It arrived the way every Mission arrived — without asking, without warning, a hook sinking into something under the sternum that didn't exist anatomically and mattered enormously anyway, and Ash gasped and folded forward, both hands pressed flat against his own chest like he could hold himself together by main force.
Maren was on her feet instantly. "What's happening — is it — "
"Mission," he managed, through gritted teeth, the word itself still new enough on his tongue that saying it under duress came out mangled. "It's — pulling. I don't — I've never — "
"You've never had one before," she finished, because of course he hadn't; he'd spent his entire short, strange existence rooted to this one hillside, hidden, undiscovered, and the machinery of the Between had apparently only just now decided he existed enough to be useful to it.
The pull deepened. His silhouette blurred at the edges, that same rooted, branching darkness threatening to bleed through the careful shape he'd built himself, and Maren — three years old in her own death, if she'd been counting, which she wasn't — did the only thing that made any sense to her in the moment.
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She grabbed his hand and didn't let go.
"I'm coming with you," she said, before he could argue, before he could even fully form the thought that he might want to argue. "Whatever this is. Wherever it takes you. I'm not staying here."
"Maren, you don't know what — "
"Neither do you," she said. "That makes two of us. Better odds than one."
He looked at her — really looked, the way he only ever looked at her, both eyes steady, that ember-blue thread holding perfectly still instead of flickering — and something in his face settled, like a decision he hadn't known he was making had just finished making itself.
"Hold on," he said. "I don't know how this works yet."
"Then we'll find out together."
The pull took them both at once, the gray hillside folding away like a page turning, and for one dizzying, weightless second there was nothing at all — no Ash, no Maren, no Between, just the falling sensation of two people plummeting toward a question neither of them had asked and both of them were, apparently, about to have to answer.