CHAPTER 129: RED ON WHITE

Morning walked in like it owned the place.

Heaters hummed low. Steam curled off a kettle and hung there, undecided. Snow made soft hiss noises on tarp and rope, like someone sweeping the same floor twice. The craters from yesterday’s snowball war were still stamped in the drifts - half-filled now, like laughter you can still see if you squint.

Feris had a belt around her waist and the center pole, "standing" with all the dignity a slightly levitating person could manage. She lifted a cup, took a princely sip, missed her mouth by a centimeter, and pretended that’s how royalty drank.

"This pot is judging me" she informed the camp.

Obi stumbled from his tent with messy hair. "Join the club. I’ve been judged by worse cookware."

Arashi, bare-armed and bandaged, stood over a pan doing violence to something that had given up being identifiable. "Breakfast" he declared, with the sincerity of a man hoping a word could make a thing true.

Raizen pushed the tent flap aside and stepped into the cold. His shoulders rolled once - habit more than stretch. The ridge sat in a shawl of cloud. Yesterday’s fun had settled into the snow like a better memory. He touched his comm, expecting Alteea’s morning tap.

Nothing.

He adjusted the earpiece, waited. "Lighthouse, you there?"

Static filled his ear and left. No voice. No click of keys under words.

Hikari tried her line. The static was the same, just as empty. Lynea tapped the side of her slate; the signal bar flickered once, then decided to be decorative.

Arashi sniffed his cooking, grimaced, and tried for optimism. "Guess the mountain’s taking a nap."

"Mountains don’t nap" Lynea said, not looking up.

"Then it’s meditating" Obi said. "Respect its journey. The interference must be too much."

Raizen didn’t laugh. He listened, the way you listen to a room you’re not sure you should be in. No wind. Even the generator’s purr sounded tucked under a blanket. Snowflakes drifted slow - then slower - as if rethinking the whole falling thing.

Obi clambered up the antenna scaffold, waved a hand over the receiver like a priest blessing a stubborn altar. "Looks fine." He leaned to peer downhill. "I’ll just -"

He stopped talking.

"Hey" he called, voice shorter than usual. "Someone’s coming."

Everyone turned. A small figure was threading the lower ridge, half running, half sliding. Red on white. A smear at first, then a stain.

Hikari squinted. "Toma?"

Lynea rose. "He was with the miners last night."

Feris untied herself in one violent, victorious knot and drift-walked toward the boundary. "He’s bleeding."

They met him where the perimeter lamps left off being helpful. Toma’s breaths came like he’d forgotten how and was relearning by panic. Red printed his sleeves and down one side, dried in a rusty slick. He tried to stop at the line and couldn’t; momentum tripped him. He pitched forward-

Lynea was already kneeling. She caught his shoulder with one hand, his jaw with the other, and softened the ground for him with a force no one saw and everyone felt.

"Not mine" he blurted. It came out like a confession and a defense. He held both palms up. The blood there had gone dark and tacky. "It’s not mine."

Raizen slid in on a knee. "Breathe." His hands went to Toma’s forearms and stayed there, careful. "You’re here. What happened?"

Toma’s eyes were too big for his face. He couldn’t keep them still. He took the camp in like it might disappear if he blinked wrong. He tried to form a sentence; it broke. He swallowed and forced the pieces back together.

"North" he rasped. "We - we were on the ridge. Checking lines. My father said -" The breath he pulled hurt to watch. "They came out of nowhere."

"Nyxes?" Lynea asked, voice without decoration.

He nodded, jerky. "But - not shades. The signals - they said two, maybe three -"

"Only a couple" he repeated, like saying it might make it true. His head shook in tiny, violent noes. "It wasn’t. It can’t be that."

"What then?" Obi asked softly.

"A lot." The words tripped. He shoved them out anyway. "Almost a dozen. Fast. Wrong. They moved like - like they were trying to be people..."

Esen swore under his breath, the kind he didn’t waste on jokes.

"Where’s your father?" Raizen asked. Not gentle. Not hard. Just the right shape.

Toma’s mouth trembled and got stubborn. "He told me to run. He said someone had to tell you. Some of the miners - the Gravers - they were still fighting when I left..." He dragged the heel of his hand over his eyes, smearing a red line across his cheek. "I think..."

Arashi stripped off his own scarf, rolled it with his good hand, and pressed it to where Toma’s sleeve had gone from dark to darker.

Obi crouched and tried on a grin that didn’t fit. "Any of them tall with a terrible mustache? That’s my cousin. I owe him money."

Toma barked a laugh that broke in the middle and became a sob. He choked it down, shook his head. "They - they screeched. They... Laughed."

The word cracked the air wrong. Everyone heard it. Nobody liked it.

"Nyxes don’t laugh" Obi said, because someone had to say the normal thing.

"These did." Toma’s voice shrank. "It sounded like a window breaking. Over and over."

Raizen’s jaw went tight. He looked north. The mountain kept its face.

The comm in his ear shrieked to life - white noise ripping like cloth. He flinched, then leaned into it.

"Team Three -" Alteea’s voice tore through the static, thinner than usual, stretched. Sirens chased her words. "Multiple distortions in your sector - north slope. Vanguards on their way - do not move - stay put -"

"Knew it" Feris muttered. No one answered.

"Alteea!" Raizen said. "Survivors on the north ridge. Repeat, we have possible survivors - miners and Gravers. Do we-"

"No" Kori cut in on another channel, iron wrapped in steel. "You will stay where you are. You will not -"

Static drowned them both. For a beat, all anyone heard was the mountain pretending not to listen.

Alteea pushed back through like a swimmer breaking surface. "- too many - distortion - interference - spiking - do not -" The rest melted into noise.

The line died. The sudden absence of her voice made the world feel larger in a bad way.

Esen looked from Raizen to the ridge and back, for once not making a joke. "Orders?"

Raizen stood. The calm that found him wasn’t peace. It was a shape he wore when he had to. "Gear. Now."

Arashi opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded. He holstered the joke and reached for his pistols instead.

Lynea glanced at Toma. "Can you walk?"

"I can run" Toma said, lying.

"Stay. Rest." Raizen told him. "You’ve done your job."

Toma flinched, wanting to argue. He didn’t. He gripped the scarf tighter and nodded, jaw set in the way boys do when they decide to be old for an hour.

Hikari touched his shoulder once, then stood, the blanket falling from her shoulders like she’d remembered she didn’t need it. "I’ll prep the med kit" she said, which was their version of saying please come back in a language that didn’t embarrass anyone.

They moved.

The camp clicked into readiness like a machine that had always been waiting for permission. Ichiro kicked snow over the little morning fire. Feris, still hovering, cinched her rope shorter and cursed a physics problem with such intensity it might have solved itself.

"Stay put" Kori said again in Raizen’s ear, lower, more dangerous. "That’s an order."

"I heard you" Raizen answered, not arguing. He slung his pack, checked the angle of his blades by feel, and looked north.