They moved east with the light at their backs. Wind pushed dust along the flats, whispering through thorn and cracked shale. Jorin set a pace that demanded attention but not breathless effort—military, measured. He watched the horizon the way a reader watches a line of text for the word that changes everything.
Kael let his steps loosen. Twice, three times, he slipped into a blink-step and back, careful to keep the distance short enough that it looked like a quick-footed boy rather than a disappearing one.
"Good," Jorin said without looking. "But choose where you plant before you move. Don't vanish into a stumble."
Kael planted the next one as if he'd been told the earth would rise to meet him. It did.
By midmorning, heat shimmered off the flats. A scatter of low boulders offered shade enough for a drink. Jorin passed Kael a ration bar that tasted like sawdust and salt and sat with his back to stone, scanning. The habit of a man who had been ambushed enough times to make sitting a strategy.
"We'll circle back toward the drop," he said. "Two ridges out, one ridge home. We don't tempt luck on a good run."
Kael nodded. He almost told Jorin about the second channel. The words pressed up, hot and clumsy. He swallowed them. Discipline, not confession.
They set out again and crested a low rise to find three beasts nosing at mineral crust—boulder-thick shoulders, tusks wet with mud, armored hides flaked with sun. Type Three Velkra, smaller cousins to the tusked coil that had started all of this. One lifted its head, scenting the air, and decided the two figures weren't interesting enough to chase.
"Ignore them," Jorin said. "No reason to fight everything you can beat." His gaze tracked to a darker line beyond, where rock folded into a shallow gorge. "We'll use the cut. Less visible."
In the gorge, the world narrowed to a path two men wide and a ceiling of broken sky. Sound carried differently—footfalls louder, breath a secret you could hear. A thin snarl drifted from the bend ahead. Jorin's hand lifted, palm down. He didn't look at Kael, only lowered two fingers toward the gravel.
Quiet.
They eased forward and found the source: a lean, six-limbed carrion cat, ribs showing under hide, one eye milky. Not strong. Not interested in a fair fight. It bared teeth at their silhouettes, decided they weren't worth the bones, and slunk away into scrub that smelled like iron.
Jorin waited until the sound faded. "Restraint," he said, still not looking at Kael. "Saves your strength for the thing that matters."
Kael stored the line.
They were almost through the cut when the stone to their right shifted—not natural, not animal. A rough blind had been dragged into place: woven weed, dust, and a human hand that didn't belong here. It trembled faintly.
Jorin didn't raise his voice. "Step out," he said. "Slow."
A boy edged into view, younger than Kael by a year, clothes too clean for a scavenger and too patched for a cadet. He held a spear that had been a broom handle in another life. His eyes jumped from Jorin's blade to Kael's empty hands and settled there with misplaced courage.
"Not from our camp," Jorin murmured.
The boy swallowed. "I'm not after your packs," he said too fast. "I just hide here sometimes. The big ones don't fit."
Jorin's jaw worked. Kael saw him measure a hundred roads through this moment—hard lesson, soft mercy, clean threat, coin.
"What's your name?" Kael asked.
The boy blinked at him, surprised anyone had bothered. "Mair."
"You shouldn't stay," Jorin said, firm. "There'll be a sweep from our side later. They don't ask questions."
Mair hugged the spear. "If I go out now, I die."
Jorin frowned toward the wider flats. He was not a soft man. He was also not the kind who'd leave a kid to be ground into red paste while calling it order.
"We'll walk you to the lip," he said at last. "You run north for the dry creek and stay in it until night. Don't look back."
They did. At the edge of the cut, Mair nodded once—gratitude and fear tangling in his face—then bolted into the wash and vanished among dead shrubs.
"You chose not to break him," Kael said when the boy was dust.
Jorin's eyes stayed on the horizon. "Lines you cross once are easier to cross twice."
They took the long way home and made camp in a shallow hollow of stone. Sunset washed the world in rust. Jorin put Kael through a drill he called the Thirty: step, plant, three strikes; step, plant, three more. Kael threaded a breath of ember into the dagger's spine on every sixth strike and removed it perfectly on the seventh, heat folding into the blade and vanishing like a secret passed hand to hand.
"Better," Jorin said when Kael's shoulders finally shook. "You feel the ground now."
Kael sank to a knee, chest pulling air hard enough to sting. Sweat ran down his temples and cut cool paths to his jaw. He thought of the boy with the broom-spear and of Feyla at a lake he had never seen. He thought of families in marble rooms reading reports and deciding which lives would be pressed into which molds.
He thought, too, of lightning waiting under his skin like a word he hadn't learned to pronounce.
"Tomorrow," Jorin said, rolling his shoulders as if shaking off an old ache, "we'll talk about parry windows. If you can shave a blink from your guard, you don't have to be faster. You just have to be in the right place."
Kael wiped his blade, slow, careful. "I can do that."
"Good." Jorin's gaze softened for the smallest piece of a second. "I know."
When night settled, Kael lay awake and called a sliver of lightning to the edge of awareness, only enough to feel its shape before he turned it away. He pictured a wire running through his forearm, a clean path that would carry current when he was ready to ask for it. Not before.
"Layer," he whispered to the dark. "Weave."
And choose, Nathan said, almost fond. Always choose.
Kael let the quiet take him. In the morning, the path would keep demanding. He would meet it with feet that knew where to land.