The fire at the checkpoint burned low and orange.
For the first hour of it, Varun let himself believe the whole thing might just be nerves.
Day one had gone the way Bexley promised.
Mudbacks, the creek, the one bad moment with Wren that ended clean.
Camp itself felt almost good, the tired kind of good a first real expedition was supposed to feel like.
Someone had found flat dry stone for ten bedrolls.
Wren was arguing with Tobias about whether the ration bars tasted like cardboard or specifically wet cardboard.
Halvard quiet, who’d said maybe forty words all day sat near the fire cleaning a knife she hadn’t needed once, while Bexley walked the edge of camp checking wards with the same unbothered thoroughness she brought to everything.
It should have felt like the end of a good day.
It didn’t, not all the way, and Varun couldn’t have said exactly why.
You keep glancing at the tunnel mouth, Wolfy said, private.
Every ninety seconds or so.
I’ve been counting.
I’m not doing anything.
You’re doing a very visible nothing.
Wren’s going to notice before I stop noticing, and she’s worse at hiding it than I am.
He made himself stop and look at the fire instead.
It didn’t help much.
Something had been sitting behind his ribs since the walk to camp not sharp, not urgent, just there, the way a held breath is there even when nothing’s wrong yet.
Do you feel it right now, Varun asked.
Or was that just the once, at the arch.
Wolfy took longer than usual to answer.
I don’t know, he said finally, and that bothered Varun more than a plain yes would have.
It’s not close.
I’d know if it was close.
But it’s not nothing either.
It’s like standing in a house and knowing a door’s open somewhere, even if you can’t see which one.
That’s not comforting.
I’m not doing comforting tonight.
I’m doing honest.
Different job.
Watch rotation went up an hour later, chalked onto a slate Halvard passed around the fire names paired off in two-hour blocks through the night.
Varun’s name landed next to Wren’s, second rotation, well past midnight.
“We drew the bad slot,” Wren said, dropping down beside him.
“Middle of the night, right when everyone’s dumbest.
Great.”
“Could be worse.
Could be last.”
“Last is basically free.
Last is when the sun’s already coming up.” She stretched until her joints popped, loud enough that Tobias glanced over.
“You’ve been weird today.”
“I’ve been tired today.”
“Not the same thing.” She said it lightly, no real push behind it just laying the fact down where he could see it.
“You did the wolf thing without even blinking yesterday.
That was good weird.
This is a different kind.”
Varun thought, for as long as it took to breathe once, about telling her some version of the truth.
He’d gotten good at that math over two years how much a person actually needed, how much was easier to carry alone.
“Just thinking about something,” he said instead.
“Not important yet.”
“Yet’s doing a lot of work in that sentence.”
“It usually is.”
She let it go and went back to arguing with Tobias about the ration bars.
Tobias drifted over a while later and dropped down across the fire, no preamble, the same way he’d once told Varun he was lost on the very first day.
“You’re off tonight.
Not in a way anyone else would catch.
I would.”
“Everyone keeps saying that like it’s news.”
“It’s not news.
It’s a pattern.
I collect those.” He picked at a ration bar without eating it.
“You don’t have to tell me anything.
I just noticed, and I’m choosing not to make it weird, which for me is basically a gift.”
“Gift accepted.”
“Good.” He flicked a stone into the fire and watched it spark.
“For what it’s worth whatever it is, you’ll probably handle it.
You handle most things.
Annoyingly well.”
It wasn’t an answer, and it wasn’t really a question either.
Just a boy who’d learned to read him too well, saying so instead of keeping it to himself.
Varun found he didn’t mind that nearly as much as he might have few weeks ago.
He sat by the fire a while longer with the cold, quiet thing behind his ribs, and didn’t mention it to anyone else at all.
Midnight watch was quieter than Varun expected, in every sense but the one that mattered.
Hollow Creek at night wasn’t dark exactly the glow-fungus kept the tunnels lit in a soft blue-green that never brightened or dimmed, so the only real sign of time passing was the slate Halvard had left to track it against.
Wren took the north arc, humming something that wasn’t quite a tune.
Varun took the south, closer to the water, and made himself actually walk it instead of standing still and waiting.
Nothing happened.
That was the whole shape of the problem.
Nothing happened, and it still didn’t feel like nothing.
Anything, he asked, an hour in.
No.
Same as before.
A door somewhere.
Still shut.
Still open.
Nothing closer.
Could it just be nerves.
Mine, not yours.
Could be.
Wolfy didn’t sound like he believed it.
I’d like it to be.
I don’t think it is.
The creek ran quiet along the south arc, dark water catching threads of light on its surface.
Twice Varun caught himself stopping mid-step to listen to a silence that was, honestly, just silence no different from the silence on either side of it, except his whole body kept treating it like it might be.
He didn’t sleep well once his turn to rest finally came.
He lay with his eyes shut and let his ears do the work instead, cataloguing every small sound the camp made on its own the fire settling, someone’s breathing catching and evening out, water somewhere finding its way over stone.
None of it, not one thing on the whole list, was what his body kept braced for.
You should actually sleep, Wolfy said, gentler now.
Standing guard from inside your own head isn’t going to catch anything I can’t already catch better.
I know.
Knowing and doing.
We’ve had this conversation before.
Fair.
He didn’t fall asleep so much as stop fighting it, and the last thing he heard, right at the edge, was Wolfy quiet, awake, nothing playful left in his voice at all.
I’ve got it from here.
Sleep.
I’ll wake you if the door moves.
He woke once more before morning anyway, for no reason he could name.
The fire had burned down to a dull red glow.
Wren was asleep on the far side of it, one arm thrown over her face.
Halvard sat awake near the perimeter, still as a rock, knife resting across her knees.
Nothing had changed.
Nothing was wrong that he could point to.
He lay back down and stared at the ceiling until his eyes felt heavy again, and somewhere in that stretch of staring, without ever quite deciding to, he fell back asleep.
Day two started early and ordinary, which felt, by now, like its own small relief.
They broke camp before full light, packed in under twenty minutes.
Halvard checked each bedroll and pack herself before they moved, said nothing about it, while Bexley walked the line double-checking formation positions were still where they’d left them.
Together they led the cohort deeper along the creek’s second branch toward the next checkpoint.
The morning passed the way a good expedition morning was supposed to pass a few low-tier creatures handled cleanly, formation holding without anyone needing to say much about it anymore, Tobias calling adjustments that were, Varun noticed with some satisfaction, actually good ones now.
Wren spent an hour trying to teach him a counting game meant for long marches doubling numbers, never saying the actual word for seven and lost twice herself before declaring the game broken rather than admit she’d miscounted.
Even Halvard almost smiled when Tobias tripped over a root he swore hadn’t been there a second earlier, startling a flock of pale, blind cave birds out of the ceiling above them.
It was easy, for stretches, to forget about the door.
Past midday, the tunnel opened into a wide chamber three passages meeting at a shallow basin of still water, cool and completely unremarkable.
They stopped there to eat, boots off, feet in the shallows.
For most of an hour it was just ten kids and two patient instructors arguing about ration bars in a slightly bigger room.
The cold thing behind Varun’s ribs stayed quiet the whole time.
He noticed that the way you notice a headache is gone rather than fading the day had it that morning, and now it didn’t, and somewhere in between it had left without saying when.
It only came once it was properly dark, both times, he said to Wolfy, once the cohort moved on again.
At the arch yesterday.
At camp last night.
Never in daylight.
Not even in this room, and this is the darkest stretch we’ve walked all day.
Could be coincidence.
Could be.
He didn’t believe that any more than Wolfy’s tone suggested he did.
Or it just doesn’t come out until the light’s actually gone.
Not tunnel-dark.
Night-dark.
That’s a worse thought than the first one.
I know.
He kept walking, because there was nothing else useful to do, and the chamber fell behind them the way everything else in Hollow Creek had that day ordinary, and willing to just be a room full of water and rock, nothing more.
By evening, the light along the tunnel walls had started its slow shift from daytime blue-green toward the deeper shade it settled into after dark.
Varun felt the cold thing stir back awake the moment it did right on schedule, like it had simply been waiting somewhere just out of reach for a sun it didn’t actually need to finish setting.
That night, lying awake at the second checkpoint with the fire down to embers and the cohort finally asleep, he thought about the mystery box still sitting unopened in his interface, and the task underneath it, and the door Wolfy kept saying was somewhere in the house unmoved, unclosed, waiting for whichever one of them found it first.
Two more days, he thought, not really to Wolfy, not really to anyone.
Two more days, Wolfy agreed anyway, quiet in the dark.
We’ll be ready either way it goes.
It’ll come back tomorrow, won’t it.
Same time.
Once it’s actually dark again.
Probably.
Wolfy didn’t dress it up.
Today’s made that much clear, at least.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t come during the day.
It waits for night, every night, same as tonight.
So yes.
Tomorrow evening, it’ll be back.
Neither of them said the rest of it out loud that ready and fine weren’t the same word, and they both already knew which one this actually was.
Somewhere past the checkpoint’s edge, past the reach of the fire and the fungus-light both, Hollow Creek sat exactly as dark and exactly as quiet as it had every other night for six surveyed years, and gave no sign of anything at all.