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“I have paired every skill gap.”

“That is not how camps survive.”

“It is how patients survive.”

Dreven watched Rath decide whether to make the argument territorial. The old warlord would have ended the dispute with command resonance. The man Kesta was beginning to trust waited. Rath finally handed the slate back. “If your pairings fail, I will tell you while we are dying.”

“Then breathe efficiently.”

The teams moved. As Kesta and Dreven descended toward the chamber route, they passed a wall covered in names instead of prisoner numbers, scratched one over another in different alphabets. Some had dates. Some had handprints beside them. One small print sat beneath the others, five narrow fingers outlined in dried pigment. Dreven stopped.

“We should keep moving,” Kesta said.

“Yes.” He did not move immediately. “But someone should remember this.”

Kesta photographed the wall, then took a second image without the imperial route marker visible. Evidence for a court, and memory for people who might never receive one.

“People before proof,” Dreven said.

“Memory is for people.”

They continued with the image stored in three locations. The descent to the pair chamber forced them through an abandoned intake hall. Forty-three metal squares were painted on the floor, each once assigned to a prisoner. Only nineteen still bore readable numbers. The rest had been scrubbed so often the steel had thinned. Hess pointed to the far wall. “They made us stand there while they decided who was useful.”

“Useful for what?” Kesta asked.

“Work. Blood. breeding. leverage.” He said the words without emphasis, which made them worse. “Elara kept changing our files. She made miners look sterile, soldiers look cognitively unstable, children look infected. Sometimes the lies bought days.”

Kesta imagined Elara alone at a console, altering lives one field at a time while the station watched her nervous system for deception. Dreven crouched beside one of the erased squares. A Kharovian glyph remained near the edge. He traced it without touching.

“A family name,” he said.

“Do you know it?”

“I knew the house. The empire declared them extinct.”

Hess gave a dry laugh. “The empire declares many living things extinct. It saves paperwork.” Kesta recorded the glyph. Dreven supplied the pronunciation. Hess supplied the names of two survivors who had used it in secret.

The rescue acquired another purpose: not only bodies removed from Hallow, but identities restored before imperial records could erase them again.

At the final junction, Kesta made every team repeat the evacuation priorities aloud. Children. Critical injured. Ambulatory prisoners. Evidence only when it did not displace a living person. No one could later claim confusion when fear made selfishness sound tactical. Rath repeated the order last.

“You distrust me,” he said.

“I distrust everyone under pressure, including myself.”

“That may be the first sensible doctrine Ash Camp has produced.”

Dreven’s tail moved once, an almost amused response. The small sign reassured Kesta more than any declaration could have. He remained present inside the danger, not consumed by it. The buried mesh warmed as if the station approved. Kesta hated that approval enough to smile.

“Let it think it is getting what it wants,” she said. “Then we disappoint it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Elara

The lower ward had been built for bodies the empire did not intend to return. Beds were welded to the floor. Restraint rings lined the walls. The air carried the sweet chemical smell of compliance drugs and the sourer odor of people kept alive after hope had become medically inconvenient.

Kesta and Dreven passed three empty cells before they heard a woman’s voice, thin but steady, repeating the same four notes. Kesta listened once through the pattern and understood it was not a song. It was a timing code.