He dreamed of Sorin.
Not the valley, not the ground, not the open eyes. The dream went back further — to the barracks on the second night, the candle, the dried fruit divided with ceremony. Sorin's laugh arriving before the joke, filling the space the joke would occupy with warmth, making room. The sound of it. The specific frequency of it.
He woke to grey morning light coming through the room's single window and lay still for a while, holding the dream carefully before it dissolved, the way you hold something that will break if you grip it.
He thought: Sorin would have something to say about all of this.
He had been thinking this since the valley, in a low continuous way that ran beneath everything else. What Sorin would say about the march. About the flags. About the record books. About the border crossing and the cold river and the town that asked no questions. Sorin's voice had become a kind of internal commentary on the absurdity of their situation — the running translation of terrible things into the language of dark humor that made them bearable to look at directly.
What would he say about a war run as a mining operation.
Kael thought about it seriously.
Sorin would say: Of course it was. Did you think they were doing it for the flags?
He would say it without bitterness. With the matter-of-fact acceptance of someone who had grown up in the Low Quarter and had never once been surprised by the gap between what powerful people said and what they did, who had in fact built his entire personality partly around not being surprised by it, because being surprised was the thing that broke you and Sorin had made a decision about not being broken.
Kael sat up.
He had made the same decision, he realized. Not the same way — Sorin had made it with warmth, with the laugh and the generosity, the fruit divided into five pieces. Kael had made it with the cold thing, the controlled fury, the list of questions and the commitment to answering them. Different materials, same structure.
He went to find the others.
Bren was already awake, sitting outside the building in the morning air, the smooth stone from the burnt village in his hand. He looked better. Sleep had returned something to his face — not innocence, that was not coming back, but a version of the openness he'd had before, the directness, the willingness to ask the question that needed asking.
"What are we doing," Bren said.
Kael sat beside him. "We're going to find someone."
"Who?"
"General Auren."
Bren looked at him.
"He paused," Kael said. "On my face. He knew exactly which face to pause on in a column of two hundred. He knows what the symbol means. And I think — I'm not certain, but I think — he may be the only person in this entire structure who knows what's in those books and is not the person who wrote them."
"You think he's not part of it."
"I think he's a general who has never lost a battle being used by people who needed a winning general to execute a resource extraction project, and I think he may have figured that out, and I think that makes him the most dangerous person available to us."
Bren turned the stone in his hand. "Or the most dangerous person to us."
"Yes," Kael said. "Both are possible."
"Sorin would say that's not a great set of options."
"Sorin would say it in a way that made it funny."
"Yeah," Bren said. He was quiet for a moment. "He really would."
They sat in the morning air and the absence of Sorin sat with them, taking up the space it always took up, and they let it, because that was the honest thing to do, and honesty was one of the things they had left.