape it makes in my mind. Then a phrase, too clean, too deliberate to be a mistake. Spoken like it’s a category in a ledger instead of a line of lives.
My fingers tighten until the plastic edge bites, and the whiteness in my knuckles shows me before I can hide it.
Static peels back in ragged strips, and for a heartbeat I hear nothing but the wind and the blood thudding in my ears. Then the radio coughs. One of those ugly, half-choked bursts where you can tell someone is talking but the words arrive chewed up, spat out. A call sign. A number string. A place-name I’ve walked past on maps without ever touching with my boots. The voice is flat, trained into calm, and the interference makes it sound even colder, like the world itself is indifferent.
“Border, ” the syllable catches, vanishes, returns. “Vill. I turn the dial a hair and hold my breath so I don’t shake.
Then it comes through clean, just long enough to be unmistakable.
“Nonessential.”
Not a warning. Not a debate. A label. The kind you stamp on crates you don’t mind losing. The kind you use when you’ve already decided what’s allowed to starve.
My throat tightens around something hot and stupid. My hand locks on the dial like if I let go, the word will float away and I can pretend I didn’t hear it. But I did. I heard it.
I go perfectly still, the way you do when you’re trying not to spook something skittish and deadly. I lean closer to the handset like my body can bully the air into behaving, like warmth and breath can pin the signal in place. My thumb and forefinger ride the dial in slivers, too much and the voice vanishes into snow, too little and it drowns under the hiss, so I keep nudging, correcting, coaxing, patient in the way you get when you’ve learned patience is the only weapon they let you hold.
The transmission keeps slipping, syllables shearing off mid-word. I catch them anyway, reassemble them in my head, forcing meaning out of fragments. Each time the voice thins, I chase it, refusing to let it escape.
The voice keeps going. Lists and tallies and neat little determinations about priority routes, ration allotments, “acceptable attrition.” It’s all numbers wearing human skin. I track each clipped phrase like it’s a target, like if I hold on tight enough I can drag the truth into the light. My hand clamps down on the knob until the ridges bite. My knuckles blanch. I can’t unmake that tell.
I pull a breath in through my nose and ration it out slow, like I can starve the panic quiet. I let the radio hiss and pop, pretend the room is the same as it was a minute ago. But my mouth has already betrayed me: too tight, too sharp. Footsteps. Mara close. I keep my eyes on the dial, because if I look up she’ll watch the moment rumor turns into something I can’t swallow.
Mara’s hand comes into my periphery (clean, bare, commanding by habit) and she doesn’t ask. She just takes the receiver out of my grip like it’s a weapon I don’t have clearance to hold. For a heartbeat I want to resist on instinct alone, because the handset is warm from my palm and the truth inside it feels like it ought to burn whoever touches it next.
She brings it close, angling it under the low lamp. The paper clipped to the logbook, thin, official, smug, sits between her fingers like it belongs there. Her eyes move once, fast. Then again, slower, as if speed could be a kind of mercy. She reads it twice the way you reread a bad diagnosis: waiting for the words to flinch, to apologize, to admit they’re a mistake.
They don’t.
I watch the minute changes I’ve learned to read better than maps. The small tightening at the corner of her mouth. The pause where she hits the line about “nonessential.” The way her thumb drags along the edge of the directive, worrying the paper as if she could wear a new outcome into it. She swallows, and the sound is too loud in the cramped room.
“Those are our villages,” I hear myself say, and it comes out too flat, like I’ve scraped all the feeling off just to make it fit through my teeth. I don’t add Ashline. I don’t have to. She knows which border I mean. She’s signed the patrol routes. She’s looked at the same smudged pins on the same map.
Her gaze lifts, just a fraction, and for an instant it’s not an officer looking at a report. It’s a woman looking at an extinction order with her name somewhere in the margins. Her lips part, then close. When she speaks, it’s not sharp, not practiced.
“That isn’t…” Her voice catches like she’s hit debris in her throat. She tries again, hoarse, unbelieving. “That isn’t what I signed for.”
The uniform is the first thing that fails her. Not in some dramatic rip, not in a showy mutiny: just a quiet slipping, like the seams were held together by habit and everyone else’s certainty. Her spine unhooks. The squared set of her shoulders loosens, and the weight she carries so effortlessly on patrol suddenly looks like what it is: borrowed authority, measured in signatures and stamps, and it isn’t enough to stop paper from killing people.
She keeps staring at the directive, but her eyes don’t track it like a report anymore. They fix on one line and go unfocused, as if she’s looking through it to wherever the consequences live. Her fingers tighten around the page, then relax, then tighten again, an indecisive pulse. I can almost hear her trying to find the right compartment inside herself, duty, denial, anger, and coming up empty.
There’s a beat where I expect her to snap into command. Instead her breath catches. Her jaw works like she’s chewing on words that won’t go down, and the room feels too small to hold what she’s realizing.
Her lips shape the word like it’s foreign, like her tongue can’t find where it belongs. Nonessential. At first it’s nothing but breath and a faint movement then the sound drags out of her anyway, rough and wrong. “Nonessential,” she whispers, and the rasp in it is almost a flinch, like the syllables scrape something tender on their way up.
She blinks hard, once, twice, and the second blink lingers too long to be normal. Her eyes don’t leave the line, but her focus fractures around it, caught between what it says and what she needs it to mean. The disbelief isn’t loud. It’s worse.
“That isn’t what I signed for,” she says, and it lands wrong. No edge, no accusation, just a shaken tally of her own hands on the pen. Like if she names it plainly enough she can trace back through the paperwork, the briefings, the salutes, and find the exact turn where duty became this. Her fingers hover over the ink as if it might blister her.
Her gaze snaps to me like a lifeline thrown on instinct, quick, sharp, and then it softens into something I’m not supposed to see from her. Not command. Not calculation. A bare, searching question. For one reckless second it looks almost like she wants me to tell her she misread it, that there’s a clause, an exception, a mercy buried in the margins.
I don’t give her the comfort she’s reaching for. I can’t. I answer that raw, searching look with the only thing honest in me: one small nod that feels like it costs a year off my life. Yes. You read it right. No, there isn’t a mercy hiding in the margins.
My eyes slide off her and fix on the radio unit squatting on the table, its casing scuffed, its dial trembling with static like a nervous pulse. I stare at it the way you stare at a fire you can’t put out, like if I keep my gaze locked on the machinery maybe the words won’t have to land inside either of us. The transmission is gone now, just a hiss and a faint, broken whine, but the sentence it spat out keeps echoing in my skull, clean as a stamp.
I swallow. My mouth tastes like metal and cold coffee and the kind of fear that doesn’t spike. It settles.
I hear my own breath, too loud in the watch room. I’m aware of Mara’s presence the way you’re aware of a blade on your skin. I don’t look at her again because if I do, I’ll see the part of her still trying to believe this is a mistake, and something in me will either crack open or swing shut for good.
My thumb rubs along the edge of my keepsake in my pocket, a worn habit I hate that I can’t break, counting old grooves like prayers. Siblings. Friends. A mentor who coughed himself hollow behind a quarantine rope. The Accord’s neat language was always a boot; I just never had the luxury of pretending it was a hand.
The radio crackles once, an aftershock, and I flinch anyway. Then I make myself speak: because the nod isn’t enough, and because she deserves the truth even if it ruins the shape of her world.
“It’s real,” I say, voice low, scraped raw. “They meant it.”
Where I’m from, “nonessential” was never a word you argued with. It was a ledger balanced on a knee because there weren’t enough tables left that weren’t being used as stretchers. It was a page damp at the corners from breath and rain, and names lined up in careful rows like that made it fair. You’d hear the scratch of a pen over the radio hum, the clerk’s mouth moving as he counted under his breath, not prayers. Inventory.
Then the line would go through someone. Quick, efficient. Ink like a closed door. Sometimes they didn’t even look up at the person standing there, holding out a tin, holding out a ration chit that suddenly meant nothing. Sometimes the person didn’t protest. They just stared at their own name like it belonged to somebody else, like if they held still long enough it might reappear.
I watched mothers trade rings for half scoops. I watched men volunteer for work crews just for the extra ladle, then come back hollow-eyed anyway. That’s what it meant: deciding hunger was a policy instead of a failure.
Quarantine wasn’t walls where I’m from. It was rope: cheap cord strung between posts, tied with knots that looked temporary even the day they went up. They hung warning tags off it like that counted as care: red paper, black ink, KEEP BACK, as if letters could stop a cough. The sick were pushed behind it with whatever they’d managed to carry, blankets and pots and a little pride, and then everyone on the safe side pretended the line was a kindness instead of a sentence.
Rain loosened the fibers. Wind worried the knots. Week by week the rope sagged, drooped into the mud, got stepped over by the desperate and yanked back into place by guards who wouldn’t meet your eyes. In the end the boundary wasn’t the rope. It was the hush, and the smell you learned not to breathe through your nose.
It comes out in jagged chunks I didn’t plan to give her. Dates that still itch in my head, villages named like I’m taking attendance for the dead, the way triage turns into math when you’re out of everything. “Nonessential” stops being a distant policy and becomes a practiced method: who gets a vial, who gets a seat on a truck, who gets a line in a report that survives.
I don’t shout. I can’t afford to: shouting makes it sound like an argument, like something you can win. I keep my voice level and let the truth do what it does, heavy and patient. Somewhere far off, people with clean hands signed their names and pressed stamps into ink, and it turned abandonment into paperwork. I’ve been carrying those signatures in my ribs for years.
I’m on my knees in the storage alcove with my shoulder wedged against the crate to hold it open, because the hinge sticks and the cold makes everything meaner. My fingers move on autopilot: fuses on the left, coils of wire on the right, cloth pouches that used to hold medical tape and now hold anything small enough to lose. I don’t need light for this. I know the shape of our scarcity.
Batteries are supposed to be in the shallow tin, third layer down. I find the tin by its dented lip, pop it open with my thumbnail, and the rattle inside is wrong. Too light. I count by sound and weight and feel my throat tighten anyway, like counting can change the number. One, two, three: dead. Four. Maybe. I set the maybes in a separate pile because pretending is easier when it has its own category.
I’m putting the dead back when my knuckles scrape something soft tucked under the spare fuses. Not a rag we use for cleaning, not the rough weave of the issued cloth. This is wrapped tight, folded with intention, the edges turned in like whoever did it couldn’t stand fraying. It’s wedged deep, like it’s been pressed into the corner and forgotten on purpose.
I pause with it half-out, listening for footsteps, for Riven’s boots, for anyone’s voice in the corridor. All I hear is the low thrum of the generator and my own breathing, fast, careful, like I’m stealing. I tell myself I’m not. I tell myself it’s inventory, it’s responsibility, it’s my job to know what we have.
The bundle is smaller than my palm but heavier than cloth should be. The weight isn’t metal exactly; it’s dense, like stone warmed by a hand. I slide it free and it tugs at the fuses as if it doesn’t want to leave its hiding place.
My thumb finds the knot. It’s not a quick tie. It’s a patient one. Whoever wrapped this did it the way you wrap something you can’t afford to lose, or can’t bear to look at unless you have to.
For a second I just hold it there, half out of the crate, half convinced I can slide it back and pretend my hand never closed around it. That’s the rule I’ve lived by long enough: don’t touch what isn’t yours, don’t ask for the story behind it, don’t make another thing in this place heavier than it already is.
But the way it’s been tucked away, deep, deliberate, like someone hid it from their own eyes, hooks under my ribs. Protected. Not stashed. Not discarded. Kept.
My fingers worry at the knot again. The cloth gives a little, reluctant, as if it remembers being pulled tight and resists loosening out of loyalty. I unwind it slowly, breath caught high, absurdly careful, like a sudden movement might bruise whatever’s inside or wake something that’s been asleep on purpose.
Layer after layer peels back: the outer grit-stained fold, then cleaner fabric beneath, then a final wrap pressed flat by repetition. The air in the alcove feels colder with each turn, thinner, as if I’m unsealing a chamber.
When the last corner falls away, the weight settles into my palm and I go still.
It’s a keepsake. Small enough to disappear in a fist, heavy enough that my hand registers it as something meant to last. The edges have been worried down over time, rounded like river stone, like it’s lived in a pocket and been thumbed in the dark. Whatever it’s made of isn’t polished so much as handled into softness. I turn it once, and the surface catches the weak light, not with shine but with shallow scars: grooves, precise and narrow, cut with the kind of patience you don’t waste unless you have too much grief and nowhere to set it. Names. Not scratched in haste: pressed in, letter by letter, as if spelling them correctly is the only mercy left.
I read the lines once, then again, because my brain keeps trying to turn them into something easier, codes, stations, slogans. But the rhythm is too human. Sets of names that belong together, a repeat of last names like a broken chain: siblings. A friend’s nickname, carved smaller. A mentor marked with a title. Each letter is careful, stubborn, a quiet refusal to let them vanish into paperwork.
Something tilts inside me, a slow, sick click. The anger I’ve been cataloging, his sharp edges, his contempt, the way he says “Accord” like it’s rot, slides out of its tidy slot and turns into a different sound entirely. Not politics. Not posturing. Mourning that’s been locked in his throat so long it learned to bite. I stand there, clutching what I wasn’t meant to see, and I don’t know how to put it back without stealing it again.
Mara comes back in like she’s carrying something that can cut through skin without ever touching it. Both hands are wrapped around my keepsake. Not clenched, not possessive, just bracing, as if her fingers are the only thing keeping it from shattering into splinters of metal and memory. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t look past me. Her gaze stays locked on the little slab in her palms, pupils narrowed, breathing shallow, like if she blinks too hard the names will rearrange themselves into something easier to bear.
I wait for the inevitable: the clipped question, the sharp accusation, the tone she uses when she’s about to turn a private wound into a tactical problem. My shoulders tense anyway, because my body has learned to meet her with armor before my mind can decide if it’s needed.
But she’s silent.
Not the silence that punishes. Not the silence that dares me to flinch. It’s the kind that listens to a room after a gunshot, taking inventory of what’s been broken and what’s still standing.
She steps closer and I move on instinct, hand lifting. Too fast, too obvious. The urge to snatch it back hits like hunger: reflexive, shameful, necessary. The keepsake was never meant to sit out in the open. It’s for pockets, for dark, for the hours when grief feels safer if it’s hidden against my own skin.
Her hand comes down over mine before I can close my fingers. Warm through the grime. Steady. Deliberate. Not restraining me so much as anchoring me, as if she’s lowering a weapon neither of us meant to raise.
Her thumb shifts, barely, and I see how carefully she’s holding it. How she’s made room around the edges so she doesn’t smear the shallow cuts, how she refuses to touch the names like they’re sacred and she doesn’t have permission.
Her mouth opens like she’s about to speak, and then she swallows whatever it is. The breath she lets out shakes, just once.
Then she moves, slow as a vow, and brings it down between us.
She sets it down where the lantern throws its weakest circle of light, right in the middle of the scarred table between our knees, as if this is the only place it can breathe. Not tucked under a map. Not angled toward her like evidence. Flat, open, undeniable: names catching the glow in shallow strokes, each one a tiny ridge my eyes snag on.
Her hand lingers an extra second at the edge, fingers splayed like she’s holding back a draft that might scatter them. The gesture is absurdly gentle for someone who gives orders like iron. It makes my throat tighten in a way I don’t have words for.
I realize, with a sting of shame, that I expected her to make it useful. To turn it into a question: Why didn’t you report this? Who are these? What unit? What loss ratio?
Instead she gives it the center of the table like an altar no one asked for, like she’s admitting there are things the Accord can’t file away. Her palm lifts slowly, leaving the keepsake behind like a confession neither of us can unhear.
My reflex snaps in before pride can even clear its throat. My shoulders draw up hard, a flinch pretending to be a choice, and my fingers dart for the keepsake like I can outrun the fact that she’s already read it. It isn’t about the metal, not really. It’s about the names carved into it, about how they feel safer pressed to my ribs where no one can count them, sort them, translate them into numbers that fit a report.
I hate the heat that floods my face, the childish, starving panic of being seen. I hate that my hand shakes just enough to betray me. I’m halfway to grabbing it back, already rehearsing a snarl, already reaching for cruelty as cover, anything to make this moment smaller, when her hand meets mine.
Her palm settles over my knuckles. The grab in my fingers dies under it, caught mid-instinct. I could pull away. I don’t. Heat from her skin seeps into the shake I’m trying to hide, and in that quiet pressure is an order, yes (stop) but also an answer I didn’t ask for: she understands the price.
For a breath I don’t take, we stay locked there: her hand over mine, my fingers curled too tight, the keepsake pinned between us like a third pulse. I feel the faint ridges of the carvings through the metal, through my skin, and I swear I can hear how careful she’s being. Not to pry. Not to claim. Just to help me set the weight down without it shattering us.
The fight drains out of the air in a slow, startled way, like a held breath finally slipping free. It doesn’t vanish, nothing between Mara and me ever really vanishes, but it stops aiming for my throat. The heat that usually sparks when we’re too close, when our tempers rub raw, slides sideways and roots itself somewhere deeper, somewhere I don’t have a name for that doesn’t feel like surrender.
I can feel it in the way her hand stays on mine without tightening, without trying to win. I can feel it in my own stupid stillness, in the fact that I’m not ripping the keepsake away and spitting something sharp to get my footing back. I’m aware of every point of contact like my body is taking inventory: her thumb near the edge of my knuckles, the metal pressing into my palm, the faint grit of old scratches catching on skin.
Outside the narrow bubble we’ve made, the watch continues. The building settles. Somewhere down the hall a door complains and shuts. The world does its ordinary, indifferent thing, and it should make this easier but it does the opposite. It makes it harder to pretend this is just another skirmish we’ll laugh about later with different scars.
My anger has always been useful. It has edges. It points outward. It keeps me from feeling the ache underneath, the one that has no clean target. But with her hand on mine, the anger starts to fold in on itself. Not dulled. Redirected. Like it’s finally realized it’s been fighting the wrong enemy: or like it’s been fighting the right one and I’ve been aiming it at her because she’s closer than a faceless Accord.
I swallow and taste metal even though I haven’t bitten my tongue. My pulse thuds against the keepsake, and for a second I can’t tell which of us is holding on and which of us is holding back. I only know I’m not alone in the weight anymore, and that feels terrifyingly close to relief.
Mara’s eyes drop to the keepsake like she can’t help it, like it pulls her by the throat. The light catches the carved letters and the little half-moon cuts around them, ragged, shallow, too deliberate to be accidental. I know those marks. They’re what you do when grief has nowhere to go, when your hands need to make a sound because your mouth can’t.
Her fingers hover, not touching the names, not daring to trace them, and the restraint hits harder than pity ever could. I watch the line of her jaw lock and unlock. The set of her shoulders shifts like she’s bracing for an impact that’s already happened. Her mouth opens on something, an order, an apology, a practiced speech, and then closes again as if the words finally understand they don’t belong here.
I feel her swallow. I hear it in the silence between us. The officer in her wants to file this away, to quantify it, to make it solvable. The person in her just… stares, and for once, there’s no armor in it at all.
My jaw works like it’s trying to chew through a decade of rehearsed blame. Once, twice. The accusation is right there, easy, familiar, sharpened to fit her name, and I can feel it lining up behind my teeth, ready to launch and make me safe again. If I say it, I get my distance back. I get to be righteous. I get to pretend the names in my palm are just evidence in a case against her instead of the dead weight they’ve always been.
But the words don’t match what’s in front of me.
Mara isn’t deflecting, isn’t correcting my tone, isn’t reaching for rank like a shield. She’s just standing here with the truth cracking open inside her, and my anger keeps sliding off it, useless. I swallow hard, and it goes down like rust.
The hush that settles between us is thin as paper, and still we treat it like it might cut. Our hands stay joined, not as leverage, not as some calculated truce. Just because the moment either of us moves, it becomes real again: the room, the watch, the names, the distance we’ve trained ourselves to keep. I don’t pull. She doesn’t either.
When Mara finally lifts her gaze, she catches me the way you catch a hand in a pocket. Mid-reach, no chance to pretend. I’m already watching her, too close, too awake. Something passes between us that isn’t strategy. It’s recognition, raw and unwilling, and it burns clean through the lie we’ve lived on: that we’re just enemies killing time until the next clash.
I keep my eyes on the needle like it’s a compass, like if I can hit the same small point over and over I can pretend the world is still something I control. In. Out. The skin at his shoulder is slick where the water never really left us, where blood keeps mixing with river grit no matter how carefully I wipe. My fingers aren’t obeying. They shiver around the steel, and I clamp down harder, annoyed at my own body for choosing now to be dramatic.
It’s cold, I tell myself. It’s fatigue. It’s the way my muscles remember the fight with the current, the weight of him going limp for half a second before he jerked back, the way my boots filled and tried to drag me into the dark. Any hands would tremble after that. Any hands would. Mine would settle if there was a fire, if there was daylight, if there was a minute to sit without listening for pursuit.
I don’t look at his face. I don’t give myself that. The line between his mouth and pain isn’t my business. His eyes on me aren’t my business. If I look, I’ll read something I can’t afford to understand, and then I’ll have to explain why my throat keeps tightening like I swallowed river water and it never went down.
“Hold still,” I say, quiet and clipped, like an order can stitch my composure back together. He does. No joke, no comment that would let me roll my eyes and retreat behind irritation. Just the weight of his attention, steady as a hand on my spine.
The thread catches, and for a split second panic flashes hot: what if the knot slips, what if this is the moment my hands betray me, what if I lose him because I’m tired and cold and pretending I don’t care. I swallow hard and force the needle through anyway, jaw locked, because caring is the one thing I’ve always been able to deny.
But the denial tastes thin now, like air in my lungs after being held under too long. Wanting him alive sits in my chest like a second heartbeat, loud and impossible to ignore, and I hate it for how honest it is.
Riven’s breath slices the quiet when I draw the thread tight. One sharp, involuntary intake that makes his whole frame flinch against the rock. It’s not loud, but it hits me like a signal flare. My hands pause mid-motion, needle hovering, because that sound yanks my attention off the neat mechanics of stitching and onto everything I’ve been ignoring on purpose.
My own chest feels welded shut.
I realize I’ve been holding myself rigid for so long it’s become background. Shoulders up around my ears, ribs locked, jaw clenched like I can bite down on the memory of the river and keep it from spilling out. Like if I don’t move too suddenly, the world won’t remember it tried to take him. The current, the slick stones, the instant his weight changed in my grip and terror turned my blood into ice.
His eyes are on me, steady and unreadable, and I hate how much that steadiness unthreads me. I hate that his pain is what makes me notice my own.
I make myself breathe in, because my lungs have been on strike since the river, because panic would love to keep me hollow. The inhale is slow, deliberate, a count I can cling to. The air tastes wrong and it drags cold across the back of my throat like a reminder. For a second my focus slips off the neat split of skin and thread and lands on the simplest, most brutal thing: he’s still here. Still solid under my hands. Still warm enough to bleed. Still close enough that I can hear the hitch in his breath when I pull the stitch tight.
And that fact hits harder than the current ever did.
The relief doesn’t settle into my bones like it should. It edges itself into something sharp and bright, heat under my skin that has nothing to do with blood loss or friction. I don’t just need him breathing, I need him close, within reach, like distance is another river that could steal him. I try to label it as tactics, as sense, and it won’t stick.
I blink until the burn retreats, until my vision stops threatening to blur into something useless. I swallow hard, like I can force the pressure behind my eyes back down my throat, and I keep my hands moving, thread, pull, knot, because if I stop, I’ll have to name it. How close he came to slipping out of my grip. How it would’ve shattered me.
The last loop of thread bites into skin and holds. I draw it snug, hands refusing to stop trembling like they’re still fighting the river’s pull, and I force the knot to be clean anyway, tight, flat, final. The kind of finish you can trust when everything else has proven it can fail.
I cut the tail with my teeth because my fingers don’t want to cooperate, then spit the taste of metal and fear out of my mouth and reach for the bandage. Anything to keep moving. Anything to keep this in the realm of procedure, where I know what I am, where my pulse doesn’t have to mean anything beyond exertion.
My hand hovers over the roll of gauze.
His fingers wrap around my wrist.
Not a grab. Not an order. Just a careful, deliberate closure of warmth over bone, pressure that says stay here, stay with me. He’s gentle in a way that should be impossible for him, for us. Like he’s afraid if he clamps down he’ll leave a mark, and like the idea of marking me matters.
The contact shoots straight up my arm and into my chest, like my heart has been waiting for permission to do something reckless. My throat tightens. I hate that I feel it. I hate that it feels like relief. Like an anchor dropping in a storm.
I should pull back. I should make a comment, make it easy, put the distance back in place with a snort and a sharp look and my title like a shield. I don’t. I can’t make my body choose the safe thing when it’s already chosen him.
His thumb shifts, barely there, a steadying stroke against the inside of my wrist where my pulse is betraying me.
“Mara,” he says. My name without armor. My name like he’s been holding it in his mouth for a long time and finally decided to let me have it.
And I stop pretending I don’t understand what that does to me.
I go still around his fingers like I’ve been commanded, like there’s a rank in his touch I can’t ignore. My breath catches high in my throat, sharp and embarrassing, and I lift my eyes to his on instinct: waiting for the deflection, the half-smile, the joke he uses like a blade to keep everything from getting too close.
It doesn’t come.
His face is stripped down to something plain and brutal. No performance, no swagger, no easy cruelty. Just attention, quiet, heavy, almost reverent in the way it lands on me. Like he’s taking inventory, not of the wound I just closed, but of me. Like he’s noticing the shake in my hands and the dried river grit under my nails and the way I’m holding myself together with sheer refusal.
It should make me angry. It should make me want to yank away and snap his name like a reprimand.
Instead my pulse trips under his thumb, and he feels it. I know he does. His gaze drops for a second, tracking the twitch at my wrist like it means something.
When his eyes find mine again, it’s unnerving how steady he is: how present. Like he finally sees past the uniform and doesn’t look away.
I don’t make a choice so much as my body does: one small tilt forward, a surrender measured in inches. The space between us collapses, and my forehead finds his like it’s always known the way. Skin to skin, warm despite the cold still clinging to us, and the whole world narrows to that point of contact: his breath and mine tangling, one shared inhale that steadies something feral inside my ribs.
His hand doesn’t tighten. He just holds me there, wrist cradled like it’s fragile, like I’m fragile. His thumb moves once, slow and careful over the frantic beat beneath my skin, as if he needs proof I’m real, that I didn’t wash away with the river. I close my eyes before I can think better of it.
He says my name again, low enough it’s almost for the space between our mouths, and it isn’t a title or a warning. It’s bare. It lands in me like a hand on my spine, steadying, claiming. The edge is gone, the distance with it: just that soft weight of promise he doesn’t dress up, like he’s finally brave enough to mean it.
I don’t answer with words. I answer with motion: one more lean, one last inch erased before my brain can marshal objections. My mouth finds his in a kiss that’s quick and clean, not hungry, just sure; a confession pressed into his lips and sealed before I can recant it. I hover there a heartbeat after, close enough to feel his exhale change, close enough to feel the consequence gather.
The second my mouth leaves his, I recoil so hard my shoulders knock the post behind me, as if the kiss was a blade and I’ve just remembered I’m not allowed to bleed. My breath snaps in, harsh and loud in the small space, and the old rules surge up from wherever they’ve been waiting. Don’t blur lines. Don’t give anyone leverage. Don’t want what you can’t keep.
Heat still hums on my lips, a ghost of him that refuses to fade, and I hate that my body is making proof faster than my mind can erase it. I set my hands in my lap like I’m placing them under arrest. The needle is still threaded, a bright, stupid loop of silver, and for a panicked second I can’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing with it. Only that I should be doing something that isn’t this.
I don’t look at him. If I look, I’ll see the exact moment he realizes I meant it. Or worse: the moment he decides what to do with that knowledge.
The air between us swells, dense and charged, and I swear I can feel it pressing against my ribs. I swallow, tasting river and copper and the clean edge of him. My throat tightens like it’s trying to hold back an entire confession.
I force my focus down, to the torn fabric and the line of angry skin at his shoulder, because stitches are simple. Stitches don’t ask questions. Stitches don’t change the map of my life with one stupid, perfect inch of surrender.
My hands start moving again, not because I’m steady but because I need the rhythm, needle through, pull, knot, to drown out the sound of my own pulse screaming you did that. My fingers shake harder than they did over the river, and I hate him for seeing it. I hate myself more for wanting him to.
My fingers lift before I can stop them, drifting up toward my mouth like they’re trying to check whether it’s real, whether the heat there is injury or evidence. The pads of my fingertips hover a breath away from my lips. I can almost feel the imprint of him through the air, ridiculous and undeniable.
Then the old instincts slam down. Don’t touch it. Don’t mark it. Don’t turn a moment into a weakness you can be made to answer for.
I let my hand fall, too fast, as if I’ve been caught reaching for contraband. I fold both hands together, knuckles whitening, and force them into my lap again, pinning them there like disobedient animals. The motion is small, but it costs me; my pulse jumps like I’ve just lied under oath.
My gaze skitters off him and clings to anything safer. The torn seam of his shirt, the damp-dark grain of the post, the dull gleam of the needle. Anywhere but his face. If I meet his eyes, I’ll have to see what I did reflected back at me, and I don’t know which of us I’m more afraid of: him knowing, or me wanting him to.
Riven doesn’t move. He sits like he’s afraid any shift will spook me into bolting, like I’m a half-tamed thing and he’s finally learned the sound of my panic. The angle of his jaw loosens, the easy armor cracking at the seam, and what shows through is not triumph (nothing smug, nothing victorious) just raw, startled relief that looks almost like pain. His eyes stay on my mouth for one beat too long, then drag up to my face as if he’s checking for blood, for regret, for the exact instant I turn him into a mistake.
His throat works. I can see the word sorry trying to climb out of him, the old reflex of offering distance like a gift. And under it, a thin thread of fear: because he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to want what I just gave.
His hand twitches up, slow like he’s approaching a flame, fingers spread as if he could bracket my face again and make sense of what we just did. He stops midair. I see the decision land behind his eyes (the careful retreat) and his arm drops, heavy. The gap between us turns physical, a living thing, hot and humming, louder than rushing water.
We don’t speak. The quiet swells in the space between my breath and his, spelling out what that one stolen second did to us: stripped the excuses, put a name to the ache I’ve been calling irritation for weeks. He stays still, I stay stiff, and somehow that’s worse than touching. Standing apart stops feeling accidental. It feels like an order we’re both obeying too late.
I make myself step back before I do something stupid like reach for him again. My boots sink into the river’s edge with a wet, sucking sound that feels too loud, too intimate. Silt climbs the tread and tugs, as if the bank wants to keep me here: wants to preserve that single breath where our foreheads touched and the whole war went quiet.
No. Not quiet. Never quiet.
I pull my gaze off his face like it burns. I force my spine straight, shoulders squared, and I sweep the reeds the way I was trained to: not looking, assessing. Left to right. Near bank, far bank. The black ribbon of water between, still moving like it doesn’t care who nearly died in it. I count sightlines the way a prayer is counted. Three narrow gaps through the cattails, one wider lane where the mud is churned and shiny, two fallen logs that could hide a rifle barrel if someone was patient enough to be cruel.
Listen.
Wind skates over the water. The reeds whisper against each other. Somewhere, a frog starts and stops, as if it hears itself and decides better. Beneath it all I strain for the cadence of boots: that clean, disciplined rhythm that makes my stomach knot because it means Skyhold is close, and I am close to being seen.
Close to being recognized.
My fingers find the edge of my uniform sleeve, pinch it, as if cloth can anchor me back into the person I’m supposed to be. Officer Mara Vance. Measured. Unshakeable. Not a woman who just pressed her forehead to an Ashline raider like she was asking him to hold her together.
My hands are still trembling. I curl them into fists and pretend it’s cold. I taste river on my lips and hate that my first instinct is to remember the warmth of him instead.
I angle my body so the reeds cover our outlines and keep my voice locked behind my teeth. No talking. Not now. Any sound feels like lighting a match.
I keep scanning. I keep counting. I keep being an officer because it’s the only way I know to survive what I just admitted without saying a word.
Across the water, a lantern flares and disappears between the trunks, a patient blink that makes my pulse trip. The light isn’t bright, just a smear of amber, but it moves with purpose, sliding along the far bank in a slow sweep, pausing, then advancing again. Not random. Not a drunk with a flame. A search pattern.
I freeze so hard my teeth ache. In the wavering glow I can almost see the line of them without actually seeing them: helmets, rifles, the disciplined spacing Skyhold drills into its patrols until it becomes muscle memory. The beam catches wet leaves and throws them silver. For a second it hits the water and the river answers, reflecting the light in a broken ribbon that points straight at us like an accusation.
I don’t look at Riven. If I look, I’ll measure the distance between his breathing and mine and I’ll forget what side of this war I’m supposed to be standing on.
The lantern’s glow drifts closer, testing every shadow like it expects the reeds to betray us.
A horn rolls through the trees, long and level, not the sharp cry of a charge but the kind of sound you use when you’re patient and certain. When you’re closing a perimeter and you have all night to squeeze. It threads itself under my skin. The note doesn’t rise, doesn’t break; it just holds, a steady line that says they’re organized, they’re nearby, and they haven’t stopped hunting because two people almost drowned and almost, almost, forgot what they are.
The air feels thinner after it, as if the river sucks in a breath and refuses to give it back.
Whatever softness we stole gets snapped shut like a clasp. The world doesn’t make space. It presses in.
Riven edges toward the rocks, the movement small but urgent, like he’s trying not to disturb the air. His gaze flicks to my sleeve, my insignia, and my stomach drops as if it’s a lit fuse instead of stitched cloth. He doesn’t speak. He just lifts two fingers, points once, sharp, then curls his hand into a fist: hide it. Hide me. Hide us.
I swallow around the heat climbing up my throat and set my mouth into a line that won’t give anything away. Breathless, I let the tremor in my hands pretend it’s only cold, not him. Out here even an unspoken softness is a currency, and I can already picture it: passed from mouth to mouth, turned into proof, sharpened into a blade they’ll press to my name.
The heat in my chest flares anyway, stubborn as a coal that won’t die, trying to soften into something I’m not allowed to carry. I feel it in the ridiculous places: behind my ribs, at the base of my throat, in the ache between my brows from holding myself together too tightly. For one reckless second I want to lean into what just happened, to pretend the world can’t reach us here, wet and shaking and alive.
Then my mind slams down like a gate.
Faces line up in the dark as if I’ve called a roll. Kett with the freckle on his chin who always watches my hands before he moves. Lysa, jaw set so hard it could crack flint, waiting for me to say what’s next because if I hesitate, she’ll hear it like a crack in the ice. Orren with the torn glove, eyes too young for the way he says “Yes, Captain,” like it’s a prayer. They’re not ghosts. They’re weight. They’re the reason I learned to keep my voice level when my stomach is hollow and my knees want to fold. They’re the reason I learned to look at a map like it’s a promise I can keep.
My steadiness has cost them sleep, blood, names carved into a ledger I don’t let anyone see me touch. My steadiness has bought us time, bought us ground, bought us the thin illusion that order is something you can hold in your hands and not lose. It’s a trade I made over and over until it became the only language I trusted.
And now Riven is right here, close enough that my breathing wants to match his, close enough that my body forgets which side it’s supposed to belong to. I can feel his attention like a hand at the back of my neck. I don’t look at him because I don’t know what my face would confess.
I tell myself: don’t. Not because I don’t want it but because wanting is the first crack. And through cracks, everything spills.
My oath rises up in broken pieces, like it’s been submerged too long and the paper’s gone soft. I remember the room more than the words. The iron smell of polished weapons, the scratch of my collar at my throat, the way my voice didn’t shake because I didn’t know yet what it would cost to keep it steady. I said the phrases cleanly, like clean things could stay that way. I promised loyalty as if it were a simple direction: forward, always forward, no matter what.
Now the words don’t land like vows. They land like stones.
Duty used to be a map I could unfold and follow. Now it’s a blade I keep turning in my own hands, checking the edge, convincing myself I’m the one in control while it bites deeper every time. River water, blood, the weight of Riven’s shoulder under my palm. None of that fits the tidy shape of what I swore. And the worst part is how quickly my mind tries to make it fit anyway, as if if I force the meaning hard enough, I can keep everything I am from slipping out through my fingers.
I tell myself it again, the familiar litany I’ve used to stitch my spine together on nights when the shouting dies down and the quiet gets sharp. Holding the line saves lives. Following orders keeps the towns behind us from burning. My obedience is a kind of mercy, a shield I can lift even when my arms shake. I’ve worn that thought like armor, polished it until it reflected back a version of me I could stand to command.
But in my mouth now it goes papery, thin as ration bread you chew and chew and never really swallow. Protection shouldn’t feel so much like fear. A shield shouldn’t cut the hand that grips it. And if I’m honest (if I let the honesty in) I can’t tell where duty ends and hiding begins.
Across from me, Riven goes still. Not the flinch of pain, but the kind of stillness you use to keep yourself from reaching. His jaw locks. His gaze holds mine like it’s bracing for impact. I can almost see what he’s swallowing: names, losses, the weight of a whole people who need him hard-edged, unturned by my hands, untricked by the cut of my uniform.
The air between us cinches tight, threaded with what we refuse to name. My oath, his cause: both of them leaning in like hands on our shoulders, insisting we step back, insisting we remember what we’re supposed to be to each other. But the steadiness of that single breath, forehead to forehead, keeps smearing the border we’ve stayed alive by sharpening.
I kneel at the river’s edge and plunge my hands in like I can drown what just happened. The current is cold enough to bite, to make my knuckles ache, and I scrub anyway. The water clouds, then thins, then clouds again, as if my skin keeps confessing. Pink ribbons unwind downstream, pretty in a sickening way, like someone’s idea of a blessing.
It doesn’t matter. The stain is already under me.
Heat still lives at my mouth, stubborn as a bruise you keep worrying with your tongue. I press my lips together hard, feel the faint sting where his stubble scraped, and the memory flashes so clean it feels like a fresh wound: that one steadying breath, his forehead against mine, the way my body chose stillness instead of recoil. No strategy. No calculation. Just want, plain and terrifying.
I tell myself it was shock. Adrenaline. Near-death does strange things to people; everyone knows that. I’ve written the line before in reports (subject displayed confusion after traumatic event) and no one ever asks what “confusion” tastes like. No one asks what it does to your ribs when it settles in and refuses to be dislodged.
I drag my fingers through the silt until grit wedges under my nails. Punishment, maybe. Proof. If I can make it hurt, I can make it real and therefore manageable. But the more I scrub, the more my mouth remembers warmth. His breath, the quiet he gave me instead of a joke, the way his eyes held mine like I was something other than a badge and a threat.
Behind me, water drips from my wrists in steady ticks, counting down to the moment I have to stand and put my face back on. I stare at my hands, red rimmed and shaking, and realize with a sick, bright clarity: I can wash off blood.
I can’t wash off the choice.
I tie off the last stitch and cut the thread with my teeth because my fingers won’t cooperate, because if I let myself notice how badly they’re trembling I’ll start shaking in places I can’t hide. The knot sits neat against his skin anyway, small and competent, like a lie I’m good at telling.
My training lunges in to save me from the rest. I try to turn the moment into entries I can survive: subject stabilized. Wound irrigated. Needle passed through tissue at a clean angle. No complications. Then my mind, traitorous and precise, adds what doesn’t belong in any form: contact sustained. Forehead to forehead. Breath shared at close range. Duration: one count, maybe two. His eyes on mine without humor, without the usual edge. My mouth warm afterward, like it’s keeping evidence.
I want to label it an error because errors can be corrected. Retraced. Disciplined out. But it doesn’t feel like a mistake. It feels like a decision my body made faster than my vows, and now I’m stuck holding it, unable to file it, unable to burn it away.
The question doesn’t ask permission. It just slides in under my ribs, sharp and practical, like a knife I already know how to use. If I can want him without my body recoiling on instinct, if I can look at him and not see an objective, a threat, a case file, then what am I doing in this skin I’ve called duty for so long? One choice. That’s all it was. One breath where I didn’t pull away, where I let his closeness steady me instead of setting off alarms. And my oath has no language for that. It only has refusal, distance, the clean comfort of lines you don’t cross. If I step over them on purpose, even once, where do I stand afterward. What am I allowed to be?
Officer used to be a word I could wear like armor, buckled, polished, unquestioned. Traitor will be the word they spit when the story reaches the right ears, and I can already hear the shape of it, the certainty. But neither one accounts for the small, vicious relief lodged in my chest: he saw my hands shake and didn’t laugh, didn’t flinch, didn’t look away.
I straighten like the uniform is a spine I can borrow, shoulders back, chin level, hands busy with clean-up so my face doesn’t betray me. Rank, protocol. Those are rails I know how to grip when the ground is still moving. But inside, something has already crossed an invisible threshold. No title, no doctrine, just a debt accruing. Whatever I am now, it’s going to cost.
My patrol reports stop feeling like weather, unpredictable, nobody’s fault, and start reading like a script someone keeps revising in the wings. The first time I notice it, it’s a coincidence I can shrug off: a caravan rerouted to “relieve pressure” on the southern road, and somehow the raiders strike the exact stretch that’s suddenly exposed. The second time, the shortage hits a district with three separate redundancies on paper, and I’m the one ordered to sign off on an “unexpected depletion” I never witnessed.
So I start doing what I’m good at: counting. Not bodies. Lines. Dates. The order of stamps. The way an instruction arrives twenty minutes after a problem, as if it’s catching up to something that already happened. I keep copies folded inside my sleeve, ink-smudged against my skin, and I log every “minor correction” that gets penciled into the margins after the fact. Someone always adjusts the numbers just enough to make the disaster look organic.
In the field, it looks like bad luck: a garrison reassigned for “training readiness” and the moment they leave, the market’s hit. A watch rotation swapped and the night the new captain takes over, the black-market stalls double like mushrooms after rain. But the desk sees patterns the street can’t. The desk sees choreography.
I don’t tell anyone at first. I hear my own thoughts turning traitorous as they form. If this is planned, then the panic is earned on purpose, and the people I’m protecting are being herded. I can’t breathe around that idea, so I put it somewhere I can manage: into columns, into tidy little grids that obey me when everything else won’t.
Every time I bring a question to a clerk, they answer too quickly, eyes skipping past mine to the door, to the corridor, to whoever might overhear. “Standard adjustment.” “Supply variance.” “Command decision.” The phrases are uniform, like they practiced them. Like they were issued, the way rations are.
And the worst part, the part that makes my stomach drop, is how familiar the handwriting is in those margin notes. Not the signature, not yet. Just the slant. The pressure. The disciplined, precise cruelty of someone who knows exactly how much to shave off before the whole city starts to starve.
The hand stops being a hunch and becomes a pulse I can feel through the page. A councilor’s phrasing, those clipped, immaculate verbs, turns up in directives that supposedly came from a dozen mouths. I used to stand at attention while he praised my discipline like it was proof the city still worked. Now I watch that same discipline get laundered through clerks and quartermasters, each step polished until it looks like procedure instead of sabotage.
I follow it anyway. I tell myself I’m only verifying, only protecting the chain by tightening it. But the rooms I end up in aren’t meant for someone like me unless I’m there to obey: a records alcove behind a false cabinet, a locked registry with my own access codes updated without my knowledge, a ledger that’s been “corrected” so often the paper thins.
Each discovery is clean. That’s what makes me sick. Nothing that can be shouted about in a courtyard, nothing that bleeds. Just careful tilts (ration allotments shaved, patrol routes “optimized,” emergency stores delayed) until panic feels like a natural season.
And I realize, all at once, the rule I lived by was never armor. It was a leash.
Across the border, I start hearing the same melody in different mouths. I’m not there, but Riven’s voice comes through our thin, dangerous channels tight with it, Ashline mothers angry over “necessary” raids, merchants spitting about convoys turned around at the last bend, scouts ordered to sweep empty hills while real threats slip past like smoke. Retaliations get stamped “approved” so late it’s like the ink is chasing blood already spilled. Grievances rise up the chain with unnatural speed, polished and presented until restraint reads like cowardice and anyone who hesitates looks soft.
He follows the trail the way I do: not by faith, by repetition. And it keeps circling back to one lieutenant.
Myths peel off in my hands like old paint. The stories we fed ourselves, honor, necessity, unlucky borders, turn out to have names and clean collars. Riven and I trade scraps through a channel that crackles like guilt, and the scraps click into place so neatly it steals my breath: the councilor and the lieutenant aren’t clashing. They’re conversing: scarcity for outrage, fear for permission.
The war I was trained to map as a clean chain of provocation and reply isn’t a line at all. It’s a market with ledgers, margins, and men who smile while they count. I stare at the signatures until the ink feels embossed in my eyes: too consistent to be coincidence, too interlocked to be spun. The floor of every oath I ever swore tilts. The shadow war has authors.
The proof doesn’t come to me like thunder. It comes like paperwork. A sealed Skyhold docket waits in my in-tray when I return from patrol, tucked beneath a stack of supply tallies and casualty updates. It’s thick enough to feel important through the paper, stamped with an internal routing code that makes my stomach tighten because it’s wrong: wrong office, wrong division, wrong me. Someone misfiled it on purpose, betting I’d either forward it without reading or burn it without asking why it ever touched my hands.
I break the seal anyway. The wax gives like it’s been softened and pressed back into place. Inside: a ledger of “security reallocations,” signatures lined up in clean, confident loops, and a set of annexes that are too precise to be routine. Names repeat. Dates repeat. Amounts repeat. The same few vendors. The same hand authorizing “exceptions” that don’t exist in any statute I’ve ever memorized.
At the same time, because the world has a cruel sense of timing, Riven’s voice snaps into my ear through our thin channel, ragged on the edges. He doesn’t greet me. He doesn’t even say my name. He just spits, “You seeing it?”
He’s got his half: an Ashline message-thread, pushed into him through a courier line that should be clean. The wrappings are different, Ashline brevity, coded honorifics, the kind of language that pretends it’s not making deals, but the spine is identical. Identical names. Identical dates. Identical payoffs. A lieutenant’s requests matched step-for-step with Skyhold “responses,” as if our border is less a line than a shared desk.
My mouth goes dry. I can hear him breathing, like he’s running even while he stands still.
“Timer’s on,” he says, and the words hit me harder than any blade. Because whoever slipped this to us didn’t just want us to know.
They want us to choose.
I spread the docket out on my bunk like it’s a body I’m trying to identify. One page is plausible. Ten pages is intention. I pull my old requisitions, patrol schedules, route authorizations (everything I can steal five minutes with before someone wonders why my door’s locked) and I start laying them side by side until the paper edges overlap and the lie becomes a map.
The pattern isn’t clever. That’s what makes my pulse skitter. Every time a district reports a shortage, there’s a sudden “security surge” stamped urgent and unavoidable. Extra boots, extra checkpoints, extra overtime that eats the budget and strangles the roads. The same vendors keep winning “emergency” contracts, no bids, no questions, just the same names sliding into the same blank spaces like they were printed there.
And always, threaded through it, the councilor’s office. Not the departments that should touch this, not the committees that are supposed to sign. Just his neat authorization for “exceptions” I can’t find in any statute or manual, like he’s rewriting the rules by pretending they already exist.
I rub my thumb over the ink until it smears faintly, and I feel sick at how long it’s been sitting in plain sight.
On his side of the line, Riven does what he always swore he didn’t do. He sits still long enough to read. He cross-checks the Ashline thread against raid logs and quartermaster stamps, and the same rot rises up, unmistakable. Raids launched just late enough to miss a cache by minutes, close enough to look like effort, sloppy enough to breed fury. Relief wagons “rerouted” for safety until hunger turns sharp and obedient hands start throwing stones. Every flare-up that earns harsher patrols also fattens the same pockets: a lieutenant whose name keeps surfacing like oil on water, always the man who “contains” the panic he somehow predicts. The order trail loops back to him again and again, a circle masquerading as duty.
We pick a place no one claims. An empty stairwell between service levels where the lights hum and even footsteps sound guilty. I spread my docket; he slides his thread beside it. The overlap is perfect, awful, like a lock finally turning. Options line up like blades: hand it to Internal Review and watch it “misplace” itself, take it to his elders and ignite a purge, leak it and become hunted.
Silence hovers there, pretending it’s mercy. It isn’t. It’s letting their little machine keep chewing, shortages, riots, crackdowns, until the city forgets what calm ever felt like and the profiteers count coin over fresh graves. I can feel the next step coming, like thunder in my teeth. None of our choices are clean now. Only chosen. Only costly. Home is the first thing on the table.
I hold silence in my mouth and it has weight. In the academy they don’t call it obedience. They dress it up. Stability. Continuity. The chain of command as a spine, and you don’t touch a spine unless you want the whole body to drop.
They taught us the story the same way they taught us how to strip a rifle: clean, efficient, no room for doubt. Skyhold survives because it’s one shape, one voice. You don’t contradict your superior in the open. You don’t air rot in the walls where civilians can smell it and panic. You report up. You let the system correct itself. If it can’t, then you become the correction. And I bought it, for years. I swallowed it so deeply it started sounding like my own thoughts.
Now I stare at the paperwork spread between us and I can practically feel that doctrine trying to climb back into my hands, trying to guide them into the safest motion: close the folder, lock it down, forward it to a department that knows how to make problems disappear without ever technically lying.
Because speaking is a kind of detonation. One accusation turns into ten, and ten turns into factions, and factions turn into streets that choose sides. The council loves a crisis; the city fears one. Between them, the Patrol gets used like a lever until something snaps.
If I say nothing, I’m not just protecting an institution. I’m protecting the illusion that the institution protects us.
If I speak, I become the crack and I can already hear how they’ll say it: that I broke faith, that I undermined order, that whatever comes next is my fault for daring to make the rot visible.
My training insists the chain must never break.
My lungs insist I can’t keep breathing if it doesn’t.
Riven sits across from me like he’s carved out of a rule he never got to vote on. I watch his gaze snag on the stamped seals, the signatures, the dates that line up too neatly, and I can almost hear the math he’s doing. Only it isn’t numbers, it’s scars. In Ashline, you don’t just swear loyalty, you bleed it into the earth and let everyone watch so they know you mean it. The oaths aren’t poetry. They’re a cage with a purpose.
Ashline can’t be seen hungry. Not publicly. Not on record. Hunger is an invitation. It tells rival clans where to press, which border to test, which leaders to challenge. It turns children into bargaining chips and makes “aid” a rope around your throat.
He’s been trained to treat weakness like contagion: isolate it, burn it out, never let outsiders name it first.
His jaw works once, like he’s swallowing iron. If he takes this to his elders, it becomes a spectacle, purity, punishment, a lesson. If he buries it, the lieutenant keeps feeding Ashline to the market. And if he stands with me, he breaks the kind of promise that’s supposed to outlive him.
And then it isn’t theory anymore, it’s a shape I can trace with my finger. The lieutenant’s orders aren’t mistakes; they’re choreography. A delayed shipment logged as “weather,” a warehouse “miscount,” a ration line cut short just before tempers tip: each little slip nudging people closer to panic, closer to paying triple for a sack of grain, closer to begging for any rule that promises relief. He’s manufacturing need and selling the antidote through the same back channels, letting hunger do his recruiting for him. I feel sick at how familiar it is, the way pressure gets framed as inevitability. Like the city is just… unfortunate. Like starving families are collateral, not the point. My mouth goes dry. The folder suddenly feels like evidence and a weapon.
In the same breath, I watch Riven’s eyes go hard on the councilor’s routing orders. Patrol units reassigned like someone’s personal club. “Safety sweep,” the memo says, but I can see the pattern: uniforms leaning into doorways, fingers on triggers, merchants paying “fines” that never hit a ledger. Scarcity isn’t an accident here; it’s a business plan wearing a badge.
Something in me unhooks with an audible click. His loyalty isn’t a banner anymore; mine isn’t a uniform. It’s just him, across the table, not flinching from the ugly shape of the truth. I see his throat work, like he’s choosing pain on purpose, and I realize I’m doing the same. We pick each other’s honesty over our oaths, already hearing the word traitor forming.
The first move isn’t a knife in the dark. It’s paper.
By noon, Skyhold’s bells are tolling the wrong kind of urgent. Notices go up on the iron boards at every junction: EMERGENCY TRIBUNAL. RESTORING ORDER. A clean title for a dirty pivot. They don’t say “martial law” yet, not in ink. They say “stability,” “accountability,” “outside interference.” They say it like the city has been acted upon, like the bruises bloomed on their own.
I watch a clerk stamp the seal (Skyhold’s crest pressed into red wax) and something in my chest goes tight. Procedure is a weapon you can point at anyone without getting blood on your sleeves. It forces you to stand in a room where the verdict is already drafted, and it makes you call it justice when they read it aloud.
Across from me, Riven is too still, like he’s listening to a sound I can’t hear. Then his jaw flexes once, and I know he’s gotten his own version of the bell.
Ashline doesn’t bother with bells. Ashline does drums, low and rhythmic, a pulse you feel through the floorboards before anyone admits what it means. A war-circle before dawn: summon the lieutenants, the captains, the elders who pretend they don’t like blood but always show up when it’s offered a purpose. They’ll call it a response to sabotage, to infiltration, to monsters at the gates. They’ll make aggression sound like self-defense and demand the right names to spit into the fire.
Two rooms, two rituals, both pretending they’re shielding their people while they sharpen the same blade. And the worst part is how reasonable it will look from the outside, how easy it will be for good men to nod along, grateful someone is finally “doing something.”
Messages don’t just arrive: they land, heavy as stones, lacquered in ceremony so you don’t notice the bruise until you’re already carrying it. A runner in Skyhold livery finds me first, breath steaming, and presses a folded writ into my palm like it’s an honor. The wax seal is still warm. Emergency tribunal. Civic duty. A chance to prove loyalty. It reads like an invitation, but every line is a hinge meant to swing one way.
Before I can even tuck it away, another courier slips through the crowd. Wrong boots, Ashline cord at his wrist, eyes that won’t meet mine. His message isn’t waxed. It’s knotted to a strip of hide and it smells faintly of smoke. Same demand, different costume: speak in the circle, name the enemy, call them monsters so the word can do the killing first.
Both sides want a statement that can’t be unsaid. Denounce. Justify. Swear. Put it on record so the crackdowns can wear my voice like armor. And somewhere in the middle of all that pageantry, I feel the trap closing: because silence is also an answer they can punish.
They don’t take me straight into the hall. They steer me into a narrow antechamber that smells like ink and old stone, where the air is too still to be honest. The councilor’s aide closes the door with careful fingers and slides a single page across the table like it’s mercy.
My name is already written at the top.
“Just the facts,” he says, but his eyes flick to the lines he wants me to read: infiltrator. Ashline agent. threat to stability. I’m told to confirm the talking points, to keep my testimony “clean,” to leave out anything that complicates the story. Strange supply ledgers, patrol reports that vanished, questions that point inward instead of across the river.
When I don’t reach for the page, the room shifts. Not anger. Administration. Like my silence is paperwork for mutiny they can file before I ever speak.
Across the river, I picture Riven under Ashline’s low beams, shoulders boxed in by men who’ve bled beside him and still don’t quite see him. They hand him their version of ceremony: words honed to a point. Say Mara’s the rot in Skyhold. Say she proves the city lies. If he speaks it, they’ll cheer, and the circle will tighten like a noose.
In the sliver of time they can’t officially control, I find him: one stolen corner, one breath shared through stone and bad timing. We trade the demands like contraband: my oath to condemn him, his order to name me proof. The symmetry turns my stomach. Either lie becomes law for the next sweep, and any real truth we speak gets stamped treason and filed.
The knock isn’t loud. It’s polite, like they’re asking permission to ruin me.
When the door opens, the messenger doesn’t look like a threat. A thin packet appears as if it’s always been there, tucked against their ribs like a prayer book. Their smile is practiced softness, the kind you put on a knife so people don’t flinch until it’s already inside.
“Captain Mara Ellery,” they say, and the formality lands wrong in this room, too official for the air. “I’m here on behalf of the council.”
I don’t invite them in, but they step over the threshold anyway. The antechamber feels smaller with a witness.
They lay the packet on the table and smooth it once, lovingly, as if it’s a sheet that should lie flat. Then, in the same careful motion, they slide two documents toward me. One with a neat line for my signature, one with the language already decided.
“Surrender the materials,” they say. Not evidence. Materials. Like it’s misfiled inventory, not the thing that could burn down the rot hiding under Skyhold’s marble. “Sign the recantation. You’ll confirm your earlier statements were made under duress and confusion.”
My mouth tastes like copper. I don’t ask how they wrote my confusion before I felt it.
“And then,” they continue, voice gentle enough to be a lullaby, “you will report for correction.”
The word hits like a fist wrapped in velvet. Correction. Not punishment. Not torture. A civic kindness. A procedure. A quiet room where they adjust you until you fit the shape they can govern.
They tilt their head, softening further, as if concerned for my wellbeing. “It’s routine. It’s private. It protects you from… contagion. From rumors. From becoming a symbol people can misuse.”
Unspoken: refusal makes me the disease.
Their eyes drop to my hands, to the tremor I won’t let them see. “You’ve served Skyhold. This is your chance to continue serving it: cleanly.”
I stare at the signature line and feel the noose disguised as ribbon. If I sign, I disappear with my truth. If I don’t, I become a warning they can point at for years.
Riven tells me later, but I can see it anyway. The way Ashline uses shadow like architecture. A back corridor, no banners, no witnesses who can testify with clean hands. His superior doesn’t bother with threats at first. He brings out a crate like it’s an altar and sets something on the lid with a slow, deliberate grace.
A lieutenant’s insignia. The metal catches the lamplight and throws it back, bright as a promise.
“Earn it,” the man says, like loyalty is a skill you can practice until it stops hurting. The offer comes wrapped in the language of order: bring in the Skyhold officer, deliver the evidence into Ashline custody, and all this ugly chaos can be managed. Like famine and raids and curfews are weather. And Ashline is simply learning to predict it.
Riven’s jaw goes rigid. He knows “managed” means monetized. It means a hand on the spigot of scarcity, turning it on and off for the right price.
The superior leans in, voice almost kind. “You know her. Make it clean.”
In the narrow pause they leave me I find Riven like a misfiled heartbeat. No ceremony, no witnesses, just the scrape of stone and the way his eyes measure the damage like he can tally it and undo it. I tell him what Skyhold called it: correction, spoken sweet as mercy. He doesn’t flinch, but his mouth tightens when he says what Ashline offered: a lieutenant’s seat, shiny enough to blind, if he hands me over and calls it order.
Different uniforms, same grip around the throat. Truth, priced. Pain, outsourced.
We don’t say trust. We don’t say us. We say survival and mean something messier.
I swear I’ll send the proof outward. He promises, hoarse, that it won’t die quietly.
I don’t hand them anything. I make copies until my fingers cramp, ink smudging my skin like guilt I refuse to wash off. I split the pages, stitch them into innocuous reports, tuck them into outgoing manifests, push them through channels the council can’t throttle: dock clerks, medics, anyone who still believes in paper. Then I sign the transmission orders myself, and feel the match strike: my name, my fuse.
Riven breaks formation like he’s tearing himself out of a skin that never fit. He misroutes patrol routes with a flick of his wrist, turns couriers back with the right names in his mouth, steps into the line of suspicion so the leak can keep breathing. When the hunt starts, he lets them find him. The lesson comes fast: fists and boots, a shouted charge, a reprimand staged for every watching rank.
The summons finds me before sleep does, a folded slip delivered with too-clean hands and a gaze that won’t hold mine. The seal is official, the ink still wet enough to smear if I let my thumb linger, Skyhold’s little mercy, giving me proof I was called to be judged. I don’t tear it open so much as peel it apart, careful, like it might explode into accusation the moment I breathe wrong.
No sirens. No rushed boots in the corridor. Just the quiet kind of threat that assumes it has already won.
I dress in my uniform anyway. Muscle memory, maybe. Or spite. The fabric feels heavier than it did yesterday, as if the insignia has started to mean property instead of purpose. My hands won’t stop shaking, so I make them busy: smoothing creases, fastening buttons, tucking the last copy of the ledger pages into the lining where my ribs can guard it. Evidence against my skin, warm and unforgiving.
On the walk to the chamber, everything is familiar and suddenly hostile. The banners hang too straight. The torches burn too even. Faces I used to salute tilt away, or worse. Watch with the tight satisfaction of people who’ve been told a story and are eager for the ending. Every step echoes like I’m already in irons.
At the doors, a guard I trained with won’t meet my eyes as he opens them. Inside, the room is arranged like a lesson: councilors elevated, clerks poised, a row of officers sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with their hands folded as if obedience is a prayer. There’s no room for nuance here. Only roles.
I take my place where they’ve decided I belong, alone, centered, exposed, and I can feel the trap in the architecture. Say the wrong word and it becomes treason. Say the right word and it becomes confession.
Someone clears their throat. The sound is small, but it slices.
“Captain Mara Venn,” a voice intones, heavy with ceremony. “You are ordered to explain your conduct.”
They want a report. A confession shaped like a report. I can feel the outline of it in their silence. “What procedures did you follow,” the councilor asks, “when you disseminated restricted material?”
Restricted. Like hunger is classified. Like bodies are.
I swallow, and it tastes like ink. “I followed the pattern,” I say, and my voice comes out too fast, too loud in my own ears. “Because procedure was being used as a curtain.”
A murmur ripples. The clerk’s pen hesitates.
“You will answer the question,” another voice snaps. “Names. Orders. Authority.”
I give them names anyway, just not the ones they want. “Councilor Halden signed the requisition reversals on the same nights Ashline raids ‘coincidentally’ hit our outer stores. Lieutenant Sable’s codes appear in our dock logs under false manifests. The shortages spike after your emergency ordinances. The black-market prices drop when Skyhold patrols are reassigned.” I lift my chin, heart punching at my ribs. “That isn’t coincidence. That’s a partnership.”
The word hangs there.
The reaction is immediate, not outrage at the facts but hunger for a different kind of blood. Chairs scrape. A councilor’s mouth tightens like he’s been waiting to make this sound official. They don’t ask for my pages. They don’t glance at the clerk’s paused pen. They aim for the simpler kill: identity.
“Captain,” someone says, and the title lands wrong, like a hook. “You presume motive. You exceeded your authority.”
Exceeded. Like the problem is my reach, not their rot.
Another voice (colder, practiced) slides in. “Let the record reflect: willful dissemination of restricted material. Incitement. Undermining morale.”
With each word, my years compress into a single, ugly verb: disobeyed.
I stand there in my uniform and feel it becoming costume as they pronounce what I am now (mutineer) before I can even breathe my rebuttal.
Riven is hauled in after me like an exhibit, wrists unbound but posture guarded, eyes cutting over the room as if measuring exits that aren’t there. They speak to him in the old cadence, admit, repent, be folded back in. He could make it easy. He doesn’t. When they offer him a confession with blanks to fill, he smiles without warmth and leaves every line empty.
The verdict lands like theater: meant to educate the room, to warn every spine into obedience. They call him oathbreaker, strip the word Ashline from his mouth like it’s contraband. They call me mutineer again, savoring it. And in the thin, vicious space between those condemnations, Riven and I tilt toward each other: shaped by the same truth, suddenly unclaimed.
The hearing room is too bright in a way that feels intentional, like they’ve lit us up to bleach the grit out of our story. The walls are bare except for the flags and the seal. Symbols I used to salute without thinking. Now I can’t look at them without tasting ash.
A man in a pressed suit slides two identical folders across the table, one toward me, one toward Riven. His voice is practiced-soft, as if we’re negotiating a contract instead of the shape of our lives.
“Separate pardons,” he says, tapping each folder with a knuckle. “Full immunity for cooperating with the panel. Records sealed. Relocation assistance. You can disappear. Start over.” He pauses long enough for the words to land and bruise. “All contingent on a complete statement identifying the primary instigator.”
He doesn’t say traitor. He doesn’t have to. The room is crowded with it. Eyes waiting to watch us choose the cleanest story, the easiest villain. The people behind him are spaced out like furniture, hands folded, faces arranged into concern. There’s even a cup of water placed within reach, like mercy.
My throat tightens anyway. I can almost feel the weight of the insignia that isn’t on my collar anymore, phantom-metal against my skin. I think of how many times I’ve been told survival is the same thing as righteousness if you say it with enough confidence. I think of the relief route we stitched together in the gap between factions, how fragile it is, how easily it could be cut if one of us becomes the official reason it had to exist.
Riven’s fingers hover over his folder without touching it. His knuckles are scraped raw like he’s been rubbing the past off his hands. The offer is supposed to look like air after drowning.
“Name the cause,” the man repeats, gentler. “Give us the truth.”
My pulse bangs in my ears. The truth is messy. The truth is both of us and neither. The truth is that they want a single throat to put their hands around so everyone else can keep theirs clean.
I look down at the neat, blank line where my signature would go and feel the trap’s teeth.
My eyes find Riven, just once, quick as a flinch, and the look isn’t a question. It’s not me asking what we should do or begging him to be the one to take the fall. It’s simpler, uglier: I see the mechanism they’ve built between us, polished and ready to drop, and I need him to see it too.
They want that reflex. The old one. The faction-bred instinct to calculate who’s expendable and who’s worth saving, to turn a person into a line item so the rest of the ledger balances. They’ve dressed it in clean paper and soft voices, but I can feel the teeth under the velvet. A signature. A name. A story with one villain, delivered neatly enough to frame and hang on a wall.
Riven doesn’t touch his folder. The stillness in him is loud, like a held breath before impact. I realize with a strange rush that he’s not looking at the panel at all. He’s looking past them, at the long years they’re trying to shove us back into.
My fingers curl against the table. I don’t reach for the pen. I don’t reach for him. I just hold the line.
Riven inhales like he’s testing whether the air in this room is real, then he lifts his eyes and speaks before I can. His voice comes out low, careful, almost gentle: like he’s setting something breakable down on the table and refusing to let them call it weakness. “I’m not giving you a statement,” he says. No heat, no performance. Just a flat line drawn in ink. “I’m not naming anyone as the instigator. I’m not trading a person for paperwork.” His hand stays open, empty, nowhere near the folder. He swallows once, the only crack in the control. “If your version of duty requires betrayal, then it isn’t duty. It’s a bargain.”
I exhale through my nose, slow, like I’m keeping something feral from bolting, and I make my voice match his. “Me neither,” I say. The words feel almost too small for what they undo. A woman on the panel blinks, then leans forward. “Captain, you understand the terms?” As if repeating them louder will make betrayal sound like reason.
The silence that follows lands heavier than any ruling. I feel it in my ribs, in the way my pulse refuses to slow. Riven doesn’t glance at me for permission; he stays steady, like he’s already paid for this choice in smaller ways. Across the table, their certainty fractures. They understand, finally: there won’t be a clean cut. Only us, taking the harder allegiance and calling it ours.
We walk out of the chamber as if we’re still being watched, because we are: by the guards posted at the doors, by the clerks pretending to sort papers, by the ghosts of every oath we ever said out loud. The corridor’s light is the color of old bone. It makes my hands look like they belong to someone else.
Riven doesn’t touch me. I don’t touch him. Not yet. Touch would look like celebration, like we’re proud of what we just did, and pride is a luxury I don’t know how to wear. But he falls into step beside me with that precise, contained pace that used to make me want to shove him into a wall just to see if he’d crack.
Instead, he pulls a small notebook from his pocket and flips it open with his thumb. “Who’s left,” he murmurs. Not a question, more like a starting gun.
I answer the way I used to give casualty reports. “Edda at South Gate still picks up if I call from a blocked number. Soren owes me for the convoy at Mirebridge. Two med techs in the western quarter, if they haven’t been dragged in.”
He nods once, pencil moving. “Fuel?”
“Three drums, maybe four, if the depot’s locks haven’t been swapped.” My mouth tastes like metal. “Spare trucks: one flatbed with a cracked axle, two vans that stall if you ask them to climb.”
He makes a sound that could be a laugh in another life. “Roads?”
I close my eyes and see the region like a bruise map. “Old river road is mined past the second culvert. Ridge pass has snipers on the eastern shelf at dusk. The orchard track is clear but narrow. One wreck and it’s a coffin.”
“Commanders,” he says, and there’s a sharpness there, the old rivalry’s reflex. Like we’re bargaining over enemies.
“Reasonable,” I correct, because if I don’t, the word will rot in my throat. “Tala listens when she thinks she’s winning. Major Hest will take credit for mercy if you hand it to him wrapped and labeled. The rest. “The rest want a scapegoat.”
Riven’s pencil pauses. For the first time since we stood our ground in that room, his gaze flicks to me. “Then we build something they can’t accuse,” he says softly. “Something that looks like necessity.”
I swallow, and the corridor feels narrower, like the world is trying to funnel us back into old lanes. “We don’t have a banner,” I whisper.
Riven’s mouth tightens. “Good,” he says. “Banners get you shot.”
Back in the borrowed office they’ve given us (one desk, two chairs that don’t match, the air still smelling faintly of ink and fear) I spread a blank sheet and start turning the region into something that can stand up in a room. I write like I’m building a case: which gate opens when, whose cousin runs the pump, what council stamp is real and what’s just a threat in wax. Names. Dates. Signatures I can anticipate, signatures I’ll have to bleed for.
Riven takes the charcoal map from the wall and lays it beside mine like a challenge. He doesn’t care what people call it; he cares where a rifle can reach. His pencil moves fast, almost angry. He circles choke points the way other men circle mistakes.
I hate how good he is at it. I hate how I need it.
Between my neat columns and his brutal geometry, a thin corridor starts to exist: so narrow it feels imagined, so obvious it makes my throat tighten. A line neither side wants to admit is there, because admitting it means admitting we could have chosen it sooner.
We start stitching that line to living hands. Not with speeches (those get you labeled and hunted) but with favors that make practical sense and still feel like sin. I call an old medic who once spit at my boots and ask her to move morphine and bandages the way she used to move contraband letters. She’s quiet a long time, then says, “For the children,” like it’s a verdict. Riven meets a smugglers’ crew in a back room that smells like diesel and rancid coffee; he doesn’t threaten, just lays out numbers, dead bodies cost more than fuel, and watches their bravado thin into something like fatigue. In a village council hall, I promise our convoys will stop for anyone bleeding, regardless of patch or prayer. Their leader’s eyes harden, then soften. “If you do,” she says, “we’ll vouch you through.”
Every checkpoint is a negotiation dressed up as procedure. I slide my papers across with the stamps visible, the route and the manifest laid bare. No rank to lean on, nothing hidden to dare them to dig. Riven stands back, hands open, voice level, offering control instead of fear. We pay in honesty and restraint, and the corridor holds only as long as we spend that credibility together.
When our first convoy finally moves, it feels less like driving and more like balancing on a wire someone keeps shaking. The last stretch narrows between old firing positions, watchers on both ridges pretending they’re not aiming. No one says “neutral.” They say “prove it.” Tires crunch, engines idle low, my breath stuck high in my chest. Riven stays close, and the promise only stays real because we do.
The road teaches faster than any tribunal ever did. The first thing we strip off isn’t gear: it’s the little stories we used to wear like armor. No insignia stitched to shoulders, no slogans painted on crates, no colors on armbands that let someone decide in a heartbeat whether to wave you through or make you kneel in the gravel. Just names, clipped and plain, and the work in front of us.
It’s supposed to make us safer. It also makes me naked.
The first time someone looks past my face like they’re searching for the rank that isn’t there, heat crawls up my throat. My hand twitches toward a collar that’s suddenly empty. I’m used to speaking and having the world rearrange itself around the sound. Used to the way people’s eyes sharpen when they hear my title, used to obedience that feels like gravity.
But gravity isn’t what we have on this route. We have friction. We have minutes.
So I start doing what I didn’t know how to do before: I explain. I point to the bend where the shoulder crumbles and tell the lead truck to hug the inside because the outside will swallow a tire. I tell the second vehicle to keep space, not because I’m ordering it but because if the first one stalls, we can’t afford a pileup. I ask, instead of command, for two volunteers to walk ahead and check the culvert for wires. I say “please” and hear it come out of my mouth like a foreign coin, bright and suspicious.
And people: people actually move.
Not all of them. Some glare like they’re waiting for me to slip and prove what they’ve always thought. Some keep looking at Riven, as if he’s the real threat and I’m just his shadow. But when my directions keep the convoy from bogging down, when the manifest matches the crates, when no one gets cheated or grabbed “for questioning,” the muttering shifts. They start repeating my words without my name attached, like the advice is just part of the road now.
It does something terrifying in my chest: it makes me realize I can be followed without being feared.
At the first chokepoint the air turns thin, not from altitude but from attention. A line of vehicles noses toward a barricade of rusted plate and sandbags, and for a second everything holds. Engines purring, men on the ridge shifting their weight like they’re deciding which old rule to obey.
Then the third truck lurches, too eager, too close. The driver’s door flies open and he stumbles out into the open lane, hands up, mouth moving fast in a language nobody bothers to translate. Panic makes him big; it makes him visible.
Riven is already moving.
He doesn’t look back at me for permission. He doesn’t call a name, doesn’t invoke any oath or order. He just steps out where the sightlines cross, palms out, and the whole world seems to tighten around the clean target he offers.
He catches the driver by the collar and the elbow (not rough, not gentle, just precise) and drags him behind the engine block like he’s done it a thousand times. The driver keeps talking, breathless, trying to justify himself.
Riven only says, low, “Breathe,” like that’s enough reason to save someone. Like it always was.
The wheel goes with a sound like a bone giving up, sharp, wet, final, and the truck’s back end sinks into the mud as if the earth has been waiting to swallow it. For half a second everyone freezes, heads snapping toward the ridges, toward old habits, toward whoever used to have the right to shout.
My mouth opens on a command that doesn’t fit anymore. I swallow it. “Can you. “Can we get it up? Now.”
Hands reach in, not one unit, not one side. A scarred forearm with the wrong tattoo grips the axle beside a clean wrist wrapped in the other faction’s bandage. Someone wedges a plank. Someone else digs, fast and furious, like anger finally found a useful shape. The answer to my asking comes quicker than any obedience ever did. We heave together, and the truck rises.
That night we spread our supplies on a tarp like evidence: cans dented in transit, bandages counted down to the last clean fold, fuel measured in finger-widths in a jerrycan. Hunger turns everything into math. I tell him my estimate; he corrects it, quiet, ruthless. I don’t bristle. He doesn’t gloat. In the dark, we start trusting each other’s calls the way we once trusted doctrine.
By the time the route pinches into bare, watchable ground, the truth settles between us like a second pack: we’re lighter when we share the load. My calm keeps him from turning into a dare; his constant scan of the horizon keeps my instincts from becoming recklessness. We walk in step without meaning to, like the road listens for both our heartbeats before it lets us pass.
The scouts come back wrong-footed, breathing like they ran through a memory. One of them is a boy from the ridge towns who used to spit when he said my faction’s name; now he plants his palms on the hood and forces the words out anyway. “They’re moving,” he says. “Not chasing. Building a line. Like a net.”
Riven’s gaze flicks to mine, then past me, as if he can already see the road narrowing into a throat. He doesn’t ask whose patrols. He doesn’t have to. In this region the uniforms change faster than the hands inside them, and authority is a stamp more than a person.
A runner on a dirt bike appears in a spray of grit, stops too close on purpose. He holds out an envelope with a red wax seal, the kind meant to make your stomach obey before your brain catches up. For a second my fingers hover over it like it’s hot.
I take it anyway. The seal cracks under my thumb with a soft, obscene ease.
STOP ORDER, it says, in block print so certain it feels like a threat. It lists our convoy number like we’re inventory. It names a commander neither of us answers to anymore, one of the new ones who inherited a map and decided that made him God. It cites “unauthorized aid redistribution” and “collaboration,” as if the word still belongs to them.
The paper shakes once in my hand, not from fear. Something closer to disgust. I’m waiting for the old reflex, the part of me that wants to square my shoulders and fall back into line because line is simple and simple is survivable.
Riven reads over my shoulder. I feel his breath hitch at the signature, then steady into something colder. “They’re betting we’ll split,” he murmurs, so low it’s almost inside my ear. “They always bet that.”
Behind us, the convoy idles: engines ticking, people watching the paper like it can shoot. I look up, meet their eyes, and hate how much they’re asking me to decide.
I fold the order once, twice. Small enough to fit in my pocket, small enough to carry without honoring it. “Keep moving,” I say, and the words land strange and solid in my mouth. “No one turns back.”
A half mile later the air changes. The road opens into a flat, bald stretch where you can be seen from the sky and from every rusted watchtower that used to matter. The first patrol truck rolls out like it owns the dust, slow enough to make a performance of restraint. Another follows, and another, fanning wide. Not to hit us, not yet, but to frame us.
A loudspeaker clicks, feeds back, then a voice slides over the plain, practiced and bored. He doesn’t say my name. He doesn’t say Riven’s. He says “convoy” like we’re a stain.
“Unauthorized movement will be corrected. Turn back to your last checkpoint and await processing.”
Processing. Like people are cargo.
Then the hook, aimed past us at every set of eyes tucked into our beds and cabs. “Noncompliance will result in disciplinary action. An example will be made.”
I feel it ripple through the line. Shoulders tightening, hands hovering near latches, the old fear looking for a uniform to kneel to. The threat isn’t really for me. It’s for the ones we’re trying to keep breathing.
Riven and I find each other’s eyes over the hood of the lead truck, and for a beat it’s like the whole plain holds its breath with us. There’s no time for a speech, no room for doubt. I lift my hand, two fingers forward, move, and he mirrors it without thinking, like we’ve been practicing in secret.
“Wheels stay turning,” I call down the line, my voice sharper than I feel. “Tight spacing. No gaps.”
Riven paces backward along the shoulder, close enough that the patrols can see his hands are empty, far enough to catch every driver’s stare. “You don’t peel off,” he adds, low and relentless. “You don’t stop to argue. You follow the bumper in front of you like it’s the only thing keeping you alive.”
Engines answer first. Then nerves. Then motion.
When the road pinches down into barricades and barrels, I don’t get the luxury of a plan. I shove half our crates into the second truck, slap a new manifest onto the dash like paper can make this legal, and signal Riven off the main drag. We peel into a side track that’s more scar than road. Someone yells. Someone prays. I keep my eyes forward, because slowing down here is the same as volunteering.
Sunlight flattens everything (our dust, their guns, the white tarp over the medicine crates) so there’s nowhere for anyone to pretend it’s an accident. I keep us in the open on purpose, close enough to the shacks and the broken towers that faces turn, that hands lift to shade eyes, to point. Let them hear the engine. Let them see the flour sacks. If the patrol wants obedience, they can have it the old way: by shooting relief with witnesses near enough to remember.
The platform is two pallets lashed together with rope that still smells like fuel, shoved up against the courthouse steps like we’re daring the building to remember what justice used to mean. Boxes of documents crowd our boots (stamped forms, charred scraps, ledgers with the corners chewed by rain) everything we dragged out of burned offices and buried trunks and the back of a truck that never should’ve made it through.
Behind us, a rough map is pinned to a sheet of plywood. It’s so blunt it hurts: roads marked in grease pencil, dates scrawled beside checkpoints, little Xs where convoys disappeared and the official reports insisted the land was “clear.” The wind keeps trying to take it. Riven keeps one palm on the top edge like he’s holding down a confession.
I step up first because if I hesitate I’ll keep hesitating forever. The crowd is a seam of faces. Some furious, some hungry, some already half turned away like they’ve learned that looking straight at harm invites it back. My throat tightens anyway, the way it does right before impact.
“We’re not doing this alone,” I say, and my voice comes out too loud, too thin. I point at the front row, then farther back. “I want record-keepers. Anyone with a pen. Anyone with a camera. Anyone who can write their name and swear you were here when this was said.”
A murmur ripples. People look down at their hands like they’re checking if they still belong to them. A woman with an ink-stained thumb raises it halfway. A boy lifts a cracked phone like it’s contraband. Two elders push through with a ledger wrapped in cloth, eyes hard as nails.
“Come up,” I insist. “Close enough to see the papers. Close enough to copy. If they try to say later that we lied, I want ten versions of the truth living in ten pockets.”
Riven drags one of the boxes forward with his boot and flips the lid. The sound of paper shifting is ridiculous, ordinary, and it makes my pulse jump. He doesn’t smile, but his shoulder brushes mine. The crowd leans in, and for the first time it feels like we’re not just surviving; we’re making a record that can’t be erased without leaving a hole everyone can see.
I start where they can’t accuse me of poetry: the chain. Unit designations, rotation rosters, call signs that used to taste like safety because knowing them meant I could predict who would hit which checkpoint and how many seconds I’d have to breathe. I say the dispatch codes out loud, each one a nail. I give the time stamps the way I memorized them (hour, minute, the little official notation that turned panic into procedure) because surviving meant making my mind a filing cabinet.
“Directive SEV-4,” I say, and the crowd flinches like the syllables have weight. “Issued on the third, retransmitted on the fifth. ‘Security sweep’ authorized.” I hold up the stamped page so even the back row can see the ink bled by rain. “Security meant seizure. Grain. Fuel. Radios. Blankets. Medical stock.”
My tongue sticks on the next part, but I force it free. “Then it escalated. ‘Deterrence.’ That was the word they used when they wanted bodies without numbers. When they wanted silence to look like compliance.”
I don’t look at Riven yet. I keep my eyes on the witnesses and let my own voice convict me. “These were orders. And we carried them.”
Riven steps in like he’s walking into a firing line he chose. He doesn’t clear his throat. He just opens the next box and lifts out his proof with hands that don’t shake, even though I can see the tension at his jaw. “This is what my side called logistics,” he says, voice rough, and the crowd stills in that way people do when they smell money behind a massacre.
He holds up payment ledgers: columns of names, sums, signatures that look almost elegant until you realize what they bought. Intercepted messages follow, grease-stained slips and clipped transmissions, orders rerouted through “civilian” intermediaries who wore clean shirts and never got dust in their teeth. He reads their names anyway. He marks the rendezvous points, the coordinates where relief was diverted, broken apart, and sold back to the hungry like mercy by the ounce.
We trade the air between us like it’s a relay baton: my date, his date; my checkpoint, his reroute; my signature, his payment line. Every claim gets a twin, every number a second mouth to say it. I keep turning to the witnesses. “If we’re wrong, say it.” Silence doesn’t save anyone now. It only proves we’re hitting the same nails.
When the officials try to smother us in rehearsed slogans and polished threats, it doesn’t take. I watch faces stay fixed, not on the banners but on the dates I just spoke, the coordinates Riven laid bare. The old words (traitor, loyalist, enemy, ally) lose their grip, peeling off like damp paper. All that’s left is action, consequence, and the names tied to both.
At the route’s first unbroken crossing, the noise of the officials’ stagecraft thins the way fog burns off under hard sun. The loudspeakers keep trying to find purchase, cycling through the same bright, empty phrases, but the words land wrong now, skittering across faces that won’t lift for them. The banners snap in the wind like they’re impatient, like cloth can force a verdict. No one claps. No one boos. It isn’t reverence. It’s something heavier: a hush that feels earned.
People press forward, not the way a crowd surges when it wants blood or a hero, but the way you lean in when you know the next sound will matter. Boots scuff the packed dirt. Someone’s child is hoisted up onto a hip, and the kid’s fingers clutch at a collar like a lifeline. I smell dust, sweat, the sharp bite of old disinfectant from the med tents, and underneath it the faint, metallic tang of fear, mine, theirs, everyone’s, because this crossing has chewed up lives before. This line has been a mouth.
On the far side, the painted boundary cuts the ground with absurd simplicity: a stripe of white over brown earth, as if paint could do what rifles did. The first trucks in our relief line sit idling, tarps pulled tight, guards spaced out in pairs that would have killed each other a month ago. I catch the smallest movements. Hands kept open, muzzles angled down, shoulders held too stiff like the body doesn’t trust peace yet.
An official clears his throat into the microphone, ready to reclaim the moment, but the sound is swallowed. The people aren’t here to be told what to think. They’re here to see what we do with our hands. I feel my pulse in my wrists. I feel Riven’s presence beside me like heat off a fire I used to curse for existing.
This is the gap between factions, and we’re standing in it, trying to make it hold.
I take one step forward and the painted stripe seems to brighten, like it remembers every boot that ever hesitated over it. This line used to decide everything with a lazy, cruel efficiency. Who got waved through, who got tagged, who got quietly erased into paperwork that never bled. My stomach flips like it wants to run back into the old script: stand straight, let the metal on my chest do the talking, let the title absorb the blame.
My fingers find the clasp anyway. It’s warm from my body, slick with sweat, suddenly heavier than it has any right to be. I unhook it with a small, sharp click that cuts through the hush, and I let it settle into my palm.
I don’t lift it like a prize. I don’t hide it like a shame. I just hold it out where everyone can see: proof of what I was allowed to be, and what I used it for. Wind presses at my sleeves. Somewhere behind me a tarp snaps. I keep my hand steady until the weight becomes undeniable.
I close my fingers around the insignia until the edges bite, a small, private sting that steadies me. For a second I can almost feel the old reflex: lift my chin, let the stamped metal argue for me, let it turn my choices into orders, my harm into “necessary.” I don’t get to do that anymore. I don’t want to.
The collection box sits on a folding table meant for forms and signatures, its clear sides already cluttered with written statements, torn strips of cloth, a dog tag someone couldn’t keep. The clerk’s pen hovers, waiting for a rank I won’t give.
I open my fist. The metal drops and clinks against the plastic, loud as a confession. “Mara,” I say, and it’s the only title I deserve.
Beside me, Riven steps into the open like he’s stepping onto a gallows he built. He hauls the old blacklist ledger up by its spine, the cover warped from rain and handling, and pries it apart. One page comes free with a sound like skin tearing, names, dates, neat violence, and he holds it up long enough for the crowd to recognize the shape of their loss. Then he turns, no flourish, and lets the rest catch. Flame eats the ink first. The binding gives with a sigh. He doesn’t look away.
We don’t reach for each other, not with hands, not with the kind of gesture people can cheer for and misunderstand. We just stay. Shoulder to shoulder on a stripe that used to split the world clean, we face the road we’ve sworn to keep open. Relief trucks, witnesses, consequences. His smoke tangles with my breathing, and the future holds.