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"You'll get stuck halfway through," I say, and it comes out almost fond despite absolutely everything happening around us, despite the very real danger, even though we are standing together in a half-collapsed hospital with a rival clan's scouts somewhere loose in the building and my own heart still hammering hard from a kiss that felt, for one brief moment, like it might have cracked something important open between the two of us.

"Then you will simply have to come pull me free again," he says, and for one unguarded moment, among all of it, something almost like a genuine smile touches the hard, familiar line of his mouth. "Go, Audrey. Confirm the route for us. I will see you at the docks before this is finished." I go, sliding sideways into the narrow black dark of the service passage with my rifle held close against my chest, and I don't let myself look back to watch him disappear the other way through the ruined corridor, back toward the rest of his warriors and the fight still very much waiting for both of us on the opposite side of this entire building. There will be time, I tell myself firmly, moving fast and low through the pitch-black passage, for whatever that kiss actually meant, for whatever answer we are still too afraid to say plainly out loud yet. Right now, in this narrow, freezing dark, there is only the mission ahead of me, and the steadily ticking clock, and the tight black passage leading, I sincerely hope, exactly where I most need it to go.

22

ROGG

The main force hit the depot's north entrance 40 minutes ago exactly as Audrey's plan called for, the diversion at the western docks pulling the bulk of Klok's patrol away from the loading bay long enough for Throk's warriors to breach the reinforced door and clear the ground-floor pharmacy in a fast, brutal sweep that cost us two wounded and no dead, a trade I would make again without hesitation given the alternative Grol had prepared for us on the main routes into the city. It was, by every measure that matters to a commander weighing a raid's success, a clean strike, executed exactly as planned, exploiting exactly the weakness Audrey identified in a council chamber less than a day ago.

The pharmacy is a ruin of shattered glass cabinets and toppled shelving, but the crates my warriors are loading onto the sledges are full, stacked high with the bottled antiseptics and sealed packets Hayden marked on her list weeks ago, and it should feel like a victory. It does not. It feels hollow the way an empty helm feels hollow, the shape of triumph with nothing living inside it, and I cannot name the reason until I realize I am listening for a voice I have not heard in the better part of an hour.

"Perimeter's holding," Throk says at my shoulder, low enough that only I catch it over the scrape of crates and the distant crack of gunfire that has, thankfully, thinned to sporadic bursts rather than the sustained fight we braced for. "Klok's patrol got drawn off toward the north entrance, exactly where we wanted them. Vorka's holding the line there without trouble." I nod, documenting the report the way I document every piece of a raid's unfolding shape, filing it alongside the wounded count and the loading progress and the dwindling daylight we have left before this whole operation needs to be safely back behind Ashfall's walls. It is good news, by any measure that matters, and I find I cannot make it settle the way good news usually settles in me.

"Good." The word comes out flat, and I catch Throk's brief, sidelong glance at the sound of it, the look of a man clocking something worth filing away for later without yet remarking on it aloud. My eyes keep drifting toward the broken window at the pharmacy's rear, toward the dark hulk of the hospital's western wing where I left Audrey to scout a service passage alone, a quarter hour ago by my count, though it feels longer with every crate that gets loaded and every minute that passes without her signal. "Any word from Riemer's team?" Throk's jaw works, a small, tight motion I have learned over the years means he is choosing his next words carefully.

"Nothing yet, Commander." I do not like that answer. I like it less with every breath I take standing in this ransacked pharmacy while she is somewhere in the collapsed dark of that hospital with only a rifle and her own nerve for company. I run the same grim calculations I have run countless times before sending warriors into uncertain ground — how long is too long, at what point does silence stop meaning still working and start meaning something has gone wrong — except this time, the answers refuse to sit as precisely in my chest as they usually do. They are sharpened by the ache of not knowing whether the woman who slept against my ribs three nights running is safe. I am about to send Throk to find a runner and push toward the west wing myself when Vorka's voice cuts through the room, thick with the particular satisfaction of a man who believes he has already won an argument he has not actually finished having.

"The human served her purpose," Vorka says, appearing at my elbow with a crate of his own balanced on one shoulder, his tattooed face split in a triumphant sneer that makes something ugly coil low in my gut. "We have what we came for. Time to leave, before Grol's main force regroups and finds us standing here counting bandages."

"We are not leaving." I do not turn to look at him. I keep my eyes on that broken window and the dark wing beyond it.

"The mission was the depot, Commander." Vorka's voice sharpens, needling, like it does when he thinks he has found ground he can hold against me in front of witnesses. "The mission is complete. The human's usefulness ended the moment she confirmed a route we've already used. We have no obligation to wait on—" I turn on him before he finishes the sentence, and something in my face must warn him, because the sneer flickers, momentarily, before he catches it and forces it back into place. I close the distance between us in two strides and take a fistful of his leathers in one hand, hauling him bodily against the nearest standing shelving unit hard enough that a dislodged bottle of something long since spoiled shatters against the floor between our boots.

"We do not leave our own," I snarl, lower and more dangerous than I have let it get in council before, low enough that every warrior in the pharmacy goes still and silent around us, watching. "Not for supplies. Not for schedule. Not for your convenience, Vorka. If you ever suggest again, in front of my warriors, that a member of this clan is expendable the moment she has served her use to you, I will finish the conversation Grol's people interrupted the day you sabotaged that gate the last time you tried it, and I will not stop at leathers next time."

The pharmacy holds its breath around us, the only sound the faint drip of melting frost somewhere in the ruined ceiling and the distant, thinning crack of gunfire from the north entrance, and I hold Vorka's gaze a long, deliberate moment before I let the words settle fully into every warrior watching, into every young warrior in particular who has spent years wondering, in whatever quiet way young warriors wonder about such things, whether the commander's patience with Vorka's constant sniping meant something about where the true line actually sat. Vorka's throat works against my grip, his eyes hard and furious but wary now, and I release him abruptly, letting him stumble back against the shelf as I turn away, my breath still coming hard through my nose. I do not look back to see how he composes himself. I have more urgent things demanding my attention than the wounded pride of a person who does not understand what it costs to actually protect something.

Around us, the loading detail has gone very quiet, the scrape of crates against the floor replaced by the particular silence of warriors who have watched their commander come closer than usual to breaking a man's neck over a woman half his own size and none of his own blood, and I do not miss the way a few of the younger ones — Zog chief among them — glance between Vorka and myself with something that looks less like disapproval and more like a wary, private satisfaction. Vorka has not made himself popular with everyone in this camp, whatever authority his rank still carries. I have simply never before given the rest of them permission, quite this openly, to show it.

"Back to work," Throk says, low and even, and the yard's motion resumes by slow degrees, crates lifting, sledges creaking under their new weight, the ordinary business of a raid's aftermath reasserting itself over the tension still hanging thick in the ransacked pharmacy air. I move to the broken window and look out across the dark, snow-choked lot toward the hospital's western wing, and something colder than the winter air settles into my chest, an instinct honed over decades of reading a battlefield before it fully declares itself. It is too quiet over there. Not the quiet of a secured area — the quiet of a held breath.

"Radio," I bark, and Zog is already crossing the room with the salvaged unit before I've finished the word, static crackling faintly as he thumbs it live.

"Scout One to command," comes the voice through the static, one of the warriors I posted at the tunnel's far exit, and there is a strain in it that I do not like at all. "We have movement. Sub-level access, west wing. It's them — it's Riemer's signal, but—" A pause, longer than it should be, filled with nothing but the hiss of dead air. "Commander, wait. There's — there are people down here. A lot of them. Human. They're not ours." My hand tightens around the radio's edge hard enough that the casing creaks in my grip.

"Secure the perimeter," I order, and every warrior in the pharmacy is already dropping crates and reaching for weapons at the tone of my voice, the same tone I have used to send men into fights they did not expect to survive. "Full team, west wing, now. Throk, with me." I am already moving toward the shattered doorway, my greataxe coming off my shoulder and into my grip, and whatever hollow victory I felt a few minutes ago has burned away entirely, replaced by a single sharp point of dread aimed directly at that silent, waiting wing of the hospital and the woman I left alone somewhere inside it. Throk matches my steps without a word, matching my pace across the ruined lot, and I do not slow down to explain myself, because there is nothing to explain — there is only the certainty, cold and absolute, that whatever Audrey has found down there in the dark, it is not going to be simple, and I will not reach her fast enough unless I stop thinking and start running.

The snow-choked lot between the pharmacy and the hospital's western wing is maybe 200 paces of open, treacherous ground, littered with the wreckage of vehicles decades dead and drifted deep enough in places to slow a lesser man to a walk, and I cover it at a dead run with my greataxe already loose in my grip, Throk matching my pace stride for stride the way he has matched it through a hundred worse crossings than this one. Behind us, I hear the rest of the strike team falling in, boots crunching hard through crusted snow, the whole detail abandoning the loaded sledges without a second thought the moment they understood what Scout One's voice meant. A commander who has to explain an order like that to warriors who trust him has already failed them somewhere along the way. I never had to explain this particular order, and I won't start today.

Human. A lot of them. Not ours. The words loop through my mind in time with my own pounding footsteps, and beneath the dread, some colder, more disciplined part of me is already running through possibilities — Grol's people, somehow moved into position beneath the very ground we scouted clean only hours ago; refugees, driven underground by decades of a broken city's slow collapse. None of the possibilities settle the dread. All of them mean Audrey is standing, right now, in a room full of strangers with no one at her back but her own steady nerve, exactly the way she has stood in rooms like it across half a decade of hard winters before she ever had cause to trust an orc's axe to stand there with her. The western wing's shattered entrance looms up out of the dark ahead of us, and I do not slow down as I reach it, taking the debris-strewn threshold at a dead run with Throk half a step behind me, my whole world narrowed down to a single, burning point of purpose: Find her.

23

AUDREY

The service passage runs longer than I expected, twisting twice through collapsed maintenance shafts I have to climb over rather than through, and by the time I reach what should be the western stairwell according to the old hospital schematics I half-remember from a scavenging run years back, I've lost nearly ten minutes I did not have to spare picking a path through debris no map could have warned me about. The radio at my hip has stayed stubbornly silent this whole stretch, dead air where Rogg's voice should have been by now if the rest of the team had cleared the main collapse as fast as we hoped, and I feel the tight, familiar coil of a mission running long start to wind itself through my chest, the same coil I've learned to trust over five winters of hunts that didn't go quite the way I planned them.

The stairwell itself is a dead end, half its steps sheared away entirely by some old structural failure, and I'm crouched at the base of it studying an alternate route on the water-stained schematic Hayden copied out for me when I notice the locker — a rusted supply cabinet wedged sideways into what should be a solid wall, its hinges bent at an angle no accident would produce on its own. Deliberate. Someone jammed this here on purpose, to hide whatever sits behind it, and every hard-won instinct I have built across five winters of reading a landscape for danger tells me that whatever's back there is worth the risk of finding out.

The jammed locker gives way under a hard shove of my shoulder, metal shrieking against metal, and I stumble through into a cavernous space that smells of mildew and old copper pipe and, underneath that, unmistakably, of people — dozens of them, judging by the shapes that resolve out of the gloom the moment my eyes adjust, all of them staring back at me with the particular wariness of survivors who have learned the hard way not to trust anything that walks in through a locked door.

It is a boiler room, or what used to be one, vast pipes running overhead thick with rust, and along the walls someone has strung salvaged blankets and rigged cook fires in old oil drums, the whole space arranged with the careful, hard-won efficiency of people who have been living here a long time. My hand goes instinctively to my rifle, though I do not raise it — these are not Iron Tusk scouts, whatever else they are, and something in my gut tells me raising a weapon in this room would be the last mistake I ever made.

The air down here tastes different than the air in the rest of the ruined hospital, warmer, faintly sweet with the smell of something cooking low over one of the drums, and beneath the wariness on every face turned toward me I catch something else too, something that looks uncomfortably like hope — the particular, fragile hope of people who have spent decades assuming the world beyond their hidden door held nothing but danger, watching a stranger walk through it and, for one held breath, wondering if this might be the exception.

My pulse is still hammering hard from the climb and the ten lost minutes and the low, animal wariness of stepping into a stranger's hidden ground uninvited, and I force my breathing level by the same slow count I've used before every difficult shot I've ever taken, letting the room resolve fully into focus around me. I count them without meaning to, the old habit of a person who has spent her life assessing every gathering of people for threat and opportunity — perhaps 40 souls, ranging from a handful of gray-haired elders to children young enough to still be carried, all of them thin in the way of people who have learned to make scarce food stretch across a whole community rather than let anyone go without. A little further back, half-hidden behind a stack of salvaged crates, I see the crude markings of a settlement that has survived here a very long time — a chalk tally of days on the concrete wall running into the thousands, a child's drawing of the sun pinned up beside cook fires that clearly haven't seen actual sunlight burn behind them in longer than that child has been alive.

An older woman steps forward from the huddled crowd, chestnut hair gone mostly to gray but still braided back the way I braid my own, her weathered face hard and unreadable, one hand wrapped white-knuckled around the haft of a heavy pipe wrench that she is clearly prepared to use. Her eyes go straight to my pack, to the Ashfall sigil stitched crudely into the canvas, and something in her expression sharpens with an emotion I cannot immediately place.