The observation post sat on a spur of rock jutting out over the quarry road, the kind of position a real army would have called a forward outpost and the kind of position I would have called a nice place to get killed with a view.
Three walls of dry-stacked stone, one collapsed roof, and inside, what should have been a table full of survey maps pinned down with river stones.
There was nothing on the table—well, there wasn’t much of a table in the first place.
Sivrel got there first and stood in the doorway for a second too long, the way a man stands in front of a house fire he already knows he can’t put out.
“Gutted,” he said, which was one word doing the work of several.
He wasn’t exaggerating.
The shelving along the back wall had been raked off its brackets, whatever binders or scrolls it once held now reduced to confetti mixed in with pulverized stone dust that crunched underfoot like sugar.
Somebody, or something, had gone through this room and made sure nobody read anything in it ever again.
“Three minutes,” I said, mostly to myself, checking the position of the sun through the missing half of the roof.
“It came from the east ridge on its last pass. If it holds its pattern, we’ve got three minutes before it swings back over this exact rock. After that we’re guessing.”
We split the room.
I took the corner with the worst light because that’s usually where things fall when nobody’s paying attention, and sure enough, my boot found a strip of parchment half buried under grit, no bigger than my palm, one edge burned black and curling.
I peeled it up carefully, the way you’d handle a job application you weren’t sure you wanted anymore.
It was a piece of a map.
A river bend, a triangle marking a watchtower, a hand-inked note in a script I couldn’t read but the EVI equivalent in this world apparently could, because a translated caption blinked faint and gray at the edge of my vision a half second later: Third relay, sighted from the false peak.
“Got a fragment,” I called.
“River section, mentions a relay point.”
One of the other hunters, a woman with a sling weapon and a face that had clearly stopped being surprised by anything weeks ago, was crouched over what was left of a boulder near the doorway.
Not a boulder that had fallen there.
A boulder that had been a cairn, the kind you stack on purpose to mark a sightline, now smashed down to gravel with what looked like a single directed blow.
“This wasn’t debris from the roof,” she said.
“Somebody swung something the size of a house at this rock. On purpose.”
I looked at the fragment in my hand, then at the gravel, then back at the empty shelving, and the picture assembled itself the way bad news usually does, all at once and too late to be useful.
“It’s not random destruction,” I said.
“It’s hunting the landmarks specifically. Cairns, survey posts, anything that would help us fix a position on a map. It’s not just killing people. It’s making sure the people it doesn’t kill can’t find their way to the next fight prepared.”
Nobody liked that theory, but we didn’t have a counterargument for it either.
A soft chime pulsed against my wrist, and the display resolved into a line of text I hadn’t been expecting: a side-bounty, registered the moment the fragment logged as recovered intelligence.
Credits, a number with more zeroes on the end than I was comfortable seeing attached to a torn scrap of paper.
I did the math I always did with numbers like that, out of habit more than hope.
Divided it against what a year filing incident reports and reconciling shipment manifests had paid me back home, then divided that by twelve, then stared at the result for longer than the situation really allowed. New chapters come out on novelping . com first.
Call it a decade and change of showing up at 7:45 every morning to a desk that smelled like burnt coffee and toner, just to match what one shredded map fragment was worth out here.
That was the whole reason I was standing in a gutted stone shack on a quarry ridge with a dragon on the clock.
Not some grand cause.
Not a debt I was settling with the universe.
I’d watched three seasons of this show from a couch that wasn’t mine, in an apartment I was one bad month from losing, and I’d done the same math back then too, out loud, to coworkers who laughed at me for it.
I hadn’t come here to save anybody.
I’d come here because the arithmetic finally made sense.
The wounded man on the stretcher chose that exact moment to remind me why the arithmetic didn’t cover everything.
His breathing had gone from the ragged, effortful kind to something quieter and worse, a thin whistle with too much space between each pull.
I’d heard that sound exactly once before, in a different life, standing over a man who didn’t make it to the ambulance.
My stomach dropped.
“He’s crashing,” I said, already moving.
“We need him stable and moving, now, not in three minutes.”
Carrying an unconscious adult over broken rock without dropping him, without twisting whatever was already broken in him farther, wasn’t something I could improvise my way through fast enough.
So I didn’t try.
Programming: stable carry, full duration.
I fed the parameters as clean as I could manage with my hands already shaking.
Priority is the casualty’s spine and airway.
If the terrain changes in a way you can’t predict three steps ahead, stop moving and hold position.
Don’t gamble on a shortcut you haven’t already seen.
The world folded the way it always did, quick and clean and without ceremony, like a door closing on a room I hadn’t finished looking at.
I came back to myself kneeling on the far side of the outpost’s threshold, the wounded man secured to the stretcher with a lashing pattern I would not have known how to tie in a hundred years of trying, a series of crossed loops running from his shoulders down to his hips, tensioned just enough to hold him rigid without cutting off circulation.
My hands still remembered the motion in the muscle, even if the rest of me had missed the performance entirely.
Twenty seconds.
That’s what the timer on my wrist told me had passed, followed immediately by the familiar gray text warning me that reactivation wouldn’t be available for another sixty.
A recovery window, mandatory.
Whatever ran the show in my skull during those blackouts apparently needed a cooldown just like the rest of the equipment out here.
Sivrel crouched down beside the stretcher and turned one of the lashings over in his fingers, frowning at it the way a man frowns at a puzzle he half-suspects is a joke at his expense. Read the latest chapters at novelping . com.
“This is a bosun’s hitch,” he said.
“Maybe two of them stacked. I haven’t seen this pattern outside a harbor crew in years.” He looked up at me, and there wasn’t accusation in it exactly, just the particular unease of someone doing math that didn’t add up.
“Since when are you a sailor?”
“I’m not,” I said, and it came out flatter than I meant it to, because it was the truth and the truth didn’t have room in it for a joke.
“I’ve never been on a boat in my life. I get seasick on a ferry.”
“Then who tied this?”
I didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t make everyone standing near me reconsider how much they trusted my body when I wasn’t driving it.
Whatever took over during those blocks of missing time wasn’t guessing its way through knots or borrowing some magic sailor’s memory out of thin air.
It had a skill set, a real one, specific and practiced, and it wasn’t mine.
It hadn’t pulled a map out of nowhere either, hadn’t seen around the corner of that culvert or spotted the dragon’s pattern before I did.
Whatever was running things only had what my eyes could see and what my hands already knew how to do, plus, apparently, decades of rope work I had never once picked up.
That was somehow worse than if it had cheated.
A ghost with borrowed eyes I could have written off as some kind of sensor package bolted onto my nervous system.
A ghost with its own hands, its own trained muscle memory, sitting quietly behind my ribs and only surfacing when I asked it to carry someone I couldn’t carry myself—that was a person.
And I had no idea who.
“I don’t know,” I said, and left it there, because the woman with the sling was already calling out that she had a second fragment, and the sun through the broken roof had moved farther than I liked.
“Time,” Sivrel said, glancing east.
“Under two minutes,” I confirmed.
“We move him now; we skip the second sweep.”
Nobody argued that math either.
Two hunters took the front poles of the stretcher, careful with the tension the knots had already set for them, while Sivrel folded the map fragments into a strip of oiled cloth and tucked it against his chest like it was worth more than his own ribs, which, considering the bounty ticking on my wrist, it very well might have been.
I stood, rolled my shoulder to check what twenty seconds of borrowed labor had cost me on top of everything else I was already carrying, and got exactly half a breath of relief before the wristband lit up with a different kind of notification, the kind with a five-second countdown attached to it instead of a dollar sign.
Location transfer initiated.
Incoming exchange: Kelz.
Destination: Vhaldrèche.
Timer: 5.
Five seconds to hand off a stretcher I’d just tied shut with knots I didn’t know I knew, to men I’d known for less than an hour, in a quarry with a dragon on approach and a countdown that didn’t care about any of it.
“He’s stable for now,” I said fast, already feeling the pull start behind my eyes.
“Don’t loosen the lashings, don’t let him roll on his side. Whoever’s next, they’ll know what to do with this.”
Sivrel opened his mouth, probably to ask what I meant by “whoever’s next,” and the number on my wrist hit zero before either of us found out.