Ethan woke before the cold did.
That was the wrong order. Usually the cold got there first, seeping up through the bedroll into his bones. This time it was the silence that woke him — the wind had dropped, and with it the small night sounds he'd fallen asleep to. No owl. No branches knocking. Just the tick of the dying fuel-cell fire and his own breath smoking in the dark.
Across the coals, Joel was already awake, sitting up with the shotgun across his knees. Frost silvered his beard. Beyond him, Ellie slept curled tight in her bedroll, one hand tucked under her cheek the way she did when the cold got bad.
"You feel that?" Ethan whispered.
Joel's eyes moved slow over the treeline. "Yeah."
Then the world went white.
The flashbang came over the ridge with no warning at all — just light, a sun going off three feet from his face. Ethan's eyes were shut before it burst. He didn't decide to shut them. His body did it on its own, the way his hands remembered knots.
Shouting. Boots on stone. Ellie's voice, sharp through the ringing: "Ethan!"
He rolled — snow down his collar, ears full of high whine — and the world came back in smeared pieces: white afterimage blooming at the edges of everything, Joel already on his feet with the shotgun up, Ellie half-crouched with her hands over her ears and her eyes streaming. She found his gaze through the glare and mouthed something he couldn't hear. Beyond her, dark figures were fanning out along the ridge above the camp — six of them, rifles up, moving in clean practiced lines.
And not firing.
That was the thing his mind caught first. Six guns, a perfect bracket, and nobody pulling a trigger.
"Don't shoot!" he yelled at Joel — then louder, at the dark shapes: "They're not here to kill us!"
A dart hissed past his ear and thunked into a pine trunk. Feathers, not lead. Tranquilizer.
Joel fired anyway. The shotgun's roar smashed the night apart, and one of the figures went down clutching his leg, screaming. Buckshot didn't care about doctrine.
"Joel, stop!" Ethan shouted. "They want us breathing — you kill one and they'll stop being polite!"
Another flash bloomed over the rocks. Ethan squeezed his eyes shut, counted two heartbeats, opened them to Ellie dragging him behind the stone outcrop, her rifle up and shaking in her hands. She'd never pointed it at a person before. He could see her deciding, right now, whether she could pull the trigger.
"Gas next," Ethan said. "They'll gas the hollow. Uphill — now."
"How do you—" Ellie started.
He was already moving, hauling her up the ice-slick rock. Halfway up her boot skidded and she went down hard on one knee with a bitten-off cry — Ethan caught her wrist before she could slide, hauled her upright, and they kept climbing, her rifle clattering against stone. His thigh screamed at the climb — weeks healed, but sprinting uphill was a different animal. He bit down on it and kept going.
Below, a canister arced through the air and burst in the hollow where they'd been sleeping, trailing thick white smoke.
Joel's voice, raw through the ringing: "Ethan! How did you know that?"
"No time—"
A Warden broke from the treeline to cut them off, dart rifle raised — and underneath the ringing in Ethan's ears, he caught it: the sub-vocal radio squelch, a voice clipped tight.
"Rook, collapse left. Take the girl breathing."
Ethan didn't think. "Rook's on your left, Ellie! Down!"
She dropped. The dart took the air where her head had been.
And then the whole fight tilted sideways — a rifle cracked from above, from the ridge the Wardens had come down, and the Warden called Rook spun and folded, clutching his shoulder.
Hale's voice, ragged, rolling down the slope: "Carrow! Left flank!"
Muzzle flashes stitched the treeline. Carrow, one arm in a blood-dark sling, firing one-handed from behind a frost-covered pine, her face set like stone. The Wardens' neat bracket shattered — suddenly they were the ones caught in the middle, Joel's shotgun below and two rifles above.
"Fall back!" someone shouted — the leader, the same clipped voice from the radio. "Fall back! Regroup at secondary!"
They went like professionals, dragging their wounded, covering each other in pairs. Thirty seconds and the ridge was empty: trampled snow, a dropped dart rifle, white smoke curling out of the hollow.
Silence came back, heavier than before. Somewhere down the slope, a wounded Warden was still crying out, the sound getting smaller as they dragged him away.
Ellie was breathing hard against the rock, her rifle lowered, her knuckles white around the grip. "Hale," she whispered. "Carrow."
They came down the slope together — Hale with Carrow's good arm over his shoulders, her face grey-white, the sling dark with fresh blood at the edges. Hale's own breathing was ragged, a cut open along one cheekbone.
"Tunnel came out above their position," Hale grunted, easing Carrow down against the outcrop. "Heard the shooting." He glanced at the trampled camp, the feathered darts, the white smoke still curling. "Containment team. They wanted you alive."
"Lucky," Joel echoed, but he wasn't looking at Hale. He was staring at Ethan.
Ethan felt it before he looked up — the weight of Joel's gaze, the question sitting in it like a stone.
"You called him Rook," Joel said quietly. "Before a word on that channel. Before any of us could've heard it."
The fire was dead. The cold was seeping back. Ethan looked at Joel, then at Ellie, then at the trampled snow full of feathered darts — none of them meant to kill. Just to take them breathing.
"I read their SOP," Ethan said. "Greyreach logs. Containment doctrine. Six-man bracket, flash-dart-gas."
Joel held his gaze. "That callsign wasn't in any log, kid."
Ethan had nothing. The silence stretched thin as ice.
Joel stood, picked up the dropped dart rifle, and turned it over in his hands the way a man memorizes a new kind of threat. "We're moving. Now. Before they regroup." He looked at Ethan once more. "That thing you knew? We're gonna talk about that."
He walked off to break camp. Ethan stood in the trampled snow, watching the treeline where the Wardens had vanished — and felt Ellie's hand slip into his, quick and warm, and let go.