Chapter 9 — Part 3: The Road of Cinders
The road north looked like someone had tried to burn history and failed halfway through. Once it had been a trade artery—a ribbon of black glass carved by Architect machines, connecting cities that no longer remembered their names. Now it shimmered beneath a sky the color of bruised tin, lined with the bones of vehicles turned to slag. To their right the river whispered thickly, slow as oil, dragging reflections that refused to be light.
Cohort Nine walked in silence.
KrysKo led, hood low, eyes skimming every line and rise. Kara's satchel chimed softly with vials as she chose her steps across brittle ground. Jax muttered math under his breath, a field drone broken down across his back like a pilgrim's relic. Ronan brought up the rear, weight deliberate, scaled skin glinting beneath his coat like submerged obsidian.
Three days since the ambush. Two nights since the bells cracked. Since the Mirror frequency woke and said without a voice: I am you if you were obedient.
> [System Advisory]
"Heartbeat steady. Fatigue manageable. Cohesion rising. But listen under the quiet, KrysKo—the silence is working."
He didn't answer. The System had learned when to be wind and when to be stone.
"The glass roads used to glow at night," Kara said at last. "My grandmother swore it."
"They still do," Jax murmured, tapping the surface with his boot. "Now it's decay that glows. Radiation, not purpose."
"Decay feeds life," Ronan said simply. "Just… different kinds."
By noon they sheltered under a collapsed overpass—a crescent of shade salted with falling grit. KrysKo crouched, set his palm to the road, and let overlays slip across his sight.
> [Thermal: clean. Pressure signature: clustered boot prints, 2–3 hours old. Pattern: disciplined, not caravan.]
"We're watched," he said.
"How far?" Jax's ration bar paused mid-bite.
"Close. Four to six. Not raiders."
"Warden leash?" Jax asked.
KrysKo didn't answer. The way his jaw set was answer enough.
The road bled into a span of twisted bridges at dusk, draped over a dry gorge where a poison thread still steamed. The main crossing—reinforced alloy and old prayer flags burned to lace—groaned in the wind.
"It's too open," Kara said.
"Fast or not at all," Ronan judged, testing a cable with his thumb. "I prefer fast."
"Half the lines are snapped," Jax muttered. "We fall here, nobody's volunteering rope."
KrysKo touched a support strut. What came up his arm wasn't vibration—it was memory.
> [Residual energy: military-grade cells; Warden signatures: seven. Footfall echo: recent.]
"They're waiting, KrysKo. You will meet them before the bridge ends."
"Formation," he said. "Kara behind me. Jax center. Ronan rear."
They stepped onto the bridge.
Halfway across, light knifed off glass—a scope wink—and he was already shouting, "Down!" when the first shot seared past his shoulder. Smoke bloomed; four silhouettes strode out of it in adaptive armor, masks stamped with a black wing. The first dropped a canister that draped the span in gray, thick as regret.
> [Combat state engaged]
Hostiles: 4. Roles: two marksmen, one melee, one hybrid shepherd.
"Adapt. They are trained. But you are learning."
KrysKo slid low, a sway and drop—the ginga's patient heart—plasma sizzle grazing air where his head had been. He rose under a charging Warden's ribs, heel like a polite meteor, then twisted the man's rifle from his hands and gave it back to his temple. Metal sang. Body fell.
Ronan met the hybrid head-on, shock-staff spitting blue. Scale took it, blue died. Ronan's counter was economy: elbow, hook, ground. The visor split. Blood misted.
Kara rolled two vials underhand—green then clear. Emerald fog climbed, a mint-and-copper veil that misled depth and snared optics.
"Eyes!" she called.
"Already on it," Jax said, and his disc scythed up into the white cone of a drone's search-beam, bursting into EMP starlight. The drone tumbled, rotors coughing, and gutted itself on the railing.
KrysKo withheld the bronze because restraint is a kind of aim. He read the next Warden's body—right shoulder telegraphing, left knee lazy, pattern four-two-one. Slip, parry, knee through ribs, spin. Breath left the man like something that regretted arriving.
> "Not reaction but prediction," the System's warm river-voice approved. "Progress."
A plasma round kissed KrysKo's sleeve; Ronan pulled him back, taking the brunt with a grunt that meant add it to the ledger.
"You owe me," Ronan said.
"Noted," KrysKo answered, and when the hybrid cut for Kara he didn't think, he moved. The bronze whispered free at last—two dull arcs that drank light—and met the leap midair. One edge opened armor at the shoulder; the other hooked the weapon arm and used geometry to introduce it to a beam. Bone and steel argued. Steel won.
Silence arrived the way it always does after trained people try to kill you and fail: too quickly to trust. Four bodies bled into the bridge.
> [Engagement complete. Encrypted data core detected.]
Jax pried a pulsing drive from a chest plate. Vulture sigil etched in black.
"Answers," he said. "Or nightmares. Fifty-fifty."
KrysKo didn't touch it. He didn't have to.
> [Unauthorized sync request detected.]
"Caution. This data speaks with the tongue that made you."
The world slid sideways. Metal under his back, air sterile and cold; lines of light drawn along a body not yet his; voices naming him like property.
Subject O'Ruadhraigh—neural adaptation stable. Prototype viable.
A second voice, winter-clean: Reset sequence engaged. Project KrysKo advancing.
"Breathe," the System murmured, shoreline sure. "The past is not your master unless you kneel."
Kara's hands were already on his shoulders. "Hey. Here. Look at me."
He did, and the storm stood down.
Jax swallowed. "It's orders. Vulture channel. 'Subject KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh—retrieve intact; terminate if compromised.'"
Kara's face went pale, fierce. "They sent them for you."
"They'll send more," KrysKo said.
They camped in the watchtower's shadow. The fire held a small circle against the old dark; beyond it, the road dreamed of engines. Kara cleaned KrysKo's graze with water that hadn't existed a minute ago. Ronan sharpened, each stroke a prayer with no temple. Jax pretended to sleep and kept counting batteries.
"You didn't hesitate," Kara said softly.
"I couldn't. You'd have died."
"That's not what I meant." She met his eyes—the kind of look that steadies edges. "You fought like something remembering itself."
> [Log note: Emotional resonance—KARA_MYLES—stabilizing variable sustained.]
"Gravity," the System almost smiled. "Not all creation needs control."
He stared into embers until the night blinked red—a flare hung in the sky, then another, slow-fast-slow: rangefinding heartbeats.
Wind siphoned their fire flat. Kara's heel snuffed the last ember. Jax clipped his drone back together by touch. Ronan's scaled pattern caught starlight like ink waking.
KrysKo moved to the tower's mouth and let the ruin's open teeth become his horizon.
> "Contact in twenty-six seconds," the System counted, velvet over thunder. "Four talon drones, Warden make. Ground squad in staggered V. Shepherd behind to close the pen. The bells will lie tonight."
"Kara—smoke and sting left. Jax—eyes. Ronan—anchor right."
The drones came like black moths trimmed in red, tri-rotors pitched between hearing and hate. Four cones of white carved the dark into wireframes.
"Hands where I can see—" an amplified voice began, official, wrong.
Jax's disc howled up into a cone, flared, and knocked a drone out of the sky. "Three," he said, already palming another.
The drones split and learned. From the east, twelve footfalls—Warden cadence trained to deny mercy time to dress.
Kara's green curtain rose, then a clear vial hissed into cold vapor. Depth shifted; distance lied. KrysKo let the ginga redraw him. A Warden cut through the fog, rifle high, and met a heel he never learned to name. Bronze found collar seam and suggested stillness. Ronan tangled a shock-staff in his scales and gave the man ground as a lesson. Jax's not-ready sphere stuck to a rotor housing and pulsed twice like a heart that had changed its mind.
> "Prediction ninety-one," the System hummed. "Your fear remains. You simply assigned it a task."
A third drone strafed Jax, needles stitching his sleeve. "Jax!" Kara pivoted; KrysKo cut three decisions into one: a meia-lua to change angles, bronze up to deflect, voice to call, "Flare!" The vial shattered midair; day poured out. The drone choked on noon and died.
The shepherd tried the center—a baton of small cruelties and footwork borrowed from a different continent. He feinted Ronan and found KrysKo instead. The dance softened. Blade flat tapped baton to break its sentence; the off-hand bronze grew the inch a shepherd didn't believe in. Blue died on stone. Close-in hands and ribs wrote a paragraph neither school had assigned; the shepherd hit the deck with breath on layaway.
"Six," Ronan reported, dropping another.
"Five," Jax corrected, tranquilizer hissing. "We're humane tonight."
When the shepherd twitched toward suicide, KrysKo lifted the mask free like a curtain. A human face. Eyes too young to be practiced at being old.
"Don't," KrysKo said, and it wasn't a warning; it was closing a book before its worst page.
> "Mercy is a kind of strength," the System said softly. "Spend it wisely."
"We were told," the shepherd rasped, staring at bronze that refused to gleam, "the target was a weapon walking. That you'd kill us because you could."
Kara's breath steadied. "We save who we can."
A red blink pulsed from rubble to the north. "Trip-sensor," Jax said. "They salted the field."
"They're not done," Ronan agreed.
> "Nor is the hand that signed the order," the System added. "It does not sleep."
"Vulture," Kara said, and the name put ash on the tongue.
The shepherd flinched. "We don't say it."
"You work for a rumor and won't call it by its handle," Jax muttered, binding the man's wrists with cable ties he insisted were for machines.
They stripped cores, took what would live. Kara set three vials on a stone—green, amber, smoky blue. "Markers," she said. "For anyone wounded who isn't finished being a person."
"Yal would be proud," Ronan said, and for once the sentence felt like a blessing without a blade.
Dawn arrived tin-bright. They left the shepherd breathing beneath the tower with a flask and a choice. Twenty steps down the road the sky peeled with a shadow—no drone: a skiff. Ophilim undercarriage wearing Architect angles like jewelry. It made two lazy arcs and slid into the sun like a lie that didn't need to work hard.
"For who?" Jax asked.
"For whoever fed the Wardens," Ronan answered, and no heat survived in his voice.
> "The bells will lie again," the System said, quiet as chapels used to be. "And farther ahead they will ask you to ring them."
KrysKo angled them into the wind so they'd smell the world before it smelled them. Kara matched his steps without needing to think about it. Jax promised his drone better batteries if it survived noon. Ronan watched the sky with both kinds of constellation in his eyes—the ones you name, and the ones that hunt.
They crested a hill. The land opened. Dust first, then mules, then faces fluent in travel's alphabet—tired, alert, children bridged by hands. Three wagons, one banded with the river-leaf sigil of the Apotheion. A Warden-apprentice walked point with a spear humbled by use.
"Identify," she called, and her eyes had already done arithmetic on Ronan and KrysKo and come out with: live if you can.
"Kara Myles," Kara said. "Adept, Apotheion. Cohort Nine. We can help."
The apprentice's jaw eased by a breath. "Wheel's cracked. We tied it. The next bend'll take it."
Jax grinned like a man greeting a bolt that had talked back. "I love a wheel that thinks it's done."
Ronan and KrysKo lifted the rear while Jax humiliated the axle into remembering circles. Kara went person to person with water and the right words in the right order. The apprentice watched like gratitude was a dangerous animal and she would pet it and get bitten and keep petting it anyway.
"The Wardens said a cohort might come through," she admitted at last. "Said if you did, we could do worse than walk near you."
"Then walk," Kara said, and for a moment the world let that be enough.
They'd gone a mile when a field bell chimed from the trees—one, two, silence. The kind you lash to a pole and ring when help lives close enough to hear and far enough to cost you.
"We didn't ring it," the apprentice whispered.
Kara's hand found KrysKo's sleeve. "Trap."
Ronan's teeth showed without humor. "Let them try."
> "Ash wings at noon," the System murmured. "And a voice beyond the trees that calls itself friend. The bells will lie again."
KrysKo touched the bronze beneath his skin. It answered like a string tuned to an old note. He counted his people with a look and stepped into the shadow that wanted to be morning.
They didn't ring the bell. But someone wanted them to come running.
Cohort Nine—stubborn as weather—went anyway.
> [Private Log — Node Pressure]
User: KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh — Level 10 (Evolution Node: UNCHOSEN)
Synchronization: 95%
Mirror-frequency: rising; distance uncertain
Advisory: "Choose not what you can become, KrysKo, but what you're willing to lose."
Chapter 9 — Part 4: Ash Wings Over Dawn
The bell hung from a peeled sapling at the edge of the copse, a pot-metal thing lathed smooth by years of weather and good intentions. It should have chimed for childbirths and lost sheep and the hour when ovens let out their bread. Here, lashed with new cord and pitched a shade too bright in the morning air, it sounded like a rumor pretending to be help.
The caravan balked at the treeline. Mules rolled their eyes; the cracked wheel thumped with a gambler's optimism and then thought better of it. Children stared at the bell as if it might grow teeth. Cohort Nine bled forward as one body—KrysKo out front, Kara half a step to his left, Jax shrugging his rucksack into a better lie, Ronan behind and slightly to the side, where shadows thickened by habit.
> [System Advisory] "Wind from the east. Carrying iron, old grease, and the ash of cut roots. Heartbeat profiles ahead: masked by resonance blankets; nevertheless present. Three clusters, KrysKo—two low, one high. The bell is a stage, not a plea."
KrysKo let the words settle behind his ribs. The glass road ran straight as a vow past the copse and into a valley the map called Orchard Fold, though the only fruit now were rusted drums and skull-white rocks. Off to their left, the hill sloped up into clipped brush and a ridge with good sightlines. On the right, the ruined bones of a silo leaned like a drunk trying to remember the way home. There were a dozen wrong ways to cross this space and only two that might be forgiven.
The Warden apprentice at caravan point—sharp-eyed, spear held correctly, mouth set in a line that had learned its limit—shifted her weight as if bracing for a sprint that never came. "We can cut wide and lose an hour," she said. "Or we can run it and hope."
"Hope's free," Jax muttered, scanning the verge with his handheld. "But someone else already paid for this party. We cut wide, we hit ground that's been raked for traps. We run it, we get shot by pious geometry."
Kara's gaze had gone distant, that healer's way of listening to air the way it speaks through wounds. "The bell's tone decays wrong. There's a dampening baffle in the crown." Her fingers tapped three beats on her thigh: slow, slow, quick. "It carries directional."
Ronan sniffed. "Left ridge. High position. Also low nests in the brush. Shepherds, and something not theirs riding the sky."
The bell chimed once more, too pretty by half. Jax winced. "Vulture frequency piggyback," he said. "And—oh good—some kind of third-party handshake layered in. I hate it when asset managers collaborate."
KrysKo raised two fingers. Cohort's attention snapped and lined up along the gesture the way iron finds a lodestone.
"We move," he said. "Kara, with the apprentice. Keep the caravan in the gutter of the road where the stone's cracked—you'll have cover from the waist down. Jax, you're our roof: drone up five meters, hardlight screen on my mark, EMP only when I call it. Ronan—right flank, break their low angle. I'll take the bell and the first face that talks."
The apprentice licked her lips once, quick. "You'll draw fire."
"That's the idea," KrysKo said, and the bronze under his skin stirred like a string plucked.
They went.
The trick with a kill-lane is to enter it like you built it. KrysKo walked into the bell's thin shade with his hands open and his step precise, as if measuring floorboards in a house he already owned. Sweat prickled at the nape of his neck; the scarf at his throat lay quiet, ember-orange against the morning like a tiny oath.
> [System: Observation Mode] "Three… two…"
The voice on the old Warden frequency came from everywhere and nowhere, smoothed flat as parchment, polite as a closing door. "Halt. By order of Academic Security—Black-Band Authority—drop your weapons and kneel. Noncompliance will be remediated."
KrysKo did not halt. He took one more step, just enough to put his body between Kara and the highest line of fire. He tilted his head. "If mercy is on offer," he said, "start with your names."
A hiss in the brush. A figure rose at the ridge—sleek armor, no insignia, visor slick as oil. Two more peeled up from the scrub at ground-level; behind the silo, a little cough of dust belied the hunkered shape of a fourth. Shepherds with their manners ironed out. The nearest raised a palm to show compliance and gently, very gently, slid a small projector puck from their belt into the grass.
"Names don't matter," the voiced replied. "Compliance does."
KrysKo's forearms whispered open.
The bronze slid out with that same strange, living hush, not a shout but a decision. Kara's breath caught—only for a heartbeat—and then she was moving, palming a green vial into the apprentice's hand. "On my count," she said, voice like someone knitting a torn sleeve. "Three… two…"
The brush exploded.
The first volley caught the road in a precise stitch of blue fire. KrysKo rolled into space and the dance found his bones. Ginga, drop, turn; a heel whipped the bell's lanyard and sent it spinning like a wounded signal; a blade flicked and shaved a round into a harmless ricochet that went skittering off the sapling's pale bark. Behind him, Jax's hardlight screen roared to life—an oval plane of crackling white that turned searing plasma into a hammered aurora.
"Roof up!" Jax shouted. "You get three seconds at a time before the matrix screams."
"Two will do," Ronan said, and hit the low left nest like weather. The first shepherd met scaled forearm with shock baton and learned about diminishing returns. The second tried a leg-scissor sweep; Ronan hopped it and came down with his elbow in a spot armor considers hypothetical. He took a blow across the jaw that would have blued granite and smiled in a way that made the shepherd reconsider his religion.
Kara and the apprentice tipped the green vial into the gutter and the biometal smoke rose—a thin river that hugged the stone's broken edge and danced at knee-height, sweet with mint and copper. The marksmen on the ridge blinked; their lasers fuzzed; depth betrayed them.
> [System—pleased] "Apothecary's veil: effective. Predictive modeling at ninety-three percent. Proceed, son."
On KrysKo's right, the projector puck at last finished its quiet sin. A figure unfolded from air like a reflection learned to write backwards: his height, his shoulders, the cut of his jaw in the same measured geometry. The eyes were calm. The mouth almost kind. The blades on its forearms were immaculate and without blood.
It spoke in KrysKo's own cadence, softened. "KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh," the Mirror said, voice as gentle as an apology. "Stand down. Your presence endangers the people you love. Allow containment. Your friends will be spared."
He pivoted under a fresh stitch of fire and said, simply: "No."
The Mirror tilted its head the way he does when listening. "You were designed to obey, not to choose. Let us hold the weight for you."
The ginga carried him forward. KrysKo feinted, turned the feint into a handstand and the handstand into a scissoring kick that clipped the nearer shepherd's rifle. His bronze came up and across; the barrel parted as quiet as paper. The man stumbled; KrysKo pressed him back into the smoke with a shoulder and kept moving.
"Containment," he said, low, almost to himself, "is a kind of slow murder."
> [System—warm as an old hearth] "You do not owe the past your future."
The Mirror's blades extended in a mirrored hiss. It stepped in time with him, not trying to outpace but to match. KrysKo cut low; the Mirror answered high. He slid, turned, drove a knee toward ribs; the Mirror folded the knee aside and presented him to the ridge line as a target.
Jax swore and threw the screen at an angle that shouldn't have worked. Light sheened into a plane and ricocheted three shots off into the trees where nobody lived. "Quit dancing with your own reflection and help me not die," he yelled, cheerful and terrified.
KrysKo grinned. "Working on it."
Ronan took a baton to the temple and laughed outright. The shepherd on him lost a second to surprise, which is a long time to misplace. Ronan caught the man's belt, turned his own hip into a fulcrum, and folded the shepherd over his thigh like an insult. "You're fighting my people's shadow-books," he said. "You should read the ones we didn't lend you."
Kara moved through the storm with a healer's grace turned battlefield-cunning. She slid her boot heel across a tripwire she'd seen and pretended not to; she let a clear vial roll out of her palm in the shelter of her scarf; when the skiff finally sailed lazy into view above the ridge, she was already holding a fist-sized bulb of smoky blue and a prayer in the language her grandmother used to speak to weather.
"Now!" KrysKo called.
She threw.
The bulb broke in a cloud that wasn't fog and wasn't smoke and wasn't chemical—not only. For a breath, the air turned to silence thick enough to crack. The skiff's belly guns coughed once, twice, and then went sulky and dark. The craft banked in surprise like a hawk knocked cross-eyed. Its pilot swore in a language the road didn't recognize and hauled it back into the light.
"Nice," Jax breathed, reverent. "You saved me having to invent that."
"Save the praise," Kara said through her teeth. "I've got two more good ones in this satchel and then we're back to bite and spit."
The Mirror pressed KrysKo, blades flickering in the rhythm of his own better practice. It didn't overextend. It didn't hate. It simply offered him the shape of the man the Vulture believed he should be—efficient, bloodless, contained. It landed a shallow cut on his forearm and stepped back in a gesture he recognized from the training room he never had: invitation to see sense.
"Your cohort complicates parameters," the Mirror said, and its eyes flicked—just briefly—toward Kara. "You can keep them safe. Yield."
KrysKo exhaled and let the dance slow one notch, not because he was tired, but because he wanted the choice to hear itself.
> [System—quiet] "Practice tells the truth. So does the blade that remembers mercy."
He stepped in.
The first movement was capoeira—an old wheel that found an ankle the way rivers find low ground. The Mirror took the fall correctly, as he would. The second movement was Warden—hard edge, blunt weight, a shoulder where a shoulder shouldn't be. The Mirror absorbed, rotated, recovered. The third movement belonged to neither school. It belonged to the thing under his sternum that had been growing each time he chose to be complicated in a world that wanted simple.
He let the bronze retract in the last half-inch of the killing arc.
The Mirror expected steel. It got forearm. The bind shifted. KrysKo leaned into the body, not the weapon, and turned the momentum not into an incision but into a throw. The Mirror hit the bell pole. The sapling rang like a lie that had been caught out.
Behind the ring, the shepherds flinched. One looked toward the ridge, wondering if this was a signal he didn't know how to answer. That heartbeat was all Ronan needed. He took the man's breath and handed his body to the ground as if returning something borrowed.
Jax's drone arced, bright as a talisman, and dumped a string of glittering confetti over the ridge. It stuck to visors, to barrels, to the projector puck that had birthed the Mirror. "Conductive chaff!" he sang, giddy. "Don't lick it!"
"Why would anyone—" Kara began, then remembered Jax, and didn't finish.
The Mirror rose smoothly; its head tipped, acknowledging the throw as if they were still in some polite room with a chalkboard and tea. "Evolution detected," it said. "Note appended to file."
"Append this," Jax muttered, and kicked the puck with a boot tip. The projection hiccuped. The Mirror stuttered and dropped three frames like a bad dream losing its budget. KrysKo stepped in and pin-wheeled his leg around in a clean meia-lua de compasso that would have taken its head if it had one. The projection collapsed, a curtain pulled on a play that had cost too much to stage.
The ridge faltered. The skiff was gone. The low nests were hurt. The shepherd behind the silo blew a whistle that was more morale than tactic and began a retreat that tried to look like a maneuver. The Warden apprentice at the wagons did the bravest thing a young soldier can do—she did not cheer. She kept the mules steady and the children behind wheels.
> [System—measured] "Enemy morale fracture: sixty percent. Recommend disengagement and asset protection. We are not here to win a field. We are here to get people past it."
"Agreed," KrysKo said.
He backed, blades out, ginga a tide rolling away with dignity. Ronan reversed like a mountain deciding not to be in a road anymore. Kara watched the brush until her scientist's heart was satisfied it had stopped lying. Jax grabbed the bell with both hands and wrenched it off its lashings. It hit the ground with an honest thunk.
"Salt?" he asked.
Kara knelt. She unscrewed the cap of a small jar and poured pale crystals into her palm. "Salt," she said. She threw a pinch at the base of the sapling, another into the road's crack, a third in a line where the chaff still glittered. "For bindings cut and binding's ghost," she murmured. "For lies put to sleep where they stand."
The apprentice listened with a face that pretended not to but could not help it. "Does it work?" she asked, voice low.
Kara looked up at her, eyes tired-bright. "Sometimes the body needs to see the gesture before it lets go."
They moved the caravan through the copse at a pace that was almost not foolish. No one ran. No one broke. The column slid over the glass road like a long memory remembering not to die. Behind them, the brush held its breath, offended but undecided. Above, the sky grayed toward noon without enthusiasm.
When they had put two bends and a small hill between themselves and the bell, the mules' ears went from knife-blade to careful leaf. The apprentice blew out a breath she'd earned. Jax collapsed into a sit walk and refused to admit it; then he stood and swore and kept walking. Ronan rolled one shoulder with a wince he didn't explain. Kara's hands shook once when she reached for her flask, then didn't.
KrysKo walked at the edge of the column and watched the road practice its old trick of looking safe.
> [System: Audit—Private] "Pulse variance settling. Forearm cut: superficial; disinfect when Kara pretends not to notice. Team cohesion: rising. Your refusal of the Mirror's lie has increased an internal parameter some designers found inconvenient. Willpower: +1."
He smiled before he could help it. "You keep score too?"
"A ledger is not a chain, KrysKo," the voice chuckled, warm as dusk. "It's a way to remember what the day gave and what it asked."
They made camp in a scooped-out wedge of hillside where rust-fern had tried a foolish rewilding and almost got away with it. The wagons ringed in a patient half-circle. The cracked wheel slept with a splint. The apprentice posted two lookouts with instructions that could pass for gentleness. The children were bribed with half a jar of pickled roots and ten minutes of Jax making the drone dance like an embarrassed beetle.
Kara cleaned KrysKo's cut without speech and then, when she was done, without looking up, said, "You didn't kill the shepherd when he would have killed me."
"I didn't need to," he answered.
"That's not why," she said.
He did not say the other because the other was a stone that hadn't settled yet. Because mercy in a world that taught slaughter felt like a muscle learning itself in a mirror.
Ronan sat with his back against a wagon and sharpened a blade in long, satisfied drags. "They'll be back," he said. "Vulture hands don't unclench."
Jax flopped near him, rummaging for a suitable length of wire to reward the drone. "Then we'll be rude again."
Kara smiled despite a day that had wrung her dry. "Practice tells the truth."
"Train," KrysKo said simply.
They stood.