Haven woke them before the sun did—lantern-glow brushing the undersides of clouds, the steady hum underfoot like a distant drum. When Ethan stepped into the yard, breath fogging in the cold, the stronghold was already moving. Builders hauled timbers. Gardeners lifted steaming trays of seedlings from the warmed soil. Someone strummed a guitar soft enough not to wake the night watch finally asleep on cots near the forge.
Darren waited by the gate with his double-ended polearm across his shoulders, the blades catching lantern light in quiet curves. Kira perched on the wall's lip above him, one knee up, spectral knives sheathed but casting a faint shimmer along her forearms as if they remembered motion. Sofia ran a hand along the curve of her bow—Valkyrie's Spine—testing the flex, listening for a protest that didn't come. Riley arrived last, hair damp, sparks snapping between his fingers until he noticed and shoved his hands in his jacket pockets with a wince.
"Three days out," Ethan said, voice low. The yard hushed enough to hear him without making a show of it. "We follow the old highway west, then north to the valley where we first found a barrier. We scout, salvage, and get back. If there are survivors, we bring them home. If there's a fight we can't win, we don't try to."
Marcus stood behind them like a granite block, arms folded. "Rules are simple," he told the line of newer fighters shadowing the departure. "You don't chase. You don't get separated. You don't play hero." He tapped a knuckle against his breastbone. "We do the living for the dead."
That earned a small, rough laugh from someone. It steadied a few faces.
Ellie came to the gate with two wrapped bundles. "Dried meat, sweet cakes," she said, pressing them into Sofia's hands. "Enough to be annoying about rationing." She glanced past Ethan toward the river, where Keith stood with Vyre's head resting on his thigh like a coiled rope. "Don't make me send the serpent after you."
"I wouldn't dare," Ethan said.
The bolts slid. The gate sighed. Cold washed through the seam. Beyond, the world waited—grey scrub, slick road, the skeletons of signposts pointing toward names the map still remembered and people did not.
They stepped out. The gate shut behind them with the heavy-friendly finality of a house door closing on weather.
The highway wore the last week like a scar. Tire tracks dried into clay. A swath of flattened grass where a caravan had slept. In the ditch, a ring of stones black with old fire. Sofia stopped there a moment, touched a finger to the ash, then straightened without a word. Her bow rode her shoulder like it belonged there more than she did.
Kira ranged ahead at a loping, effortless pace, every few minutes vanishing and then reappearing ten meters to the side, the knives' faint halo blinking where her shadow didn't quite line up with the light. Darren set an easy cadence—long strides, steady breath, the polearm's haft balanced with the kind of casual intimacy that comes from a thousand repetitions. Riley hummed sometimes under his breath, then stopped and cleared his throat when the hum tried to throw lightning into his mouth.
They walked until the sun rubbed the mist thin. Birds—ordinary, blessedly ordinary—sketched lines high over the pines. Once they passed the shallow imprint of something that had dragged itself across the road and into the trees. They didn't follow. Darren looked at the marks, at the way the branches above broke, and set his jaw. They went on.
Ravi's map—copied on scavenged paper, charcoaled and smudged—said the old western suburb began after the long rise. It did. Houses huddled in threes and fours down short lanes, roofs slumped under damp leaves, windows blind. Someone had painted a line of blue handprints across one fence and the paint had run in the rain. A wind chime made of forks spun lazy over a porch and chimed a single note that hung far too long.
"Hold," Darren said, voice barely above the breeze. He pointed with the polearm's butt without taking his eyes off the road ahead.
Kira froze instantly. Sofia set an arrow on the string but didn't raise it. Riley stilled with his hand half-out of his pocket.
"Left," Darren murmured.
At first Ethan saw nothing. Just a porch. A couch rotting into itself. A pair of boots upended on the steps. Then he saw it—the faint shimmer where air should have been flat. A quiver in the light, like heat over asphalt. The porch boards dipped under weight that wasn't there.
He thought of the ambush birds ripping people skyward and the feeling in his throat that didn't fit inside a word for days after. He kept his face even.
"Back," he said. "Slow."
They moved like a tide pulling away from shore. The porch shimmer tracked them a meter, two, then stopped. The quiver flattened. Kira's eyes were very black when she looked at him. She tapped her temple with two fingers and then pointed: two more, high and right. He nodded. The air didn't move. The chime didn't ring again.
"Not hunting," Darren said, once they were clear. "Watching."
"Wraith hounds?" Riley whispered. His voice did not come out as steady as he had wanted. A spark popped between his teeth, uninvited, and he flinched.
"Not quite," Kira said, the barest smile like a knife's edge. "Not brave enough."
Sofia exhaled slow, smile lines bracketing her eyes. "We keep walking," she said. "Let them watch our backs walk away."
They did. And the air watched. And nothing hit them. Ethan counted that as three victories.
By noon, the highway lost itself in trees. They cut north on a deer trail. The scrub leaned in, friendly at first, then not. Vines braided low. Old willow trunks arched like ribs over the path, bark gone soft and furred. The world smelled less like water and more like leaves breathing.
They stopped by a creek the color of hammered zinc. Sofia knelt, cupped some in her palm, and poured it back.
"Elemental water back home spoils me," she said, standing. "Never thought I'd say that."
Kira pointed with her chin up the creek bed. "Boot prints. Three pairs. Small."
Ethan's head lifted. "Children?"
"Or women with thin shoes," Kira said. She set her palm flat to the damp mud, eyes down, and a ripple of that not-quite-light ran along her forearms as the knives ghosted into being beneath her skin. She listened to the earth the way Maya listened to air and footfall. After a second, she looked up. "Yesterday. Whoever they were, they were quiet."
Quiet didn't outlast this world long unless it learned quickly. Ethan's chest tightened. He set his hands on his knees for a breath and then straightened. "Keep to the creek line. If we're being watched, water will drown half the sound."
They followed the bend until the trees thinned and the ground sloped away into a shallow valley. The hillside dropped, then rose in a rough arc, and there, flat along the near ridge like it had grown there instead of being built, stood the ghost of a wall. A safe zone shell. Black veins laced through its surface where corruption had burned it, the way frost maps a window in winter. The gate hung loose on one pin, not wide but not closed.
No birds flew over that valley. The air had a held-breath quality that made the hair along Ethan's arms lift.
"That's it?" Riley asked, too quiet. "That's where—?"
Ethan nodded once. "The first place we saw something like safety."
Kira slipped ahead, knife-light fading. She reached the gate and pressed her palm against the twisted metal to still the swing, then leaned just enough into the seam to see. A beat. A breath. She looked back and raised two fingers: movement. Small.
Darren took the center. Ethan moved to his left, Sofia to his right. Riley rolled his shoulders like he could ease the tight off by moving it around. Ethan reached without looking and touched his sleeve.
"If we run," Ethan said, quietly enough not to knock on anything listening, "you keep pace with me and Darren. You don't stop to be lightning unless Darren says to. Clear?"
Riley nodded. "Clear."
They slipped through the gate. The world inside smelled faintly of metal and wet old wood. A line of chalk drawings ran along the interior wall—sun, flower, a stick figure with a crown. Ethan had to swallow twice before his body remembered what to do with breath that surprised it.
The courtyard stretched wider than he remembered, maybe because it was empty except for things that couldn't be salvaged. The main hall's roof had fallen in along one side, and the banners that had promised order hung in grey rags. A table lay on its side like a dead animal's body. From the far corner, where the kitchens had been, came the faint clink of something against ceramic.
Sofia signed once with two fingers and crouched, bow half-drawn. Kira flickered left, hugging shadow. Darren's stance slipped from walking to a kind of stillness that could move at any angle without needing to decide which first.
"Hello?" Ethan called, not loud, not soft. He didn't say we're not going to hurt you. He didn't say come out. Both lies in the wrong mouths.
Silence rolled through the hall like a thing that had been rehearsed. Then, behind the counter in the kitchen, a head lifted. Strands of hair stuck to a gaunt cheek. Eyes too big for the face. A boy. Then another head leaned into view, older, a woman in a coat the color of old tea leaves, a bandage along her hairline that made a white flag of her temple. She looked at him like he had come from either the sky or a story.
Behind them, nearer the pantry door, a third figure stood. Straight. Thin. A mouth like a painted line when paint dries. Her hair was pulled back so tight that her face looked carved. Ethan knew that face. The first safe zone had called it Councilor. He had called it trouble.
"Stand down," she said immediately, not to them but not not to them. Her voice had the old habit of being obeyed. "Weapons down. Hands visible."
Sofia's mouth curved before she controlled it. She did not lower her bow.
Ethan didn't smile. He lifted both hands, palms out, keeping Darren and Kira at the edges of his vision, keeping Riley in the center of it the way you watch a pot you don't want to boil over.
"We're from Haven," he said. "To the east. We saw your barrier red on the map and came to see if anyone was alive."
"Alive," the councilwoman repeated, as if tasting the word for rot. "We've maintained order."
Kira's eyebrow went up to a place it did not visit often. Sofia's bow tipped one degree lower, thoughtful.
"How many?" Ethan asked, eyes on the woman's mouth because it would be what lied if anything did.
The councilwoman's throat worked once. "Enough."
"That's not a number," Darren said, gentle as a warning.
The woman in the coat touched the boy's shoulder. "Fifteen," she said softly. Her voice had the warmth of soup. The boy pressed closer to her without taking his eyes off Ethan. "Mostly children. Some injured. We had… we had more."
Lightning ticked under Riley's skin and then stilled. Ethan heard it. He didn't let his eyes flick to the sound and give it power. He kept them on the woman like the world had narrowed and widened at the same time.
"We can take you back," he said. "It's a day and a half on foot if we don't rush. We have walls. Food. Water. A doctor of sorts and a blacksmith and a dozen people who will find you a bed."
The councilwoman stepped around the counter. Up close, Ethan could see her hands tremble just enough to be human. Her gaze snapped over their weapons, measured, moved on. "I will speak to your leader," she said. "We will determine whether your… town meets the criteria for integration."
Sofia coughed into her wrist and somehow turned it into a quiet laugh. Kira looked at the knives on her arms like she had forgotten them there and was trying to decide whether to remind everyone they existed.
"We don't do integrations," Darren said mildly. "We do neighbors. Or family. Or we keep walking."
"What he means," Ethan said, and he did not raise his voice, "is you can come with us or not. But if you come, you follow our rules until you learn why we made them. Then you make them with us."
The councilwoman's eyes narrowed, considering this as if it were a puzzle on a desk. Something in her expression notched toward flint. "What is your title?" she asked. "Your station?"
"Ethan," Riley said brightly, too loud because he was young and didn't know yet when to let quiet do the heavy lifting.
"Ethan," the councilwoman repeated, and filed it somewhere.
"I'm the one who says yes and no," Ethan said. "But I'm not the only one who can."
"Democracy," she said, and made it a verdict.
"Experience," Sofia murmured. It could have been teasing. It wasn't.
A small face peered out from behind the pantry door. A girl with hair in two tight corns, ribbons frayed to thread at the ends. Riley's attention snagged on her alarm-bright eyes and softened without permission. Lightning, for once, did not seize the opportunity.
"Food first," Ethan said. "Then the rest. Pack only what you can carry without slowing. We move at mid-afternoon. We don't travel in the dark."
The councilwoman translated this into her tongue: "We will depart at fourteen hundred hours. Assemble at the gate. Leave nonessentials." People in the back bobbed their heads like flowers. Old order sinking hands into new soil.
Kira drifted to Ethan's shoulder as the kitchen turned into a murmuring hive. "She'll be a problem," she said lightly, like commenting on weather you held an umbrella for. "Not now. When she rests."
"I know," Ethan said. "We'll deal with problems when they're strong enough to argue back. Not when they're starving."
Kira's smile was quiet and, for once, kind. "You're getting good at being the person you didn't want to be."
"That supposed to be a compliment?"
"Unfortunately," she said.
Sofia and Darren moved through the rooms, checking doors, lifting blankets with a toe to see if the floor held, peering into rafters. Riley knelt by the chalk drawings, tracing the crown with the tip of a knuckle the way you touch a bruise to see if it's healing.
"Hey," the boy beside the woman in the coat said, not to Riley but to the space near him. "Is your hair supposed to do that?"
Riley patted his head as if it might correct itself by etiquette. A lavender spark crackled and died. "Yes," he said, and then grimaced. "No. It's complicated."
The boy considered this with solemn gravity. "Okay," he said. "I had a tooth that did that once."
Ethan watched something unclench around the woman in the coat's mouth. He took that victory and put it in the pocket you keep the small ones that add up when no one is looking.
They ate the food they had brought with the kind of thanks that doesn't require words. They bound two ankles, one wrist, a scalp cut that would scar into something almost like a comet. They layered sweaters over sweaters. They poured water.
By mid-afternoon, the line formed by the gate—fifteen souls and six duffel bags between them. The councilwoman stood at the front with her chin as level as someone at a podium and a vein beating in her throat like a small trapped thing that meant breathing anyway.
"Ready?" Darren asked, voice pitched to calm.
"Ready," Ethan said. He was, and he wasn't, and both were fine.
They stepped through the gate and into the hush of the valley's edge. The world outside smelled like pine and damp asphalt. As they took the first ten paces, Ethan felt the hair along his arms lift.
Kira felt it, too. "Down," she said, and dropped, and they dropped with her.
It wasn't the birds this time. The air above the road ahead twisted—not a shimmer, not heat. A ripple like someone dragging long fingers through water. The sound came a beat later—the almost-bark of something that did not do barking as a primary language. Two, three, five shapes unstitched themselves from the shade where willow branches hung low.
They weren't large. That would have made them simple. They were the size of big dogs with wrong-length legs and fur that bent light like oil film. Their eyes did not reflect, which made them look like holes.
"Back," Ethan said, very soft. "In. Now."
The councilwoman opened her mouth to command something at the same time the woman in the coat had already put her hand on the first child's shoulder and turned him toward the gate. Order. Experience. They met in motion.
Darren stepped forward, the Arc spinning so lazy you could mistake it for grace. Kira's knives sang into her hands like they had been trying to return to her since she set them down. Sofia's arrow rose and settled with the kind of aim that could ask a flea for its address. Riley's hands lit, not white this time but a gold that matched the settlement's hum, and he grinned like he had decided to be brave in a way that might keep.
"Not a fight," Ethan said, measuring distance, wind, the tilt of the ground that would throw ankles and narrow options. "A message. We're not food."
"Deliver it?" Darren asked, mild as ever.
"Deliver it," Ethan said.
The first wraith-dog stepped, then blinked, and an arrow existed in its shoulder where no arrow had existed previously. It yelped, pure animal sound for once. Darren cut his spin tighter and the other blade licked the air where the second animal's nose had been a fraction of a breath earlier. Kira flickered and flickered, then reappeared behind the third, nicking its haunch just enough to make it doubt the shape of itself. Riley put a low bright bar across the road and held it. The dogs watched it like it was a river they had not planned on crossing.
They decided against it.
When they melted back into the shadow, Ethan did not relax. You don't when shadows learn to wear feet. But he let the message settle—the one they had sent to whatever counted prey and predator in this valley. Not today.
"Move," he said, and did not have to say it twice.
They didn't run. Running said you believed the thing behind you more than the thing in front. They walked like the ground was theirs and the air was just rented for the hour.
When they reached the lip of the ridge, Ethan risked one glance back. The wall lay quiet. The chalk crown had been scuffed by a heel and still looked like a crown.
Beyond the trees, far as a remembered name, Haven's beacon lifted a thin thread of light into the afternoon sky.
"Home," Riley said under his breath, as if trying the word on his tongue to see if it fit there.
"Home," Ethan agreed. "Let's bring them to it."
They made the road by dusk. Kira took rear. Darren took lead. Sofia took every sound and sorted it into things that could be ignored and things that would buy them a second if they weren't. The councilwoman walked like she had invented walking and didn't trust anyone else with it. The woman in the coat told a story about a dog that had eaten a whole bag of flour and left paw prints through the entire flat and the children did not laugh, they grinned like maybe the skin remembered how.
When the first lantern from Haven threw its cut of gold between trees, even the pines seemed to stand a little straighter.
The gate lights brightened as they approached. The people on the wall shapes leaned, then lifted hands. The bolts slid back. Warmth rolled out.
"Welcome to Haven," Ethan said, and meant it like a promise he could keep.
Behind them, the valley breathed out in the dark where they had left it. Ahead, the stronghold breathed in, and the hum underfoot found a rhythm that fit their steps. The world outside still wanted its due, but tonight it could knock and wait.
They brought the living in. The dead had their names on a wall. The rest would be work, and they had hands for that.