Mist held the river like a low breath that refused to leave. Mair's gray shape vanished behind them. The broken bridge creaked once as the ropes finished surrendering to water. Ari kept her brother's hand tight and felt the shard press at her ribs like a guest who wanted to speak.
"East," Kael said. "Keep the reeds on our right."
"Eyes on my feet," Ari told her brother.
"I'm watching," he said, though his voice shook.
They moved through trunks the color of bone. The bark shed in thin curls. Moss pulsed faint underfoot, brightening when they stepped and dimming on delay, like a heartbeat that lagged the body. The air carried iron and wet leaf. Far behind, a shout cracked the mist and died. Not close. Not far enough.
The shard hummed. Not warning. A building. The way pressure builds before thunder. Ari pressed her palm flat against her sternum.
"Quiet," she whispered. "Not yet."
It eased by a shade. It did not obey. It negotiated.
The light thinned to a flat gray that meant noon. Birds traded one call for another. The new cry had two notes, quick, like a question and a short answer. Kael lifted a hand and stilled. He crouched and touched two hairs snagged on a reed. They were black, cut short. He rubbed them between his fingers and held them up.
"Helmet lining," he said. "Scouts passed this way. Within the hour."
Ari's brother swallowed. "Can they hear the shard."
"Not from far," Ari said. "Only when close. Only when it shines through skin." She said it like a rule. It was a guess with a truth's shape.
Kael pointed along the river bend. "We can't stay on the bank. Too clean. They read mud like words." He tipped his head left. "There's a ridge with deadfall. Harder to track. We take that."
They left the reeds and climbed into undergrowth that snagged at their trousers and slowed the feet to honesty. The slope lifted them above the water. The sound of the river turned soft, then background, then memory. The forest changed. The pale trunks gave way to thicker pillars with skin like old leather. Branches crossed high overhead and braided the light. Something called from deep in the leaves with a sound like a drum covered with wet cloth.
Ari's brother stumbled. He caught himself on both hands and hissed. Blood striped his palms where bark had cut. Ari tore a strip from her hem and wrapped them clumsy but effective. He watched her do it and tried not to wince.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You're brave," Ari said. "That's worse than fine and better than stupid."
He huffed. Pride found a small place to sit.
The shard warmed. The hum climbed a tone. It had started to feel like it was listening and choosing at the same time. Ari kept her hand on it because containing a thing sometimes worked even if the hand could not hold it down.
Leaves shivered two lengths ahead. Not wind. A pause. A step. Another. Kael slid forward on the balls of his feet and looked around a thick trunk. He did not wave them forward. He did not turn back. He became still.
Ari knelt and pulled her brother with her. She peered through low fern. Three shapes moved along the slope. Helmets dull gray. Cloth wraps to break the outline. Rifles carried close. They moved with the quiet that means long training. They stopped when the last one's heel fell level with the first one's toe, as if the ground had told them so. The first lifted two fingers. The second slipped down the slope toward the river and vanished into reed. The third turned his head toward the ridge where Ari crouched.
The shard pushed. Harder. It wanted to answer a question the helmet had not asked. It wanted to speak in the only voice it knew.
"No," Ari whispered. The word had no edge. She tried again and put iron in it. "No."
The scout's visor angled up. Not on them. Through them. A scan beam slid across the trunks in a lazy sweep. It did not slow when it reached their roots. It passed. The scout turned away.
Kael breathed out through his nose. He motioned with two fingers. Back. Slow.
They slid to the other side of the ridge and moved along. The slope narrowed to a knife. To the right, the land fell into a bowl of ferns. To the left, a run of old fire had left a strip of dead wood spiked like broken teeth.
"Through the burn," Kael whispered. "No prints on ash if you step the rows."
Ari nodded. Her brother made a face. He hated ash. He hated the memory of fields lit by men. He went anyway.
They placed feet only where black bark lay thickest, never in the gray dust between. Each step was a held breath. The shard vibrated against Ari's hand, as if it was standing on the same narrow row inside her and trying not to slip. Halfway across, a branch shifted under Kael and snapped with a sound that was too clean.
The shout came before the echo finished. "Contact. Ridge. Two. No, three."
"Run," Kael said. Not loud. Enough.
They ran the line of ash until it ended and dove into ferns that slapped faces and hid ankles. Bullets chopped leaves behind them with short angry sounds. One struck a trunk and filled the air with the smell of fresh sap. Another hit stone and pinged into harmlessness with a sound Ari wanted to keep in her pocket for later.
Her brother tripped. Ari lifted him by the belt with one hand and kept moving. She could feel his heart stamping through his shirt like an animal trying to kick out of a pen. The shard's hum rose a step. Pressure built under her sternum until her ribs felt too tight. She almost gasped. She did not. Gasping changes sounds. Sounds turn heads.
The ground fell toward a cut in rock where water ran in a narrow slide. Kael took the slope on a slant to keep speed. Ari followed. A scout cut the angle above and brought his rifle to shoulder. He hesitated because the shot would cross a rock lip and might ricochet into his own line. The hesitation threw the count off by a beat. Ari gambled on that beat and made it down the slide.
A drone buzzed overhead. It dove. Red light raked the water. The shard shoved. It was not a pulse now. It was a knock. A demand. Ari staggered under it and reached for a tool she did not own and found one anyway. The air between her hands thickened. A line of gold snapped into being across the drone's path, bright and thin as a hair in sun. The drone hit it. The line held. The drone cartwheeled and crashed into the slide with a splash that threw cold into Ari's face. The light went out. Silence like a held breath lived for half a second.
Kael stared. "You..."
"Move," Ari said, and the voice that came out was not only hers. It sounded older and steadier and belonged to a person who trusted doors they could not see.
They ran. The slide widened into a shallow channel. The water stayed ankle deep and cold enough to argue with blood. The bank lifted and broke into two gullies. Kael chose without looking because bodies learn angles. He took the left. The gully curved and rose to a ledge choked with low scrub.
They crawled into the scrub and lay still. Voices moved along the channel below, thick with consonants. The words meant sweep, flank, hold. The tone meant hungry.
Ari pressed her brother's head under her chin and put one hand over his ear. He shook like a struck leaf. She shook too. The shard shook not at all. It pressed and pressed.
"I can't hold it," she whispered. The admission scared her more than the scouts.
"Then don't," Kael whispered back. "Use it and aim."
"I don't know how."
"You decide who it is for," he said. "That's most of how. The rest is luck and not being a coward."
She almost laughed. The sound would have broken her teeth. The pressure rose until her breath shortened. She turned her face into the dust and spoke with her mouth closed.
"I will use you for bodies that bleed," she told the shard. "I will not use you for pride."
The heat climbed her throat and settled at the back of her tongue like she had swallowed a hot coin. Her fingers tingled. She lifted them a hair above the scrub and spread them like a splay of roots. The air at her fingertips changed. It thickened and hummed. She pictured a net between the gullies. Not to cut. To catch. To answer the rifles with something that did not cost her brother's life.
Three scouts moved into the net she imagined. Gold filaments woke from nothing and sang. Not loud. Enough to change the way the world held them. Their rifle barrels drooped. Their visors fogged on the inside as if the air had become reminder of breath and not air. They stumbled and dropped to knees with their hands out like men who had remembered they were children once and needed to touch the ground.
Kael rolled from cover and struck the closest across the helmet with the side of his spear. Not a killing blow. A moral one. The soldier dropped. The second dragged the third back by the collar. Training surfaced and held. They retreated without firing because firing when lungs refuse their jobs is hard.
The net dissolved. Ari's hands went numb. Nausea surged so fast she gagged and turned away and retched water and bile into the dust. The heat in her chest collapsed and left a hollow that let cold in. She shook. Her vision doubled and then settled. Her brother's palm was on her cheek.
"Are you okay," he asked. His voice was ragged.
"Yes," she lied. No. A different small truth would not save him here. "It cost me. I'm paid up for a little while."
Kael crouched beside her. He touched the back of her hand. His own hand was cold. His eyes were hot. "You did it."
"I don't know what I did," she said. "I only knew what I wanted."
"That's enough," he said. "Most men break there."
A shout rose from below with a different pitch. The scouts had found the drone. They had found the cut line. The officer's voice came thin and angry over a channel that sent itself into helmets. Orders changed. The shape of the hunt shifted.
"Time to be somewhere else," Kael said.
They slid along the ledge and found a deer path that cut through scrub to a notch in the ridge. The notch opened on a slope of stones that had once been a road and had since become a rumor. At the bottom, a field of low metallic plants spread like a tarnished lake. Their leaves rang faint when wind moved them. Each leaf had a lattice of crystal through it. The sight made the shard stir in recognition.
"What is that," the boy whispered.
"Wrong field," Kael said.
"Not wrong," Ari said softly. "Old." She did not know how she knew. The shard held a memory like a smell of bread in a room that had no oven. She felt hands tending these plants and pressing them into tools that sang. She shook the picture away. The present demanded her pulse.
Movement shivered the far edge of the field. A single figure stepped out from behind a low stone. The helmet was off. The face was young and shook. The rifle pointed at the ground. The hands that held it did not know what fingers were for right now. The figure saw them and froze.
She was barely older than Ari. Sweat stuck hair to her forehead. The insignia on her collar rank meant small. The insignia on her eyes meant this was her first assignment that had turned into death. She opened her mouth and then shut it and then opened it again.
"Don't," Kael said. His spear did not rise. "No one has to be brave here."
"I have to call," the girl said. Her voice cracked. She was trying to find the officer inside her tongue and could not. "If I don't call they'll..."
Ari lifted a hand, palm out, fingers open. "We don't kill children," she said. Her voice did not shake. She was surprised by that. "You turn and you walk. You say you saw nothing."
"They'll check my feed," the girl said. "They'll see..."
"You tripped," Kael said. "You dropped your gear in the river. You found it downstream. Your channel went to hiss. Pick a stupid, believable thing. Live inside it."
The girl swallowed. Her eyes moved to Ari's chest, then away, then back like a moth forced to admire a flame that scared it sick. "It is true," she whispered. "You shine. The old ones. They told us in training. They used to hang them in palaces."
Ari felt something dark in her stomach try to wake. "We are not decorations," she said. "We are people who bleed."
The girl nodded, once, hard enough to hurt her neck. She turned and ran the wrong way on purpose. It was a brave choice. It was also smart. Kael watched her until she vanished.
"We need to move fast before her courage cools," he said.
They skirted the metallic field. The leaves sang against their trousers. The song found a frequency that made the shard harmonize. Ari's teeth buzzed. She fell into the hum and then forced herself out. The road beyond the field picked up again as if to say yes, stories continue even when you try to stop for breath.
At a bend, the bank cut away to show a view east. The ground fell into long swales of reed and water. Beyond them, low hills stitched with lights lifted toward a pale horizon. No towers. No cutters. A faint line of smoke that might have been cooking and not war.
"There," Kael said. "If we reach the second swale before dark, we can sleep in the shadow where the ground keeps wind. Scouts hate wet boots."
A crack sounded behind them. Not a gun. A branch under weight. Ari turned. The third scout from the ridge had followed alone. He had cut across smarter than his partners and read the ash better. He raised his rifle. He did not flinch. He did not hesitate. He was very tired and wanted this job to be finished.
Ari did not feel the shard rise. It was already at height. She did not picture lines. She pictured a hand closing a mouth. The air answered. A thrum ran between her and the scout like a wire pulled quick. The rifle's muzzle dipped. The scout's knees wobbled. He fought it and fired off line. The bullet cut a furrow across Kael's upper arm. Kael grunted and dropped to a knee.
Ari's brother screamed. The sound stripped her of her restraint. The hand became a fist. The thrum turned into a chord. The scout's visor went white. He crumpled sideways, not dead. Out. Breathing hard. Hands clawing at his own helmet like it had turned into a bucket full of river.
Ari ran to Kael and tore his sleeve with a jerk. Blood ran hot. The cut was deep enough for pain, not death. She pressed cloth into it and tied with her teeth and fingers while her hands shook. Kael's breath hissed. He did not swear. That scared her more than swearing would have.
"I'm fine," he said, pale.
"You're stupid," Ari said, and the words came wet. "That's different."
He almost smiled. "Keep saying truths. It helps."
The shard cooled faster than before. The hollow after the heat was deeper. Ari swayed and caught herself on Kael's shoulder. Her brother pressed under her arm and held like a manholds a gate in wind.
"We go," Ari said. She looked at the scout who had chosen not to die. She looked at the path east. "Now. Before the rest of them do math."
They reached the first swale as the light turned the color of old coins. Reeds crowded close. The ground gave in places and held in others. Kael's breath hissed in time with their steps. Ari found a cut-through where deer had made a habit. The habit held their weight.
On the far side, a low rise hid them from the ridge. They collapsed in its lee. Ari cleaned Kael's wound with water that tasted like iron and leaf. She crushed two of Mair's leaves and packed them along the edge of the cut. The scent rose bitter and then kind. The bleeding slowed.
Her brother leaned against her shoulder and fell asleep mid-sit, head heavy, mouth open a little. Ari kept him from tipping with a hand at the back of his neck. She watched the horizon for a long time without seeing it. The shard lay quiet as an ember under ash.
Kael flexed his fingers and winced. "It will scar pretty," he said.
"You don't have to make me laugh," Ari said.
"I'm making me brave," he said. "Laughter tricks fear into thinking it lost."
She breathed once and let the air go all the way out. "They will follow."
"Yes," he said. "But slower now. Word will travel through their ranks that the thing in your chest is not only a story."
"Good," Ari said. The word surprised her. It felt wrong. It felt true. "Let them do math with doubt in it."
Night slid up behind them. The reeds sang in low wind. Somewhere far, a tower sighed, far enough that it sounded like the world breathing in its sleep. Ari tucked her brother closer and rested a hand on Kael's bandage to feel the pulse there. His heart was a strong drum. It kept time with the shard and then insisted on its own count. She liked that.
"We will move at first light," she said. "We find higher ground and a house with a door that doesn't turn people into cages."
"And if there isn't one," Kael said.
"Then we make one," Ari said. "We keep him warm. We ask before we burn. And if I have to burn, I pick the shape."
Kael closed his eyes. "Pick me if it comes to it."
"I won't," Ari said. "I already chose."
He wanted to argue. He didn't. He let sleep take the part of his weight that bravado couldn't carry. Ari watched the dark until her eyes watered. She pressed her palm to her sternum and spoke without sound.
"I will learn your rules," she told the shard. "You will learn mine."
The warmth under her ribs acknowledged her like a nod in dim light. Not a promise. A start. The hunt would come back. The world would set new traps. The next place might not welcome them. But the math tonight ended with breath in their chests and a little ground under their backs.
Ari laid her cheek on her brother's hair and made a vow that fit in a mouth and a day.
She would carry. She would not cage. She would try to make the loud into song.