The debrief with Reyes ran late into the night. She had all five of us in the briefing room, a fresh pot of coffee nobody had touched going cold on the side table, and she made me walk through the forest encounter three separate times, circling back on the same details from different angles.
"Say the exact words again," she said, for the third time, pen hovering over her notepad. "Not the paraphrase. The exact words."
"'The little army sends its best now. I'm flattered,'" I repeated, and it felt stranger every time I said it out loud, like repetition was wearing a groove into how much it actually unsettled me. "Then later — 'command implies effort. They simply understand what I want.'"
"And it hesitated before that second line?"
"No. That's what bothered me. It didn't hesitate at all. Talked like it had already thought through the whole conversation before we ever stepped into the clearing."
Reyes wrote something down, jaw tight. "Dustin. You said the tier fours shifted formation before you adjusted your own positions. Half a second before, you said."
"At least half a second," Dustin confirmed. "Maybe closer to a full one, on the second flanking attempt. It's reacting to us in real time, but not through anything we could see it say or gesture. Either it's communicating on a frequency we can't perceive, or the tier fours under it have enough independent tactical sense now that they're anticipating us the same way it is."
"Neither of those is good," Ian muttered.
"No," Reyes agreed. "It isn't." She set her pen down finally, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of one hand, the exhaustion she usually kept off her face showing through for just a moment. "I'm elevating this to General Cole personally, and I'm recommending we start treating any confirmed named entity like this as a standing tactical threat, not an anomaly to log and move past. That means resupply priority, that means better intel before we send anyone back into that forest. You did good work today. All of you. I don't say that as often as I should."
"Feels like it should come with better news," Ralph said, wincing as Bruce — who'd slipped into the room partway through to check his bandaging — tightened the wrap on his arm.
"Rarely does, in this line of work," Reyes said, and there wasn't much comfort in it, but there wasn't any pretense either, and I found myself grateful for that much at least.
By the time she finally let us go, I was too wired to sleep despite how empty my core felt, that particular hollow, scraped-out feeling that came after spending three slivers of time back to back.
I sat on the floor of my room and started the slow work of pulling mana back in, letting the familiar rhythm of it quiet my head. It always helped, a little — the meditation didn't ask anything of me except patience, didn't have opinions about warehouses or ranks or majors with smiles that didn't move right. I'd almost gotten somewhere close to calm when someone knocked.
It was Bruce, out of uniform, a look on his face I didn't like at all — the same careful, bracing expression he'd worn the day he told me Angela and Daniela weren't going to make it.
"You should see this," he said, holding out a data tablet before I'd even fully opened the door, not bothering with a greeting.
I stepped back to let him in, and he sat on the edge of my bed while I read, tablet screen casting pale light across both our faces in the otherwise dark room.
It was an internal memo, dated that afternoon, from Major Voss's office. My name was in the subject line. I read it twice before the words actually landed.
Request for review — discrepancies in Corporal Johnathan's service record, Warehouse Recovery Operation, three months prior. Deleted access logs recovered from base server backup indicate unauthorized entry to restricted sub-level not reflected in after-action report. Recommend formal inquiry.
My stomach dropped somewhere around my boots.
"How did you get this?" I asked, voice tighter than I meant it to be, still staring at the screen like the words might rearrange themselves into something less damning if I looked hard enough.
"I still know people in records from the old base. One of them flagged it to me because your name was on it and they knew we served together." Bruce's expression was careful, worried, not accusing — which somehow made it worse than if he had been. "Johnathan. Is it true? Did you find something in that warehouse you didn't report?"
I thought about the room with the crystal-embedded weapons, the sniper and the knife and the assault rifle glowing dark red, the door I'd sealed shut behind me and the footage I'd deleted with hands that hadn't quite stopped shaking. I thought about how close I'd come to explaining it to the corporal who'd debriefed me that day, and how something in my gut had told me not to, some instinct that had kept me alive through three years of a world that punished trust more often than it rewarded it.
"Yes," I said, because lying to Bruce felt like a line I wasn't willing to cross, even now, even with the memo's cold official language sitting between us like a loaded weapon. "I found something. I didn't report all of it."
"Why?"
"Because the second the army knows there's a stockpile of crystal-augmented weapons sitting in an unguarded basement, every officer with ambition is going to want to know who gets them first. And the second they figure out I'm the only one who knows exactly where that basement is and what's in it — " I sat down heavily on the edge of my bed, the fatigue from the fight finally catching up with me all at once, my whole body suddenly aware of every bruise the tier fours had left. "I become a lot more useful alive under someone's thumb than I am free. I've watched what this army does to people it decides are assets instead of soldiers. I wasn't going to volunteer for that. Not after everything it already cost me to get here."
Bruce was quiet for a long moment, turning the tablet over in his hands like the weight of it had changed. "Voss is going to use this."
"I know."
"What are you going to do?"
I looked down at my hands, still faintly stained from three months of blood that never quite scrubbed all the way out from under my nails, and thought about Kane's voice on the highway telling me I was still soft, and the creature in the forest calling me Corporal like it already knew exactly who I was, cataloguing me the same careful way Voss had at the ceremony.
"I don't know yet," I admitted. "But whatever it is, I can't tell them the whole truth to fix it. If Voss digs one inch deeper than the warehouse, he's not going to find a kid who covered up a weapons cache. He's going to find out what 'short-range teleportation' actually means. And I don't know what this army does to people who can stop time once it finds out for certain instead of just suspecting. I don't know if there's a version of that conversation that ends with me still standing here, still with Vanguard, still anything close to free."
Bruce sat down slowly across from me, the tablet still glowing faint in his hands, expression working through something I couldn't quite read. "Then we'd better figure out how to make this go away before he gets that far."
"We?"
"You think I forgot who carried me out of that warehouse?" He set the tablet down between us, screen dimming to black. "I owe you a debt I can't exactly repay by staying quiet while some major with a grudge tries to bury you for it. Whatever this turns into — you're not doing it alone."
"You could get pulled into it too. Voss doesn't strike me as someone who draws neat lines around who counts as involved."
"I know that." Something steady settled over his face, the same steadiness he'd had the moment before he'd dragged me out of that basement with half his own blood already on the floor. "I'm still saying it. You didn't leave me behind when it would've been easier. I'm not leaving you to handle this by yourself just because it's inconvenient for my own file."
For the first time since I'd read the memo, something in my chest loosened, just slightly, the cold weight of it easing enough that I could finally breathe past it.
"Okay," I said. "Then let's figure out what Voss actually wants before he decides to make this official. Start with what you already have — who else has he pulled records on? Is this really just about me, or is the warehouse just the thread he happened to find first?"
"I'll ask around," Bruce said. "Carefully. My contact's discreet, but I'm not going to push harder than she's comfortable with. She's already risking her own position flagging this to me at all."
"I don't want anyone else exposed for my sake."
"Nobody's exposing anything they don't choose to." He stood, tucking the tablet under his arm, pausing at the door. "Get some sleep if you can manage it. Something tells me tomorrow's going to be worse than today, and today wasn't exactly gentle."
He was right, though neither of us knew yet exactly how right. I sat alone in the dark for a long while after he left, mana still only half-refilled, running through every version of the next few weeks I could imagine, and finding not a single one of them that didn't end with someone finding out more than I wanted them to.
Eventually I gave up on sleep entirely and pulled the wyvern's crystal out from under my bunk, turning it over in the low light, watching the two colors inside it fight for space the way they had every time I'd looked at it since the forest — an amber warmth I recognized as close kin to my own core, threaded through with something darker underneath, almost violet in the right light, like the creature had been carrying two different stages of purity at once and neither had ever finished winning out. I didn't have anyone to ask about it. The instructors who might have known were three bases away, and the one person here who understood mana cores well enough to guess — Reyes, maybe, or one of Cole's staff — was exactly the kind of person I couldn't afford to hand a piece of evidence to right now, not with Voss circling and an inquiry apparently already halfway drafted.
I thought about calling Emma. It was well past the hour the comm line usually opened for scheduled slots, but some nights the operator let calls through anyway if the queue was empty, and some nights I needed to hear a voice that didn't know the first thing about warehouses or inquiries or majors with patient, unhurried smiles. I got as far as standing up before I sat back down again. Whatever I said to her tonight would come out wrong — too honest, too frightened, and I didn't want her carrying that weight from three hundred miles away with nothing she could actually do about it except worry.
So instead I sat with the crystal in my palm until the shaking in my hands finally settled, and let the slow work of pulling mana back into an empty core carry me somewhere close enough to rest that it would have to be good enough for one more night. Tomorrow would bring whatever it brought. Tonight, at least, I still had a bed, a squad that trusted me, and a friend willing to risk his own record to keep it that way.