The old man was shelling something when Fio found him.
Seated outside his door on a low wooden stool, hands moving with the automatic ease of someone who had done this ten thousand mornings in a row.
He didn’t look up when Fio approached.
Didn’t look up when Fio stopped in front of him either.
Fio crouched down to his level.
“Good morning,” he said.
The old man glanced at him.
Then at the uniform.
Then back at his hands.
“Morning.”
“I won’t take much of your time,” Fio said.
“I only want to ask a few questions about the road.
The one heading toward the jungle edge.”
The old man was quiet for a moment.
“Heard about the road,” he said finally.
“Did you know anyone who used it regularly?”
Another pause.
The hands kept moving slow, steady, unhurried.
“Merchants mostly.
Travelers passing through.
Nobody who stayed.”
“Did you notice anything different recently?
Anyone new on that road.
Anyone who didn’t fit.”
The old man looked at him properly for the first time.
Something passed across his face not fear exactly.
More like the careful calculation of a man deciding how much to give away and to whom.
Fio waited.
Didn’t push.
“There were some,” the old man said slowly.
“Few weeks back.
Moving in a group.
They fit in dressed right, spoke right.
Nothing about them stood out.” He paused.
“But they moved at odd hours.
Too quiet for merchants merchants always make noise.”
“What else did you notice ?”
The old man looked at his hands.
“Nothing.
That’s all.”
Fio wrote it down.
Let the moment sit.
He stood.
Turned.
Behind him, Junei had been questioning a younger man a trader, maybe twenty-five, who had clearly been trying to leave since the conversation started.
“So you’re saying you definitely saw them,” Junei said.
“I didn’t say definitely—”
“But you saw them.”
“I said I might have—”
“Which means you did.” Junei leaned slightly forward.
“How many?
What were they carrying?”
The trader’s eyes had gone the careful blank of someone who had decided to stop talking.
Fio appeared beside Junei.
“Thank you,” he said to the trader — the same tone he’d used with the old man.
Calm.
Genuine.
“That’s very helpful.”
The trader blinked.
Nodded.
Took his chance and left.
Junei watched him go.
“I almost had him.”
“You lost him,” Fio said.
Not unkind.
Just accurate.
“Come on.”
They kept moving.
House to house.
Stall to stall.
The air thick with spice and dust, voices overlapping, none of them agreeing.
A woman near the market insisted the group had been outsiders foreign accents, she said, nothing local about them.
An old trader two streets over said the opposite they’d greeted him by name, knew which stalls opened early.
A young boy said he’d seen one of them pray in a way he didn’t recognize.
The fragments contradicted each other.
Fio wrote it all down.
The contradictions could wait.
But underneath all of it, one thread kept appearing quiet, consistent, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.
They passed as locals.
But nobody could say why they were sure of that.
And nobody could say they’d seen them leave.
By the time the sun climbed higher, the questions had run dry.
The answers waited elsewhere.
The examination tent smelled of preservation chemicals and something underneath that nobody named.
Vani worked at the central table.
Around her, documentation spread in careful organized rows measurements, observations, timelines.
Everything in its place.
Everything precise.
Seran stood at the far end of the tent studying the cord marks on the nearest body.
Davan stood beside her studying the face.
Not the wounds.
The face.
“What are you looking for?” Seran asked without turning.
“Nothing,” Davan said.
“You’ve been looking at nothing for four minutes.”
“Three.”
Seran turned to look at him.
He was perfectly serious.
She looked back at the body.
“Baahg merchants,” she said.
“That’s my read.
Look at the build trading class, well fed, used to moving between cities.
Most merchant traffic through this region comes from Baahg.”
Davan was quiet for a moment.
Then “You’re forcing the merchant angle.
Look again.”
Seran looked at him.
His eyes hadn’t moved from the body.
She looked again.
Properly this time the shoulders, the arms, the way the torso held its shape even in death.
“Discipline muscle,” she said slowly.
“Not labor.
Not trade.” Davan’s gaze moved across the body with the careful attention he gave everything.
“These men trained.
Regularly.
The way soldiers train.”
“Mirkal then.”
“Maybe.”
Seran stared at him.
“So what’s your read?”
“I don’t have one yet.
But it isn’t Baahg.”
Seran made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“Absolutely useless.” She turned back to the body.
“Fine.
if they’re from Mirkal you buy the tea.
If somehow I’m right about Baahg I buy it.”
Davan considered this with the gravity of someone being asked to sign a legal document.
“Agreed,” he said.
From the central table, without looking up, Vani said —
“Neither of you will be buying tea.”
Both of them turned.
Vani’s pen moved across her documentation.
Her eyes didn’t leave the page.
“The stomach contents,” she said.
“Preserved well enough to identify preparation method.
Coastal spicing.
Specific to the Varan fishing regions.” A pause.
“Rich food.
Expensive.
The kind that doesn’t travel inland easily.”
Silence.
“They ate Varan food,” Seran said slowly.
“Hours before they died.”
“Yes,” Vani confirmed.
Still not looking up.
Davan and Seran looked at each other.
The bet had evaporated.
Something heavier had replaced it.
“Mirkal papers,” Seran said quietly.
“Varan food.”
“Passed as locals,” Davan added.
“Moved like soldiers.”
Vani set her pen down.
Looked up for the first time since they’d arrived.
“There is one more thing,” she said.
“That I am certain of regardless of who they were or where they came from.”
She let the silence hold.
“The cut.
The cord marks.
The method.” She looked between them.
“Identical across every body.
Same hand.
Same training.
Same teacher.”
A pause.
“And the clothing specific items.
Same fabric, same stitching pattern hidden in the inner lining.
Seven of the twenty-eight wore it.”
The silence that followed was different from the ones before.
That was not coincidence.
“They knew each other,” Davan said.
Not a question.
“Before the road,” Vani confirmed.
She picked her pen back up.
“Whatever they were they were together before someone put them in that clearing.”
Seran looked at the body in front of her for a long moment.
Then looked at Davan.
“Who,” she said quietly, “sends a group of trained men from Varan with Mirkal papers onto a jungle road in Hasti?”
Davan said nothing.
The question sat between them like something with weight.
Back in the settlement, Fio closed his notebook.
Every person they’d spoken to had said something different.
A foreign accent.
A familiar greeting.
An unfamiliar prayer.
The contradictions didn’t cancel each other they stacked into something stranger than any single answer.
He didn’t have Seran and Davan’s findings yet.
But he had the thread that kept appearing underneath everything else quiet, persistent, impossible to dismiss.
They had learned how not to be noticed.
He stared at the page for a moment.
Then wrote one line underneath.
They were hiding something.
Before someone hid them.