The world came back together mid-step, and the step was already wrong.
My boot came down into ankle-deep mud instead of quarry gravel, and I pitched forward, catching myself against a stone wall slick with something I chose not to identify by smell alone.
No stretcher.
No dragon.
No Sivrel calling out the minutes.
Just a courtyard, walled in on three sides, with a sky the color of an old bruise hanging low over what looked like a fortified estate somebody had stopped maintaining a long time ago.
Vhaldrèche, then.
The wristband confirmed it a half second later, the transfer log settling into place with a name I recognized: Kelz, outbound, destination Kharvoss.
Whatever she’d been carrying here, she wasn’t carrying it anymore.
That much was already clear, because the ground in front of me had a notebook sitting on it, closed, weighted down against the wind with a chunk of broken masonry, positioned so precisely in my line of sight that I doubted it had landed there by accident.
I picked it up.
The cover was damp but the pages inside were dry enough to read, and someone had gone to the trouble of writing in a clean, deliberate hand instead of the frantic scrawl I’d have expected from a person with a five-second countdown breathing down her neck.
A route, sketched out in landmarks rather than distances.
A gate symbol.
A crossed-out path with the word patrol written next to it twice, underlined the second time.
And at the bottom, a name: Mavra, followed by a rough description of a cellar door behind a collapsed grain shed.
Whoever Kelz was, she’d used her last few seconds in this courtyard doing exactly what I would’ve wanted done for me.
That was worth something.
I filed it away as a debt I couldn’t repay to a woman I’d never met, in a world where meeting her again wasn’t guaranteed, and kept reading.
“You’re back,” a voice said from somewhere behind me, and I turned to find a man half-crouched near the courtyard’s far wall, a length of iron chain wrapped twice around his forearm, looking at me the way you’d look at a coworker who’d stepped out for coffee and come back with the wrong order.
“Good. Help me with the gate before the patrol swings past the outer wall.”
He nodded toward a portcullis set into an archway at the courtyard’s edge, iron bars thick as my wrist, rusted at the joints, sunk maybe a third of the way into a channel choked with debris.
It wasn’t budging on its own.
“You lifted this before?” I asked, mostly to buy myself a second to think, because the answer was obviously going to be no, not me, not this body.
“Not me. Her.” He tilted his chin toward the space I’d apparently just occupied a version of, meaning Kelz, meaning a woman who was currently somewhere in a quarry with a dragon problem and none of her upper body strength left behind for my use.
“Got it up past my knee height on her own two hands, no chain, no lever. Figured you’d manage the same, seeing as you’re standing where she stood.”
“I’m not going to manage the same,” I said, and watched his face change.
“The swap doesn’t hand off muscle. It doesn’t hand off training, either. Whatever she could lift, whatever her arms were built to do after however many years of doing it, that stayed with her. I got her notebook and her last known coordinates. That’s it. That’s the whole inheritance.”
“I didn’t write the rules. I’m telling you how it does work, because guessing wrong here gets somebody’s fingers under that gate.” I crouched down next to the channel, running a hand along the bottom edge of the portcullis where it had jammed against a lip of broken stone.
“What’s your name?”
“Darian.”
“Darian. I’ve got a strap on my harness rated for towing loads, not for hand-over-hand lifting, but rated is rated. If we thread it through the bars and around that support post there, we’re not lifting the gate anymore. We’re using the post as a fulcrum and the strap as leverage. Slower than one strong person hauling it straight up, but it doesn’t require me to suddenly have the shoulders of a stevedore I’ve never met.”
Darian looked unconvinced, the particular unconvinced of a man who’d already watched one impossible thing happen today and didn’t see why a second one shouldn’t follow.
But he didn’t argue, which I took as consent, and I unclipped the strap from my harness and got to work threading it through the lowest gap in the bars.
Two figures came out from behind the collapsed grain shed while I worked, drawn either by the noise or by the simple fact that a gate finally looked like it might open.
Refugees, judging by the state of them, thin coats and the kind of caution in their eyes that comes from surviving something recently and not trusting the quiet after it.
A woman, older, with a bandaged hand.
A younger man missing a boot.
“We need weight on this end,” I said, pointing to where the strap looped around the support post, “and a steady pull, not a yank. If you yank it, the strap slips and someone’s hand ends up under a few hundred pounds of iron. Slow and even.”
The woman with the bandaged hand didn’t ask who I was or why I expected to be listened to.
She just grabbed the strap where I pointed, planted her feet, and waited for the count.
The younger man took the other side without a word either.
Whatever they’d been through in this courtyard before I arrived, it had apparently trained the arguing right out of them.
“On three,” I said.
“One, two—”
The gate groaned upward in short, ugly increments, the mechanism inside the channel shrieking with every inch like it hadn’t moved in a decade and resented being asked to now.
Darian braced his chain against the opposite side, more for stability than actual lifting, and between the three points of leverage the bars climbed high enough to clear a crouching man’s shoulders.
Not elegant.
Not fast.
But it climbed.
“Hold,” I said, once there was clearance enough to see the path beyond, a muddy lane running between two half-collapsed buildings toward what I guessed, from the notebook’s sketch, was the shelter Kelz had marked.
“Hold it there. Somebody wedge something under before we lose the tension.”
Darian shoved a length of broken beam into the gap at the base of the gate, and the whole assembly settled onto it with a groan that sounded almost grateful. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
The path was open—open long enough for people to move through it, which was what mattered right now.
That was when my strap decided to become a casualty of its own success, the buckle end twisting into the mechanism as the gate settled, wedging itself somewhere inside the channel where I had no chance of retrieving it without either tools I didn’t have or time I definitely didn’t have.
“Leave it,” I said, mostly to myself, because some small, stupid part of me wanted to yank on it anyway out of pure stubbornness.
I let go instead.
It wasn’t a magic strap.
It was a strap, and straps were replaceable, and I’d rather lose one than lose the ten minutes it would take to argue with a jammed buckle while a patrol I couldn’t see was presumably getting closer by the second.
A soft chime sounded against my wrist, and the display resolved into a clean administrative line, the kind of language that always made these systems sound like they were run by people who’d never once stood in mud.
Personal equipment loss detected.
Bill remaining value to next occupant of current mission slot?
Confirm to proceed.
I stared at it long enough that Darian noticed and asked what was wrong.
“Apparently I can make whoever swaps into this exact spot pay for my strap,” I said.
“Some poor soul who’s got no idea this courtyard exists yet is supposed to eat the cost of a decision they weren’t around for.”
“And?”
“And no.” I dismissed the prompt with more force than the interface probably required, just to make sure it took.
“Whoever ends up standing here didn’t jam that buckle. I did. I’m not sticking somebody else with my bill because the system’s decided that’s a convenient way to keep score.” It wasn’t a big moral stand, and I wasn’t going to pretend it was one.
It was just the kind of thing that would’ve eaten at me on a bus ride to work, back when bus rides were the worst part of my day, so I wasn’t about to let it slide now that the stakes had gotten considerably less forgiving.
The Kharvoss log updated a moment later, scrolling past on the same display, apparently still tracking a mission thread I’d left behind in another sector entirely.
Kelz, resumed carry, casualty stabilized, Sivrel assisting.
No mention of borrowed lashing knots or shoulders that weren’t hers.
Whatever gear had gone with her from that stretcher, whatever local mission property had been tagged to Kharvoss and not to the person carrying it, none of it had followed her here any more than my strength had followed Kelz’s absence.
The system was at least consistent about that much, even if it dressed the consistency up in language designed to sound helpful.
I pulled the notebook back out and found Mavra’s rough coordinates, keyed them into the wristband, and sent a short ping with my current position attached.
The response came back faster than I expected, a set of directions overlaying the courtyard sketch, a route that mostly agreed with what Kelz had already drawn by hand except for one detour around what the new data flagged as a collapsed archway.
“Thank you,” I said to Darian and the two refugees, because gratitude cost nothing and they’d earned it more than most people I’d worked with back home ever had.
“Stay off the main lane if you can. The patrol is supposedly using it.”
Darian gave me a short nod, already turning back toward the shed to see what else needed doing, and I stepped through the gate we’d just fought open, notebook tucked against my ribs where the strap used to sit, moving toward a woman I’d never met with instructions I could pass along freely and a body full of skills that, notebook or no notebook, weren’t going to travel with me any further than the next five-second warning.