The swap dropped me mid-stride, and for one very bad half-second I kept Veska’s momentum going straight into a wall of rubble that used to be a street.
I threw myself sideways, boots skidding on loose masonry, and went down hard on a shoulder that had already logged enough abuse for one lifetime.
The ledger chimed against my wrist before I’d even finished rolling.
SWAP CONFIRMED: Veyr ⇄ Veska.
Destination: Odrance (partner: Mavra).
Duration since last Odrance presence: 6h41m.
Six hours and forty-one minutes.
Long enough, apparently, for an entire street to stop existing.
I’d walked this corridor before, back when I’d first come through with the winch crew.
Back then it ran straight for two hundred meters to a supply junction, flanked by a low outer rampart that gave line of sight clear to the gatehouse.
Now the rampart wasn’t low and wasn’t where I remembered, and the street ended twelve meters ahead in a wall of collapsed stone that hadn’t fallen by accident.
Someone had dropped it there on purpose, packed it tight, and left it as a plug.They’d barricaded the breach.
A hand closed on the back of my coat and hauled me backward hard enough to knock the wind loose.
“Not that way,” a defender said, not slowing down to explain further, dragging me bodily off the line I’d been about to walk.
I got two steps of resistance in before the reason became obvious.
Something clicked into place somewhere above us, a mechanical iris opening in what I’d assumed was decorative stonework, and a beam of focused light swept the exact dead end I’d been standing in a heartbeat earlier.
It didn’t fire anything visible.
It didn’t need to.
The scorch pattern already baked into the rubble told me everything about what happened to things that lingered there.
“Automated turret,” the defender said, releasing my coat now that I was no longer standing in its favorite spot.
“New since this morning. Third one this week. Whatever you knew about this street, forget it.”
“Copy that,” I said, and meant it more literally than she probably realized.
I pulled the contribution ledger up while my pulse settled, mostly to have something to do with my eyes that wasn’t staring at the turret housing.
The defensive sector overlay had changed enough that I had to blink and reread it twice.
Two concentric ramparts had rotated on some kind of buried track system, swapping their firing arcs entirely.
Three new turret nests.
A tunnel that used to dead-end into a storage room now connected clean through to what the overlay labeled a forward redoubt, currently flagged in the kind of angry red that meant it wasn’t doing its job.
Teams had been grinding on this city the whole time I’d been off setting fire to a king’s paperwork.
Nobody had waited for me to come back and admire the work.
“You’re the gear hand,” the defender said, already moving, clearly expecting me to keep up rather than ask questions.
“Redoubt Three’s traverse mechanism seized an hour ago. Command wants the replacement block hauled in before the next wave, and the next wave is in eleven minutes.” Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
Eleven minutes.
Not a lot of time to relearn a city.
“Lead the way,” I said, and jogged after her boots.
Zekh was already at the staging point when we arrived, which was the first genuinely good news I’d had since materializing face-first toward a wall.
He had his coat off and folded, boots braced wide against a section of cracked rampart stone that was leaning at an angle no rampart should lean at, both palms flat against it like he was trying to convince it to stay put through sheer force of personality.
“Don’t tell me,” I said.
“Eyelid.”
“Eyelid,” he confirmed, not looking away from the stone.
“Whole outer face is one good tremor from sliding into the supply road. I freeze it, buy the shoring crew twenty minutes to get real timber under it, everybody goes home happy. Well. Everybody except me. I go home unconscious and useless, but that’s the deal.”
“Ready when you are, then.”
“Little busy being ready,” Zekh said, and I recognized the specific quality of concentration on his face, the one that meant he was two seconds from committing to something his body would make him regret.
His telemetry bracelet chimed first.
Mine chimed a half-second after, in sympathy, the way it always did whenever someone nearby got yanked sideways out of the world.
SWAP CONFIRMED: Zekh ⇄ Salkhe.
Zekh’s hands came off the stone mid-breath.
He didn’t finish whatever ritual buildup Eyelid required, didn’t so much as flinch before the space where he’d been standing filled instead with a woman in leather bracers, a bowstave slung across her back, and a quiver of arrows fletched in a style I’d never seen anywhere near Odrance.
She looked at the leaning rampart and at the shoring crew standing around with timber braces, then, finally, looked at me.
“Where are the beasts?” she said, in the flat tone of someone ready to kill something.
“I was told there would be beasts. A quarry. Traps.”
“You’re not in Kharvoss anymore,” I said.
“This is Odrance. That wall is about to become a landslide, and the last guy who was standing where you’re standing was going to freeze it in place for twenty minutes so a construction crew could brace it properly.”
“I do not freeze walls,” Salkhe said, entirely reasonably.
“I shoot things that move. Nothing here is moving. Except possibly that.”
She pointed, unhelpfully accurately, at the section of stone that had just shifted another few centimeters with a groan that everyone here pretended not to hear.
There wasn’t time to be diplomatic about it.
Zekh’s ability had bought us nothing, and the countdown on Redoubt Three hadn’t paused to accommodate our confusion.
“New plan,” I said, already turning to the shoring crew.
“Forget the freeze. You’ve got braces and you’ve got hands, so use them the manual way. Get the longest timbers you have wedged under the overhang now, don’t wait for perfect, wedge it ugly and wedge it fast. If it starts to go, you get clear, you don’t play hero for a wall.”
She barked names and sent people scattering toward a stack of beams I hadn’t noticed until she pointed at it.
“And you,” I said to Salkhe, “you’re an archer with a working set of eyes and no reason to be standing in front of a rockslide. There’s a gear block that needs an escort to Redoubt Three, and I’d rather have someone who can put an arrow through anything that gets ideas about our flank than someone standing here doing nothing useful.”
Salkhe considered that for exactly as long as it took to register that it was, in fact, a job she was equipped for.
“That,” she said, “I can do.”
“Good. Because we’ve got about nine minutes left and I still haven’t seen this gear block you people keep talking about.”
The mechanic waiting at the staging shed solved that problem by simply gesturing me toward it, and I understood immediately why nobody had wanted to carry it alone.
The replacement gear block was a solid disc of dark iron easily as wide as I was tall, its rim cut with teeth thick as my forearm, resting in a wheeled cradle that four defenders were already straining to push.
“Traverse mechanism’s whole housing seized,” the mechanic said, falling into step beside me as we pushed.
“This is the spare tooth ring. Slot it into the redoubt’s drive shaft, it re-meshes the gearing, the turret swings again. Simple, if we get it there in time.”
Simple was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The cradle fought every centimeter of ground, and twice we had to lift the front edge bodily over debris that the shifted ramparts had left scattered across what used to be a clear corridor.
Salkhe walked point with an arrow nocked and didn’t say much, which I appreciated more than I expected to.
We reached the tunnel mouth to Redoubt Three with time still on the clock, which felt like the first piece of good luck I’d had since arriving.
It didn’t last.
The tunnel was narrow, cut for foot traffic rather than freight, and the gear cradle barely scraped through with its wheels shrieking against both walls.
Behind us, a defender grabbed the heavy blast door meant to seal the passage the moment we were clear, and shoved.
It moved four inches and stopped dead against the cradle’s trailing edge.
“It’s not going to close,” the defender said, shoving again with no better result.
“The block’s too wide. Door won’t seat until it’s through, and it’s not through yet.”
“How much farther?” I asked the mechanic, already knowing the answer wasn’t going to be one I liked.
“Thirty meters. Maybe less.”
Thirty meters of open tunnel behind an unsealable door was not a number I wanted to be carrying around, and the tremor that answered it a moment later came from somewhere down the passage we’d just walked through, low and mechanical, nothing like footsteps.
“Drones,” Salkhe said, already turning, bow coming up.
Two of them nosed into the tunnel mouth behind us, low to the ground, optical clusters swiveling with the particular unhurried confidence of things that had already decided we were slower than they were.
“Keep pushing,” I told the crew hauling the cradle, and dropped back to put myself between the gear block and whatever those drones had been built to do.
The mechanic crouched by the drive housing at the redoubt’s base instead of running, one hand tracing the exposed edge of the broken gearing with something close to affection.
“Here,” he said, tapping the ring of teeth where they’d sheared clean through.
“You see how they interlock? Every tooth on the spare has to seat between two on the housing, no gaps, or the whole assembly binds the second it takes a load.”
“I see it,” I said, not entirely looking at the teeth so much as the drones closing the distance behind them.