# Chapter 18
Master Sin turned out to be nothing like the file suggested.
Kumo had pictured someone frail — a man who'd spent decades hunched over vials, more chemist than fighter, the kind of person who needed three trainee escorts because he couldn't so much as run. What met them at the eastern gate instead was a short, thick-shouldered man well past sixty, a satchel of glass vials strapped diagonally across his chest like a bandolier, and a walking stick that Kumo clocked within the first ten seconds as being a sheathed blade.
"Three of you." Sin looked them over, unimpressed. "I asked for cover, not a school outing."
"Best the Institute had," Spencer said, all easy charm. "You're welcome."
Sin snorted and turned to lead the way without further comment. It set the tone for the first day: the old man walked like someone with nowhere to be, stopping every so often to examine a plant at the roadside, muttering about toxicity ratings under his breath, entirely unbothered by the fact that three armed teenagers were the only thing standing between him and whoever might want him dead.
By the second day, he'd warmed slightly — enough to start correcting Kumo's assumptions about the poisoned needles.
"Foolish delivery method," Sin said, not unkindly, when Kumo mentioned The Web in passing. "Effective, but foolish. You're relying on a single compound to do a job that needs three. Paralytic, then a suppressant to mask the paralytic's tell, then the actual kill agent layered last so the body doesn't recognize the threat until it's too late to matter." He tapped the satchel at his chest. "I could build you something that drops a Grandmaster in under a minute, if you had the patience to learn to brew it instead of just throwing pointy objects at people."
"I don't have the patience," Kumo admitted.
"No," Sin said, "you don't look like you do." But he said it like a compliment.
Elina kept mostly to the treeline as they walked, bow reassembled and slung rather than her rifle — better suited to the canopy cover, she'd said, and Kumo hadn't questioned it. She moved half a step apart from the group most of the time, scanning, restless in the way people got when the terrain didn't suit them. Spencer, for his part, had recovered his usual rhythm, keeping Sin talking, drawing out old war stories about poisons that had nearly claimed emperors, guildmasters, entire wedding parties.
It was good cover, Kumo thought. Spencer's chatter kept Sin relaxed, kept the old man from noticing how often Elina's eyes swept the trees, how often Kumo's hand drifted near his wrist-guards without quite touching them.
On the third night, they made camp in a shallow gully off the main road — Sin's suggestion, not theirs, and a good one. Defensible on three sides, decent sightlines on the fourth.
"You're worried," Elina said, dropping down beside Kumo once the fire was low and Spencer had talked Sin into telling one more story a few yards off.
"Not worried," Kumo said. "Just listening."
"To what?"
He didn't have a good answer. The itch under his ribs hadn't sharpened into anything he could point to — no killing intent, no shape to the danger, just the sense that something out past the firelight was paying closer attention to their camp than the empty forest should.
"Nothing yet," he said finally. "Ask me again tomorrow."
Elina studied him a moment longer than the answer probably deserved. "You'd tell me. If it was something."
"I'd tell all of you."
"That's not what I asked."
Kumo didn't have an answer for that either, and for once, she didn't push. She just leaned back against the gully wall, rifle case within reach, and let the silence sit between them the way it always had — comfortable, mostly, except for the small part of him that noticed exactly how close she'd sat, and didn't move away.
Across the fire, Spencer's story hit its punchline, and Sin's dry laugh cracked through the quiet.
One more day on the road, Kumo told himself. One more day, and this would just be another job finished clean.
He almost believed it.