The plan Remus laid out an hour later drew immediate, unanimous objection, and he pushed forward with it anyway, because it was, as far as he could tell, the only version of the next twelve hours that ended with all of them still breathing.
"I go back into Autumnshade," he said. "Alone, or with Andrea if she insists on coming, which I can already see in her face that she does. There's a Nightforged ship still grounded in the compound's old training yard. Small, fast, wasp-shaped. If I can reach it before it lifts off, we fly it clear instead of walking."
"Did you forget what happened the last time we all argued about throwing away lives for a good idea," Annabelle asked, sharp with worry rather than anger.
"I haven't forgotten anything," Remus said. "That's precisely why I know it has to be small and fast, and it has to be me, since I'm the only one who's already Identified that ship's controls once, back when I still had a body strapped inside one exactly like it."
Andrea came with him, exactly as predicted, the two of them slipping back through the treeline under cover of full dark while the rest of the group held position deeper in the forest.
Autumnshade, when they finally reached its outer wall, looked less like the home Remus had built and more like a wound left open too long: scorched timber where the guest inn's roof had stood, the training arena's packed dirt churned black in long furrows, the Ember Works' own forge floor dark for the first time since he'd lit it.
The ship sat exactly where Search had promised, low, wasp-shaped, its hull the same wrong, unsettling angle he remembered from the inside of one of these things a year ago, and Remus felt his own steps slow without meaning to, some old, animal part of his mind recognizing the shape of the thing before the rest of him caught up.
"You're stalling," Andrea murmured, close at his shoulder.
"I know," he said, and made himself keep moving anyway.
He reached the ship's open hatch and climbed through into a hold lined with familiar, coffin-shaped enclosures, every one of them empty now, every one of them still faintly warm, and the smell hit him a half-second before the memory did: ozone and old blood and something underneath both that he had no proper word for, only a body that remembered it in full even when his mind wanted badly not to.
A single Nightforged crewman, left behind in the confusion of the retreat, rose from a maintenance hatch near the controls with a blade already half-drawn, and before Remus had fully registered the danger his own feet had carried him three steps backward into the exact enclosure he'd woken up inside a year ago, the restraint cuffs snapping closed around one wrist before he understood what had happened.
Pain arrived first as memory, a half-second of pure, blinding recall rather than anything actually happening yet, his whole body flinching from a device that hadn't even engaged.
"Remus!"
Andrea's voice cut through it, and then her hands were on the cuff, forcing it, her own strength straining against a mechanism built for far larger hands than hers, and it was only when the crewman lunged for her instead that Remus's own paralysis finally broke.
Craft: Restraint Shear.
Materials Used: 1 x Steel Rod (from inventory).
The tool formed in his free hand fast enough that he barely registered crafting it, and he wedged it into the cuff's own housing and forced it open with a strength that had nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with a raw, animal terror: watching someone he loved put herself between him and the exact machine that had once taken a year of his life without asking.
Andrea handled the crewman herself, quick and brutal and entirely without hesitation, and by the time Remus had climbed fully free of the enclosure, hands shaking in a way he made no attempt to hide, the hold had gone silent again.
"Are you hurt," she asked, checking him over with a bluntness that left no room for either of them to pretend the moment away.
"No," he said, and then, because her steady, unflinching gaze made the lie feel pointless even before he'd finished saying it, "Yes. Not my body. Something else."
"I know," Andrea said, and didn't push further, only steadied him with one hand at his back while he got his breathing back under control. "You've never once told any of us what that device actually did to you while you were inside it. Not the mechanics. What it felt like."
"I know I haven't," he said. "I'm not ready to yet. But I wanted you to know that I know it's a debt I'm still carrying, and not one I've forgotten about the way I've apparently forgotten to mention a great deal else."
"That's something," Andrea said. "It's not everything. But it's something."
They flew the ship out twenty minutes later, low over the tree line, Remus's hands steadier at the controls than his voice would have been if anyone had asked him to speak just then, and touched down in the clearing where the others waited with a landing rough enough to send Pompey diving sideways out of the way.
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