Chapter 7 — Part 3: Ash on the Wind
By the time their little unit left the last charred ribs of the Burned Forest, the light had thinned into a pale ribbon and the wind carried the taste of river-metal. Ahead, the land opened into the Ashrun Flats: a broad, scarred apron of scrub and sand where black grasses stood in careful ranks, as if waiting for orders long since forgotten. Far off, the river glinted—thin silver under a sky that hadn't decided whether to be forgiving.
They found the caravan by the things it had left behind before they found the caravan itself.
A smear of wheel-cut in the dust that ended too cleanly.
A scatter of nails, bent and blackened.
A torn leather strap threaded with bead-charms from five different towns.
Kara crouched and touched the beads with the back of two fingers, more prayer than test. "Families," she murmured.
"University manifest said eight carts," Jax said, scanning with a mechanic's eye that loved counts and ratios. "Heavy loads, mostly cloth and reagent stock. A small lockbox for Mechanum—they didn't say what."
"They never do," Ronan said, voice quiet. The wind found the scales laddering his neck and made a sound like a whispered chord.
KrysKo lifted a flat palm. "Fan out—two-by-two. Don't break sight lines. Kara with me. Ronan, take flank. Jax—rear arc, then sweep for tech signatures."
They moved.
The site resolved in layers: a half-circle of fire-pits gone to ash; the ghost geometry of tents in flattened grass; a corral of poles with no rope left strung between them. And in the center, three shapes—what remained of carts. The forward axles were charred through; the wagon beds had slumped off like tired shoulders. The burn wasn't wildfire. It was too precise, too clean at the edges. Lines of heat cut along the grain of wood, as if drawn by an argument that understood carpentry.
"Look," Kara whispered, pointing. The ground around the carts wore a constellation of black crescents and perfect circles, as if a giant had walked there on the ends of smoking rods.
Jax crouched and placed his palm flat over one circle. He flinched. "Residual. Cold now, but it was Ophilim-hot. Beam work."
"Raiders with stolen toys?" Ronan asked.
"Could be," Jax said. "Could also be someone who wants us to think that."
KrysKo's gaze tracked outward, drawing the fight in his head from the positions in the dirt. "Carts hit first," he said. "Anchors burned. Panic drove the line outward. See those scuffs? Someone fell, got dragged—then pulled free." He pointed to a set of prints where the earth showed the rhythm of two figures, one leaning hard on the other. "No blood in the fall path. That's… hopeful."
Ronan knelt near a darker stain—not red, but iridescent brown. His nostrils flared almost imperceptibly. "Drakari ichor," he said. "Not much. A cut, not a mortal wound." Something eased in his shoulders and then set again, as if that ease embarrassed him.
Kara moved to a burnt stretcher—the rough kind made of two poles and a canvas sling. The sling had been cut free at one end. On the remaining strip, someone had written, in neat block letters: PRIME BEFORE BIND. She touched the letters with her thumb and felt the grit of charcoal. "Myles script," she said, voice gone thin. "Someone from my line trained them. Field taught. They primed a wound. They knew what they were doing."
"Any bodies?" Jax asked, a hard question meant kindly.
KrysKo scanned the near ground. His system overlaid vectors, distances, thermal ghost. [No cadavers. Bio-scent: stale. Trail: west-by-northwest. Time-lapse estimate: within a day.] He pointed toward the river. "A group left in the dark. They moved slow, carrying weight."
Ronan's pupils tightened—a predator's attention snapping to a distant sound only he could hear. "Not alone," he said, head tilting. "Listen."
They listened.
At first, it was only wind gnawing at the ruts. Then—metal. The faintest tap. Tap. Tap. Not close. Not far. Not rhythm. A patience.
"Someone's testing the air," Ronan said. "Or… marking time."
"Could be a loose sign," Jax offered. "Or a trap saying hello."
KrysKo set his hand on the nearest cart, fingers splayed to anchor himself in the present. "We'll treat the site as active," he said. "We make camp just off the leeward, low, no silhouette. Kara, catalogue salvage—food, water, med. Jax, sweep for signal shards and hot metal. Ronan—walk the perimeter with me. If we're not alone, I want to be the ones who know first."
They worked, quick and quiet. The caravan had left little because little could be spared. Kara found a crate of hardtack gone half-to-stone (still edible if boiled), a bag of cracked barley, three sealed jars of pickled onion, and a bundle of cloth rolls labeled MECH—CLEANROOM (dust had laughed at the label). She also found a leather doctor's wrap—empty, save for a broken glass pipette and a Myles-line amulet carved with the small knot of three leaves. She pocketed the amulet and didn't apologize.
Jax pried a charred box from under a wagon bed and hissed through his teeth when he lifted the lid. "Architect shard-battery," he whispered. "Half-spent. A caravan shouldn't be carrying this without a Mechanum chaperone and a prayer." He handed it to KrysKo, who didn't flinch at the cold that breathed from it. "Someone in this line either had friends in the wrong places or an enemy who wanted a reason to visit."
"Mark it," KrysKo said. "No live experimentation."
Jax rolled his eyes fondly. "You take all the romance out of my life."
Ronan and KrysKo ranged the perimeter in slow circles. The flats stretched in dim bands: ash scrub, scar grass, the darker seam where the ground had burned too clean to hold any life at all. Every so often Ronan would stop—head cocked, eyes half-closed—and breathe. KrysKo couldn't smell what he did. He didn't need to. Ronan's attention drew a map.
"More Drakari scent?" KrysKo asked.
"Yes." A pause. "Old line. Not deep. Like… the trace left by a patrol that doesn't want to be remembered." His mouth compressed. "Or a hybrid masking."
"Yours?"
Ronan's laugh lacked humor. "I don't mask," he said. "I endure."
They returned to a camp KrysKo would have been proud to show a suspicious warden: low profile, nested sight lines, fire cratered below grade so the light held to the earth and didn't tell the sky stories it didn't need to hear. The carts themselves made a crude windbreak. Kara had strung her copper bells on a short line—their sound too small to carry, just enough to tell sleeping people the world was moving without them.
They ate badly and gratefully. The barley chewed like contrition. Pickled onion made eyes brighten despite themselves. Jax tried to toast hardtack like he was entertaining royalty and nearly set his glove on fire, which he accepted as fair feedback.
"Signal mirrors," Kara said, laying out her notes. "If survivors made the river, they might've tried to flag a patrol. At dawn, I'll climb the axle and look for glint. If there's smoke, it'll be morning-cold and will carry clean."
"Night first," KrysKo said. "We keep watches in pairs. Ronan with me first. Kara with Jax second. Keep the bells tight. No heroics."
Jax raised a hand. "I make no promises."
"You will tonight," KrysKo said, and even Jax accepted that.
They settled into the long hush.
---
The Ambush
It began the way good ambushes often do—like boredom.
The wind shifted a patient degree and the wall of a ruined wagon creaked where the burnt iron hugged wood. KrysKo counted twenty breaths and then twenty more. Ronan was a stillness at his left, not the human kind that strains against itself but the Drakari kind, like a coil of stone waiting for the river to remember it.
Then, from the dark just beyond where the black grasses raked the ground, came a sound like someone chewing a wire.
Ronan's hand flicked once—flat, low: hold.
KrysKo didn't move, didn't blink, didn't arise from the place inside where everything waited to be asked to do what it was made to do.
The wire-gnawing became a scrape. Then the faintest series of clicks, irregular but with a logic the body knows before the mind does: knees, elbows, something dragging a length of itself along the dust.
KrysKo allowed one syllable. "Three," he breathed.
"Four," Ronan murmured, and then, after a breath: "No. Six."
The clicks fanned and closed. A sour-sweet smell came with them—rot and old tin.
KrysKo touched the ground with his fingertips and felt the minute tremor of weight distributing in a circle.
[Hostile markers: multiple. Pattern: pack probe. Composition: human-variant. Toxin residue: probable. Tactic: encircle / test.]
He rolled his shoulder once, slow, and the scarf fell just enough to free his neck. "Jax," he said—not loud, but pitched to find the engineer's ear if it wanted to be found. "Soft wake. Lantern two. No flare."
On the second breath, the portable lantern under the tilted wagon breathed a new and careful light into the dark: enough to make the near ground legible, not enough to give their silhouettes to the world.
They came into the glow in pieces: a pale knuckle, the blade of a shin, a mouth. They were men once—men whose lives had been chewed by radiation and the wrong medicines and the wrong gods. Bones had learned the wrong lessons and grew where they shouldn't. Joints bent the way joints bend when a body tries too long to move like a dog. One of them had a jaw that opened too wide and didn't know how to close anymore.
There wasn't rage in their eyes. Only hunger and a gratefulness for objective.
The first two rushed the wagon corner where Kara had knelt earlier. They didn't find her there. The copper bells whispered as she sidestepped into the shadow of a wheel-well and drew the long knife she used for cutting root and bandage. Jax's hand flicked and something small and metal-seeded skittered across the dust to the entry path and lay there like a coin.
"Left," Ronan said, and KrysKo flowed.
He didn't rise. He didn't square. He slid out along the dirt and carried his weight on his hands for three steps so no silhouette told a story over the cart's edge. When he came up, it was under the first attacker's guard. He stepped into ginga and the rhythm caught his hips like it had been waiting. A sweep of his leg took the creature's knee: rasteira that remembered men better than monsters. The figure crumpled—and in the same breathing unit KrysKo spun along the same axis and drove his heel into the second attacker's rib side where ribs become a door to a heart. Something cracked and something else stopped trying.
"Three on the back line," Jax reported, voice tight, arm out as if he were pointing and casting simultaneously. The coin-thing he'd tossed blinked once, then bloomed open into a trash-born caltrop-sprite—six shivs of spring steel that arced up when a foot hit it and bit. One attacker found it with his full weight. He screamed a sound that remembered man, then crashed to the dust, clutching at a foot that suddenly had four convictions.
Ronan met his first with no dance at all. Drakari fighting styles have rhythm, but they don't bother inviting you to admire it. He stepped in, hand to throat, hips set like a door you don't open, and when the attacker clawed his face Ronan tilted his jaw into the pain so the claws skittered across scale instead of eye. His free hand found a leverage along the collarbone and the body went slack with a little tearing sound that made Jax wince and look away.
Another came low, fast, the knotted limbs learning how speed becomes a language when you've forgotten other ones. This one's mouth opened and a spray hit KrysKo's scarf—a hiss, the little sting of acid spittle. The scarf took most. The part that reached his throat became light and heat. He didn't make a sound. He stepped over the spitter and inverted, palm to earth, both legs scissoring wide—meia lua re-written for a body that has no fear of being upside-down. His heel kissed the spitter's mandible. Bone yielded. The body folded.
"Kara?" he called without looking.
"Here," she said, and her voice was not calm, but it was working. She slid under the axle of the broken wagon, knifed a hamstring when it presented itself, then went still again in the shadow and breathed so shallowly that even when an attacker passed within an arm's length, his eyes didn't learn her.
Jax swore as one of the pack skittered at him with a piece of rebar held like a sword a child mistakes for a stick. He did not meet strength with strength. He stepped aside, jabbed the rebar with a short pry-bar, twisted with the economy of a man who had learned torque before grammar, and the rebar left the attacker's hand. "Bad form," Jax said, and then the attacker bowled into him anyway. They hit the ground together in a tangle. Jax took a head-butt to the cheek and saw a burst of little white birds. He shoved a knee into a soft place, swore again, and got his palm on the flat disc at his belt. He slapped it onto the attacker's shoulder. The disc snapped and spat and jolted—not a kill, a stutter. The attacker spasmed and Jax rolled free, spitting blood and laughter that sounded unhinged and pleased to be alive.
Two more came, not from the ground but from over the cart—bodies that had learned to climb by shredding their own palms until the body forgot palms are for anything else. They landed badly, like meat sacks, but their momentum was real. One scrambled at KrysKo's back. Ronan's hand found the scrambler's hair and wrenched his head far enough that the rest of him forgot what "up" meant; the body flopped, trying to make a new map. KrysKo flowed under the second as it came down, duck walk to handstand, pivoted on his right wrist, and his left heel traveled an arc that knew exactly where a temple lives. Contact. Lights out.
The last two broke. Packs always test. Packs always count. When arithmetic says loss, packs melt.
They tried.
KrysKo let them.
"Don't chase," he said, still as a blade that had just remembered it was a mirror. His breath did not bother to pretend at labor.
Ronan's eyes stayed on the dark where the last one had dragged itself, leaving a snail's gloss of mucus and blood. For a moment he was a statue of a young man who had learned stillness at a time in life when stillness is an insult. Then he touched his jaw, winced, wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, and looked at KrysKo with something like appraisal redrawn as respect.
"You fight like someone taught your bones to count," he said.
"I learned in rooms without windows," KrysKo said.
Ronan nodded once, accepting the kind of truth that has its own privacy locks.
Kara slid out from under the axle, knife still in her hand, breath coming fast and high. She wiped the blade on a rag the color of old rain, then dropped to a knee beside Jax. "Let me see."
"I'm fine," he said automatically.
"You're bleeding from your ear," she said, not unkind. "Fine later. Still now." She tilted his head, dabbed gingerly, sniffed her fingers, nodded to herself, and came up with a little corked vial. "Bergamot and comfrey." She touched drops just inside the ear, and the sharp smell flooded Jax's sinuses and made his tongue numb in a way that felt like a good decision. "Swallow."
He swallowed. "You boss me."
"You live," she said.
They triaged the field: checked pulses (when there were pulses), bound two cuts (their own), and rolled bodies away from the fire-pit so the smell of burned meat wouldn't get ideas. KrysKo took a cloth, wet it, and scrubbed the acid spittle off his scarf and throat with the methodical attention of a man who hasn't forgotten the last time he let a small thing become a large thing.
"Ronan," Kara said softly, "your jaw."
Ronan touched the line of his face where the claws had dragged. The scales there had dulled and were already re-glossing as the micro-plates secreted whatever it is they secrete to convince skin and armor to be friends again. "It will heal," he said, and then, after a moment: "Thank you."
Kara smiled without teeth. "You can thank me by letting it bleed less next time."
"I'll tell the enemy," Ronan said, and his mouth made the shape of a joke he had not practiced enough to be good at telling. Kara laughed anyway, because she understood what he was buying with the attempt.
The wind shifted again. The bells on Kara's line made the tiniest sound and then settled.
Silence took the camp like a blanket. Not the nice kind.
"Listen," Ronan said.
They listened.
Under the hush and the settling metal and Jax's low swearing at a bruise he'd found on his ribs, there came the softest sound. Not metal. Not beast. Not wind. It was the small, broken cough a throat makes when it has lost water and learned to barter.
KrysKo was moving before the word formed fully. Kara's hand found her bag and her feet. Ronan moved like the sound had been carved into his bones years ago and he'd been waiting for the chance to answer it.
They found the shape crumpled in the lee of a sand lip ten paces beyond their outer bell-line. It wasn't a trap. It was a boy shaped like a trap might imagine a boy if it were trying not to hurt him. He wore a courier's harness—light, cross-strapped, designed to hold cylinders against the ribs so they didn't knock in a run. Two cylinders were gone. One remained. The leather around it had been cut once, then clumsily tied back with a bootlace that had come from a boot that didn't match the one on his foot. His lips were split in a way that says no water for a long time, and his eyes had that sandblasted glaze that makes bodies decide to lie down and be rock instead.
Kara knelt. "Don't move him," she said to KrysKo, who had no intention of moving him yet. She pressed two fingers to the boy's throat. Pulse, thin. Slow. "Jax—water. One cap. Then wait."
She lifted his head just enough to wet his mouth. The boy coughed again and the cough did what coughs do in dry throats—it hurt like fire. He gagged, swallowed the hurt and the water, and when he opened his eyes, he didn't see them at first. He saw something the world had done to him last and remembered it too clearly.
"It's all right," Kara said, the way Myles voices say shore to drowning people.
"You're University," he rasped, and tried to smile and failed. "Thank… gods."
"We're Warden Senn's unit," Jax said, because he liked naming things. "And you're heavy, kid, so drink so you can walk."
The boy blinked at the humor and found a sliver of strength where laughter would have been if laughter had been cheap. His gaze found KrysKo then, and widened for a second in that little involuntary way some humans do when they look at him too long. Then it steadied. "You look like someone who doesn't panic," he said, and the sentence sounded like a man twice his age had taught him to deliver it to a specific kind of stranger.
"I don't," KrysKo said.
"Good," the boy said, and tried to sit up. KrysKo stopped him with two fingers and the gentlest force. The boy let himself be stopped, which was trust or exhaustion. "Courier Jul Mendez," he said, because training overrides the body's complaints. "From the Ashrun line."
"Jul," Kara said. "I'm Kara."
"Mission," Jul said, as if the word itself were a cup of water he needed. "For the University. For Mechanum." His hand clawed at the cylinder on his chest and couldn't quite do anything about it. He made a frustrated sound and then flinched with the pain of making it. "I held one. Lost two. I'm sorry."
Jax took the cylinder the way you take a sleeping child—carefully, like it might wake wrong. He turned it in his hands. Architect seal at one end. Human at the other. The seam between them ugly, recent. "Mechanum will forgive you," he said softly, honest. "You made it to us."
Jul's eyes slid to the dark and to the place where the pack had fled. Fear wrote itself on his face like a weather line. "They're not the worst thing out here," he whispered. "Something… under the ground, where the black grass won't grow. We cut the wheels and ran and it followed anyway. Not with feet." He swallowed. "It made a sound in the cart wood before it burned."
Ronan's eyes narrowed. "A vibration."
Jul nodded. "Like a hive in a chair you're sitting in. It sang and then the bolts let go."
Kara met KrysKo's gaze. "Another node?" she asked, meaning Architect, meaning old, meaning problem.
"Or something that learned from one," Jax said grimly.
Jul shoved his hand toward the cylinder as if he might physically give it to KrysKo more than he already had. "Message," he said. "Broken. I couldn't keep the locks clean. Sir—" and the "sir" was for KrysKo and he didn't know where the boy had learned to give it to men who don't breathe the way you do, but he knew how to hold it without cracking it. "Get it to the University. Please."
"I will," KrysKo said.
It wasn't bravado. It wasn't comfort. It was a promise that hadn't hurt him to make. The kind he allowed himself when a thing inside him that remembered rooms without windows permitted it.
Jul's head sagged. Kara stroked hair back from his face with two fingers and felt heat—not fever yet; the heat of a body that had used too much of itself. She looked at Ronan. "I need a windbreak," she said. "And a small fire. And your patience with the smell while I boil bandage."
Ronan gave both without comment and found a third thing to lend: his watchfulness. He paced the camp's long edge while Kara worked and Jax sketched the cylinder's fasteners with his eyes and KrysKo stood just inside the light and just outside the part of himself that would not let the night go unmeasured.
When Jul slept (and he slept the way the exhausted sleep—hard, with a little whimper that isn't fear but the body reminding itself it survived), KrysKo took first half-watch again. Ronan joined him without being asked.
They didn't speak for a time.
When Ronan did, it was in a voice that seemed to choose the words by touch rather than sight. "In Drakari tunnels," he said, "there's a kind of silence we use to mourn. We sit in it and we don't carve it with noise. We leave a space where the name was." He glanced at the outline of the boy. "We don't do that for the living. We don't make them carry that space while they're still trying to fill it."
KrysKo looked at him and nodded, and the nod was more than agreement. It was a man who has learned that some kinds of silence are violence and some kinds are medicine, recognizing the difference in someone else.
His system chimed a small thing he didn't ask it for:
[Directive thread appended: Protect courier. Secure cylinder. Return to University. Subnote: Observe Ronan Veyne—variable high.]
He did not argue with the thread. He simply adjusted the map in his head, adding one more line: back.
The wind changed again, a shift with teeth in it. The bells whispered and then forgot what they'd been about to say.
KrysKo watched the dark where the Ashrun Flats met the first hints of river fog and thought, in a quiet place where no voice lived but his: We will take you home. He did not say to whom he spoke. He did not need to.
Behind him, Kara dreamed the sound of water that wasn't river and woke with her hand already reaching for a vial. Jax snored once and scared himself awake and pretended he'd been on watch the whole time. Ronan tilted his head toward some far-off depth and stilled again, as if listening to a long, low note only he could hear.
And the night held—for now.