CHAPTER 448: 448: WORDS IN A BOX

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A few hours later...

Twilight came with a long bruise of color along the west. Mia’s team made a silent camp under a low bank where the wind had brushed sand thin and left a hard face that faced the wrong way for strangers to spot. They did not light a fire. They ate cold. They ran a thin cord from peg to peg and wrapped their wrists in loops so startled sleepers didn’t lurch into the open when a dream tugged.

Om wrote by feel, then read his notes out in a whisper with no flourishes: the distances, the signs, the lack of drums, the way the old caravan cut still had the ghosts of wheel ruts deep enough to break an ankle if you walked there at night like a fool. He slid the lens into its sleeve and closed his eyes under his forearm like a man who has learned to steal rest in coins instead of paper money.

Kiva took the first watch. Serit took the second. Mia took the dawn. No one argued with those choices.

Somewhere to the north a hawk called. It did not sound like Alka; it sounded like the smaller kind that think mice belong to them and are wrong sometimes.

The night was kind.

At first light, Mia laid out a plan on the ground with a stick. "We go to the rim," she said. "We look down. We do not go down unless I say so. Om writes. Kiva counts. Bren tastes the wind. Serit tells me if my boots are in a bad place. If we hear any news about white hair—" she let the words sit there like some lodestone and then shrugged "—we do what we came to do anyway. We count names. We mark the ground. We do not forget our motivation for someone else’s story."

They moved while dew still thought it had a chance. The rim came up the way ridges do when a map in your head meets the one under your feet with a handshake. The hardpan made a new sound under boots. The air changed. You could taste the difference between the last world and the next in the place where your tongue tells you your mouth is dry.

The mountain was still a rumor — somewhere beyond the first set of dunes, not yet a picture your eyes could draw. But the country around it had started to lean the way a crowd leans when a man with a voice steps onto a rock. Mia felt that lean in her bones. She kept her face calm and sharp so her team would keep their breath even.

They found signs first, not men: a broken net line that had eaten itself to rags with salt; a scrap of lacquer that might have been Mardek’s stupid bright; a bent reed stabbed into sand where no reed should grow — Dawn blade mark, though Mia would not insult her team by naming it aloud. She bent and touched two fingers to the reed and then to her forehead, an old gesture from a religion no one kept anymore but soldiers liked because it felt like respect even if it wasn’t to anything in particular.

Om wrote the reed into the book. "Marker," he said softly. "Unknown unit. Placed with thought."

They moved on.

At the low of the sun they met a wind that had spent an hour learning their mouths. The dunes opened like unrolled cloth. In the mid-distance, a smear of color that was not sand or sky said camp in the language of tents and ropes. Closer to that, a scatter of small dark things that were either rocks or something that used to be men and didn’t need names today.

Mia lifted her hand. "We stop here," she said, because you do not walk into places that belong to a story that did not start with you. "We send the glass. We eat. We go around to the left and then we go around to the right. We do it twice. If the ground doesn’t get mad twice, we draw nearer."

The team breathed the way trained people breathe: grateful into their bellies where no one can see it.

Om set the lens for the mid-day note. "Regent," he said. "We are at the sand shoulder. Sighted camp sign. No movement. Signs of battle. No music. No drums. The Princess orders caution. We obey."

Hoorius’ clerk wrote obey in a neat hand, underlined it once, and sent it back with a stamp that meant we don’t hate your plan.

They ate the kind of food that soldiers always eat on travel and think it will get better even though it never does. They walked left, then right, then left again, making their bodies remember the slope. Mia’s ears picked out the small piece of wind that did not want to blow that particular way. She listened to it until it told her it was only a small cowardly wind and not a telling one. She ignored it.

When the second sun line tilted, they reached a vantage that gave them the first clean look. The camp had been folded into the forest the way a careful man folds a cloak he will never wear again and gives it to a brother whose back is colder. Ropes lay where they had been cut; poles stood up like teeth with no gum under them; a net pole dragged a long line that said someone left in a hurry and wasn’t thinking about form. Mark lay in a long shallow arc where a wedge had broken and men had fallen like beads coming off a string.

Mia and her team took a slow breath together, not because anyone had told them to, because lungs know when it is time to make space.

"Om," Mia said.

"I have it," he said softly. He wrote: After action field. No scavenger work. No rot. Fresh. Thirty-six visible. Twelve more probable. Signs of elite gear. Signs of dust nets. Signs of... he paused, not because his pen stopped, because the part of a good scribe that will not lie hesitated at a phrase he knew was going to be stupid. He wrote it anyway. Signs of fear.

Serit pointed with his chin. "Look," he said. On a single stake someone had tied a ant mark stone, the camping sign. It was cracked into two pieces.

Mia nodded once. Not the nod that says I am glad, the nod that says truth accepts us.

"Names when we’re safe," she said quietly. "Not here. We don’t say names in places that still want them."

They moved the way you walk in other people’s church: heels that think about where to land. A curl of cloth lifted and showed the edge of lacquer. Kiva bent and brushed sand with two fingers, not a scoop, a caress. The lacquer had been painted with a pale resin. It belonged to Yavri’s line.

Om wrote Yavri and underlined it twice, then struck one line because he remembered not to turn a guess into a fact.

Mia straightened and looked at the horizon where the mountain would soon be something a person could point at without anyone calling them a liar. Her face gave away nothing. Inside, she counted.

Vexor. Shale. Flint, Needle. Four men who had been salt in the kingdom’s bread and were now steel in someone else’s knife. Soon she would walk near them and pretend she did not know the shape of their footsteps. Soon she will see her love. Soon she will meet the man for whom she cried without knowing she loved her. Still now she is too naive to admit her feelings. She just wants to meet with him and watch him until her eyes give up.

"Princess," Serit said, quietly. "Do you need anything?"

"I don’t," she said back.

And because the world likes its coils neat, this was the hour that answered the one in which a shell in a mountain room breathed and sealed and began to drink the storm it had called.