Dawn came thin and gray, skimming the pines like a tentative hand. The cabin smelled of coffee and wet wool; smoke curled from the stove, and the pack moved with the small efficiency of people who had slept too little and still knew the work that needed doing. Everyone was quieter than usual — the quarry had left a mark none of them liked to discuss out loud. It hung in the air like cold metal.
Ethan rose with the others and felt the panel's invisible hum under his sleeve. It was as ordinary to him now as his own heartbeat — a private instrument he kept folded away in the wash of normal life. No one in the pack saw it. No one could. That secrecy sat between him and the rest like a thin glass wall: absolute privacy, constant responsibility.
Ari called them to a quick council after breakfast. They circled the map scratched into a plank of wood: the river, the old oak, the quarry, the ridgeline. Ari's finger traced the places with decisive economy.
"We don't know who left the mark," Ari said. "We know it's a message. We know they took Lila and left the sign. We know they've been practicing cutting our traps clean. That means two things: they have hands that know what they're doing, and they want us to know. They want us to react."
Riley's jaw clenched. "We tighten, we patrol harder. No one goes alone." Her eyes flicked to Ethan for a second, the kind of look that asked if he had any ideas. He kept his expression even. He had ideas — dozens — but most of them involved measures the pack could not see and that might make them suspicious if the objects appeared out of nowhere.
Ari split tasks. Two teams would sweep the logging road and the old kiln; two would check the river crossings for new footprints; one team would attempt to find where Lila had been taken from the quarry and trace any paths from there. Ethan joined the tracing team with Riley and two of the older scouts.
They moved like a single animal, each person listening for the same heartbeat of sound. The trench where the quarry met the path held a different air: wind moved oddly through the rocks, carrying scent and echo in unpredictable ways. Ethan's training told him to pay attention to sound and to weight; his panel reminded him there were discreet tools he could use if the price made sense. He kept that thought folded away. For now he wanted the pack to trust the work he did with his hands and his senses.
They found a clue less than an hour in: a scrap of fabric snagged on a root, still damp with quarry dust; a fragment of a wooden bead that matched the line of a trader's bracelet Ari had once described. The bead was too small to be decisive, but the instinct at the back of the pack's mind — the one that Ari had honed for years — whispered the same suspicion: this was not merely random cruelty. This was deliberate. Someone had taken a captive and wanted the pack to chase the narrative they designed.
Riley crouched beside him, palms splayed on the damp earth. "They didn't plan to use a direct ambush," she said. "They staged a show." Her voice was low, precise. "If they wanted blood, they'd have killed Lila or left a worse thing. They want us to move, and they want us to make the first mistake."
Ethan nodded. He could see the threads — bait, reaction, escalation. He could also see options the pack wouldn't have: small, surgical things that would change the shape of a fight without making it look like magic. The panel offered a dozen choices in the privacy of his head: a short-range mapping echo that would replay recent footsteps in a visual grid (useful, clean); a covert listening shard that could be placed near the river to catch conversation; a temporary disguise field to sponge torchlight. All of them had costs; all of them were invisible to the pack.
He selected none of them.
"What do you think?" he asked instead, letting the questions land on the tree bark and between breaths.
"Trap the obvious places and then search where the obvious isn't," Riley said. "Think like someone trying to get away without being seen. Check hollows, wagon ruts, marks on trees where ropes were used. They'll try to hide signs in plain sight."
They worked methodically, following the trail until it petered out under a tangle of brush. There they found the thing that made the hair at Ethan's neck stand up: a tiny scraping on a boulder, faint enough to be missed by anyone who hadn't been taught to look. Someone had ground the edge of a blade into the stone and left almost nothing — a hairline of metal. It was the kind of signature a craftsman leaves, meant to send a message to others who would read it.
"Evan's crew," one of the scouts muttered. "This is their mark."
"Not necessarily Evan," Ethan said quietly. "But it's someone with knowledge, resources, and the nerve to send a signal."
They followed the next faint track to a narrow, overgrown path that led away from the quarry and deeper into a stand of old pines. The path opened onto a shallow ravine where the ground sloped toward a ruined mill foundation. There, tucked in a tangle of brambles, someone had left a pack half-buried in leaves — a trader's bag, recent footprints, and the scent of rope and smoked meat. It was a staged cache but useful: someone had planned to use the mill as a temporary holding or transshipment point.
Ethan's panel hummed with possibilities again. In the privacy of his own mind he could bring up a reconnaissance module that would reveal short-term heat maps of human movement around the mill for the last seventy-two hours — subtle, private intel. The cost was reasonable to him; the information could reveal who'd been meeting whom and whether the quarry was a staging ground or a diversion.
He felt the weight of that private menu and, for a moment, imagined simply using it, printing the paths into his mind and handing Ari a map that would make the investigation trivial.
Instead, he slid the impulse down like a coin into his pocket and made a different choice: he harvested what the world offered and then sought a human source.
"Let's bring this back," he said aloud. "It's a lot to leave here. Someone might want it. And I think it gives us a place to stake a watch."
They packed the bag carefully and moved back to the cabin at a slow, deliberate walk, sharing observations the way sewing partners trade thread. Ari listened intently and then made a decision that fit his style.
"We'll set a watch at the mill tonight," he said. "Three will go in at dusk. We'll move quiet and set a bait — something to pull them out if they come back. If Evan wants a show, we'll give him an empty stage and see who comes."
Riley looked at Ethan. "You sure you want to be there?" she asked.
He met her eyes. "Yeah. I want to see who's moving the ropes."
Night fell with a contained hush. At dusk, Ethan, Riley, and two scouts took the long route to the mill, crossing the old backwater that reeked of algae and rot. The moon was an indifferent eye that sent the world into shades of ink. They moved slow, a quartet of intent shapes sliding between trunks. The mill lay dark, a skeleton against the sky. They cut into its bones and set a low fire in a place that would be visible from the usual approach routes and then hid around the far side where the brambles were thick.
Time became small. The rhythm of breath and the chirp of distant frogs were the measures by which they counted minutes. Ethan pressed his palm to the hidden panel only once, a tiny private check to be sure his extraction balance still hummed in his head. It did. He closed it like a book.
At one in the morning the world changed.
Footsteps approached — not many, and not clumsy. A single man moved first, cautious and swift, checking the approach. He was followed by a pair, then another. They were careful; they expected traps. The leader paused at the mill's lip and scanned the dark. He moved as if familiar with the terrain, as if he'd practiced this route until it was part of his hands.
They stopped at the bait fire. The leader crouched and inspected its edges with a practiced eye, checking for oddness. A young boy in Ethan's mind would be the one to extract the fire and carry the tale, but the tapestry held up. The man pulled a scrap of paper from his sleeve, read something in the dim, and then signaled. Two men broke from the tree line and moved toward the brambles.
Ethan's pulse quickened. He had a private list of options: use the restraint field to hold anyone who crossed a threshold; dump light to blind them and risk revealing a technological advantage; use a listening shard to pick up exact words. He kept his hands still, reminding himself of the thing he'd promised — to earn trust without exposing the instrument.
The two men crossed the small clearing and stepped into the web of brambles. They didn't see the scouts until a quiet hand on shoulders pushed them into the open. The pack moved like a closing fist. Someone — a scout with nimble hands — slapped a cord around the leader's wrists and another over the second man's arms. They were caught. The leader spat a curse and then, with sudden fury, barked orders that were met by silence. Then a voice called out from the tree line — a voice he knew by reputation and by an old grudge they'd all heard whispered about over fires: "You took a woman from our line, and you dare mark us. Show me the hands."
A shadow moved, and the leader's face was suddenly revealed to the firelight.
It was not Evan.
But the name that left the leader's mouth was one Ethan knew from stories: a mid-level enforcer, a blade for hire. He'd been seen trading favors for grain and for fear. The man's eyes were flat, efficient. He looked at Ari like a man who had been paid to break things and then counted the cost.
"Evan sent us a map and a mark," he said shortly. "He wants to make the pack look weak. He wants you to take the blame for a failed trade."
Ari's face hardened. "Where's Evan now?"
The man spat. "He's south. He'll test you and then move to the cache. He doesn't want to face you yet — he wants to see how you move. If you leave your stores unprotected tonight, he'll take them and your people will be hungry come dawn."
Ethan felt a cold clarity thread through him: a plan formed not from a panel menu but from watching men and remembering patterns. If Evan was planning to strike the cache, they could either wait him there and risk casualties, or they could set a counter — a transfer of the cache to a new, discreet location, then leave a false trail that lured Evan into an empty holding. It would take careful work. It would take trust and small, surgical deception.
He looked at Riley, then Ari, then at the captured men. "We move the cache tonight," he said. "We make a decoy. We let Evan take what he expects and get nothing useful. And we ambush his route on the move — pick him off when he's vulnerable."
Ari considered; his face was a shuttered thing. "Risky," he said. "But the alternative is to give him the stores and start hollowing out our people. You think you can pull the bait move?"
Ethan thought of the panel, the private menu, the things he could spend to make this easier. He thought, too, of Riley's steady hand and the pack's muscle. He wanted to earn the result.
"Yes," he said. "We move the cache. We set the decoy. We hit the route."
Riley tightened her jaw and then nodded. "We're with you."
They put the plan into motion with the quiet, practiced speed of people who'd had to improvise shelter out of salvaged wood. The pack worked through the night, moving sacks and loading carts in the dark while the captured men watched with sullen eyes. Ethan spent a few private moments arranging small, non-glamorous uses of PP — a healed strap here, an olfactory mask for a crate there — actions that would not announce themselves as miracles but would smooth the logistics. He did not show the pack the ledger under his sleeve. He never would.
By the time the eastern sky bled faintly with pre-dawn light, the cache had been relocated, the decoy set, and the ambush line laid. They waited like a patient net.
Only Ethan knew how many of the moves that made the night possible were paid for quietly by a blue glow the world could not see. He counted them in his head like small debts he intended to pay back with care.
At last, exhaustion easing to the slow satisfaction of a plan executed, he let himself breathe. The pack's trust was not bought; it was reinforced. The panel hummed a private approval, like a machine consenting to a human choice. Outside, beyond the line, somewhere down the road Evan's men would find the decoy and take what they expected — and then move into a trap of their own.
It was, at least for now, the right bet.