The sky above the road was the particular blue of mornings that don’t know yet what the day will ask of them.
Bahadur watched it through the carriage window.
Flat farmland on both sides the festival harvest already cut, the fields open and pale.
The road ahead long and straight and unpromising.
“Sir.” The officer beside him young, attentive.
“We’ll reach the rendezvous point within half a day.”
Bahadur nodded.
Around him the twenty Nirakh-Suri sat in the silence of officers before a mission rifles on their backs, hands in their laps, nobody talking because talking before this kind of work costs something you might need later.
The carriage moved at steady pace.
The road gave nothing back.
Bahadur unfolded the paper Maro had handed him at the gate.
A permit stamped and sealed, Nirakh-Vrath Mihan’s mark at the bottom, the authority to enter, to search, to arrest.
Official.
Airtight.
He looked at it for a moment.
Rusi.
The name sat somewhere behind his eyes, the way it always sat.
Don’t worry.
I’ll take what Vael owes you.
And I’ll get Kabi out of there before he understands what he’s been standing next to.
He folded the paper.
Put it back in his jacket.
Behind him, two voices low, careful, trying to be quieter than they were managing.
“What will you do after?”
“Festival with my friends.
New food stall opened near the east market milk sweets.
You?”
Bahadur turned.
Both officers went rigid.
“Sir — we are extremely sorry—”
“Tell me who you are,” Bahadur said.
Not unkindly.
“And what you were talking about.”
The one on the left straightened.
A small bangle on his left wrist caught the light brass, worn smooth.
“Sir.
I am Ravi.
Nirakh-Chaal.” He gestured carefully to his right.
“He is Kishan.
Also Nirakh-Chaal.”
Around them the other officers were looking at the road with great interest.
“And what were you talking about, Ravi and Kishan?”
“After the case, sir,” Ravi said.
“The festival.
We were thinking of the milk sweet stall near the east market.”
“Hmm.” Bahadur looked at them both.
“Don’t talk during a serious mission.”
“Yes sir.”
He turned back to the window.
Milk sweets, he thought.
Vikas would eat himself sick on those.
Kabi would complain about the price and eat twice as many as anyone else.
Rusi would—
He stopped the thought where it was.
Looked at the long dirt road ahead.
After, he told himself.
After.
The carriage moved.
The fields moved with it, flat and open, the festival sky above them all indifferent and blue.
The second carriage was louder.
Not dramatically just the natural result of Junei being in it.
“Does everyone know their role?” Fio said.
He was looking at the road ahead, the city already behind them, the open land beginning.
A chorus of yes sir moved through the carriage.
Fio glanced sideways at Junei.
“What do you think we’ll find at the address?”
“I don’t know,” Junei said.
“Clues maybe.
Something connected.”
“Bahadur’s group hasn’t reached Vael’s estate yet it’s in the city but still far.”
“So we might arrive first?”
“Maybe.”
Junei considered this.
“I know.”
“Do you think we’ll—”
“We’ll save the city,” Fio said.
Simply.
Not performing confidence just stating it the way you state something you’ve decided is true.
“We always do.”
Junei looked at him.
Then nodded.
“What are your plans?” Fio said.
“After.”
“I was thinking of going with you.”
Fio turned.
“With me?”
“To the festival.”
“Junei.” Fio looked at him with the expression of a man doing arithmetic.
“I am twenty-six years old.
You are nineteen.
That is—”
“I’ll go with you,” Junei said.
Completely unbothered.
Fio looked at him for another moment.
“Fine,” he said.
Like a man accepting something he knew he’d lost before it started.
He turned to the carriage.
“What about everyone else?
Festival plans.”
One by one they said it the young officer near the back who was going to his grandmother’s shop to help her through the rush.
The man beside him who was visiting family in the northern quarter.
Another who had never been to the river lanterns and had decided this was the year.
The Nirakh-Rakk officer with the scar on his chin who said he was going to sleep for two days and then go to the festival and then sleep again.
Fio listened to each one.
He was smiling without entirely meaning to.
The carriage rounded a long bend in the road and the city disappeared behind them fully.
Ahead open land, the road becoming dirt, the air different out here.
Cleaner.
Quieter.
In the distance, set back from the road behind a line of old trees, the shape of a village entrance appeared.
Fio straightened.
“Get ready,” he said.
“Everyone change.
We go in as merchants.”
The carriage slowed.
Bags came out plain clothes, ordinary merchant wear, nothing that said Nirakh from twenty feet away.
The officers changed with practiced efficiency, rifles wrapped and out of sight, weapons concealed in the places they were always concealed.
The village waited at the end of the road.
The storage room smelled of wood and grain and something else underneath chemical, faint, the kind of smell that registers in the back of the nose before the front of the mind catches up.
Seran stopped walking.
“There are a lot of boxes,” she said.
Davan was already at the nearest one, lid off, looking inside.
Grain.
Standard festival supply the kind of bulk food distribution that Voss’s network had been running for weeks.
He moved to the next.
Same.
Cloth.
Cooking oil sealed in containers.
Dried goods.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Maybe deeper,” Seran said.
She was moving along the far wall checking labels, looking at the stacking patterns, the logic of how things had been arranged.
“Or maybe we’re missing something.”
Davan lifted another lid.
Food.
Genuine, unremarkable festival food.
“Strange,” he said.
“Why this much?
For who?”
“Poor quarter distributions,” Seran said.
She was checking a box near the corner.
“Voss runs the relief supply every year.
Clothing, food, basic goods.
It’s part of why nobody questions him.”
Seran moved to another box without looking at him.
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“No.”
“Nothing you want to see?
No one you want to—”
“Davan.”
“I’m just asking.”
“You’re not just asking.” She opened a box.
Empty.
She looked at it.
“An empty one.”
Davan set his lid down.
“If you have no plans—”
“Are you trying to flirt with me?”
“No.” He said it immediately.
“No.
I want to spend time with someone.
That is different.”
Seran looked at him.
“Then why me?”
He picked up another box and carried it toward the light from the door.
“Because you keep distance from everyone.
Because you work every hour and don’t stop.
Because if you go to a festival you might remember what the city actually feels like when it’s not a crime scene.” He set the box down.
Opened it.
More grain.
“And because I like spending time with you.
Both things can be true.”
Seran was quiet for a moment.
“I might consider it,” she said.
Davan smiled.
Small.
The kind of smile he didn’t perform.
He reached for another box heavier than the last, significantly heavier, the weight of it shifting his stance before he’d fully lifted it.
He stopped.
Looked at it.
Set it down carefully on the floor.
His expression changed.
He opened it.
Inside not food, not cloth, not grain.
Containers, sealed, marked with chemical notations.
Oxidizer compounds.
Stabilizing agents.
Ammonium nitrate packed in sealed tins beside wrapped tubes of nitroglycerine stored carefully in stabilizing material.
The components that, combined correctly, produced something that didn’t need to be labeled because anyone who recognized the parts already knew what they made.
TNT materials.
On the side of the box, stamped in red the Voss mark.
Davan looked at it.
“Seran,” he said quietly.
Only for her to hear.
“Come here.”
She crossed to him.
Looked at the open box.
Her face did nothing dramatic just went still, the stillness of someone processing something that confirms what they already feared.
“The logo,” she said.
“Red,” Davan said.
“Not the standard black.
Specifically marked.”
Seran stood.
Looked around the storage room the rows of boxes, the stacks against every wall, the dozens of containers they hadn’t opened yet.
“Everyone.” Her voice carried across the room, clear and controlled.
“Search every box.
Find the ones with the red Voss mark.
Now.”
The officers moved.
Seran was already walking toward the far end of the room another box, different stack, same red mark on the side.
She opened it.
Same materials.
Same containers.
Same chemical smell that had been there from the beginning, hiding underneath the grain and the cloth and the festival goodwill of Naren Voss.
“Davan,” she said.
“We need the storage room owner.”
Davan was already at the door.