Rainbow found our trail before noon.
I felt them before I saw them—a vibration in the asphalt, a change in the air pressure, the faint smell of diesel and gun oil that cut through the wilderness like a blade. We were walking through a stretch of dead forest, the trees white and leafless, when I stopped and tilted my head.
Mara looked at me. "What?"
"Vehicles."
"I don't hear anything."
"You will."
Several seconds later, she heard them too. Her eyes widened, her head turning toward the sound with that new, inhuman precision. "How many?"
I listened. The engines were synchronized, moving in formation. "Three."
Mara looked around, panic starting to creep into her voice. "We need to hide."
I shook my head. "Too late."
The vehicles appeared over the hill behind us—three black transports, armored, stripped of any identifying marks. No Rainbow insignia. No government plates. Only a small white symbol painted beneath each windshield: a rainbow with the colors deliberately faded, as if someone had tried to wash away the promise of hope.
Inside the lead vehicle, I knew, sat professionals.
Hunters. People who'd been sent to collect me like a specimen.
They stopped fifty meters away. Doors opened. Soldiers poured out—six from each vehicle, eighteen total, moving with the mechanical precision of a drill team. They spread into a semicircle, cutting off our retreat.
Commander Voss exited last.
She was different from the soldiers. Older, maybe forty, with gray streaks in hair pulled back in a severe bun. She wore a combat suit that fit too well: tailored and expensive. Her face was angular and sharp, the face of a woman who had made hard decisions so many times they'd stopped being hard. She studied me with eyes that were neither cruel nor kind. They were analytical. The eyes of a scientist looking at a slide under a microscope.
In her hand, she held a tablet. She glanced at it, then at me, then at Mara.
"Kael Veyron," she said. Not a question. An inventory check.
I said nothing. My hands were in my pockets, my fingers brushing the knife. Useless against eighteen rifles, but I wasn't going to die unarmed.
"You're coming with us," Voss said. It wasn't an order. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the confidence of someone who had never been refused.
"No."
Voss smiled. It was a terrible expression—warm, patient, delighted. "I was hoping you'd say that."