Rhonda pulled the vehicle to a halt on the ridge, and the four of us sat in silence for a moment, staring at the reason we'd driven through the dark for two hours without speaking more than necessary.
The camp was visible at seven or eight kilometers through the binoculars — a wound of firelight against the black landscape, crude and purposeful, the kind of encampment built by something that understood fortification without having been taught it by any tradition I recognized. I glassed it methodically, sector by sector, the way you work a target package when the stakes are high enough that missing a detail isn't a recoverable error. Crude wooden walls. Perimeter patrols moving in irregular intervals — irregular enough to suggest intelligence, not enough to suggest discipline. A dozen spider-scorpions distributed around the outside, maybe more in the shadows where the firelight didn't reach.
And somewhere inside, Aphanea.
I knew it the way I knew things I couldn't fully account for — a certainty that sat below the level of reasoning, in the body rather than the mind. I sensed her presence the way you sense a change in pressure before weather arrives. The half-dead dragon had broken south some time before we arrived, climbing away into the dark without her. The sight of it departing confirmed what I already knew. She was in there. She was alive. Those two facts were the only load-bearing walls of the next several hours.
"How are we going to get in there?" Kathy whispered.
"We ain't," Grace said flatly. She turned to Kathy with something sharp in her expression that wasn't quite contempt — more like the particular impatience of a person who has very little tolerance for questions that don't account for the reality in front of them. "Get your rifle out. You said you're a sharpshooter. Time to prove it."
"Fine," Kathy said, the word coming out clipped and precise. "I'll make you eat your words."
"Go right ahead, Mrs. Taylor. I'll be happy if we all get out alive."
"What's the play, Thor?" Rhonda said.
I kept the binoculars up, finishing my sweep of the eastern approach before I lowered them and let the image of the camp settle into working memory alongside everything else I was holding. "Distractions are our best bet. I can get in under the right cover. What I'm more concerned about are those." I pointed toward the spider-scorpions moving their slow circuits around the perimeter. In the firelight, their carapaces caught the glow in ways that made them look almost beautiful. They were not beautiful.
"The fifty-cal and the M249 can handle those," Rhonda said. "Grace takes the fifty. We lay down suppressing fire when things go loud." She said it the way she said most things — directly, without performance, already past the decision and into execution. "What kind of distractions?"
"Flares. North, south, and west."
"We're to the north, Thomas," Kathy said.
"Which means," Rhonda said, picking it up without pause, "if this bad guy has half a brain, he knows Thomas is coming from the north. So Thomas goes east. The flares give him three false directions to choose from and leaves the approach clean." She glanced back at me. "Right, big guy?"
"You hit it exactly right. Rhonda and I set the decoys. Kathy, unpack the drone and get it in the air — give us a bird's-eye of the interior while we're out there."
We organized without ceremony, the way people who've committed to a course of action do when there's nothing left to discuss. I loaded the pack with what I'd need — a pair of explosives on the chance that this place needed to not exist anymore when we were done with it, which I was increasingly certain it did. A hundred and twenty miles from town was not a comfortable margin. I slid the enormous sword between my back and the frame of the pack, felt its weight settle, and we moved out.
---
The first kilometer passed in a silence that was almost meditative. Rhonda moved through the dark with an economy that continued to revise my understanding of what she was. Not surprising — her father had told me about the SEAL qualification, about the class she'd topped out of pure, personal, unperformable spite — but knowing a thing and watching it are different experiences entirely. She picked the placement for the first decoy setup with an eye I would have trusted from anyone I'd served alongside at any level, and she kept her perimeter awareness running the whole time I worked, her eyes and ears quartering the dark without apparent effort, her breathing controlled and quiet.
We didn't speak while I set the first traps. The work required the kind of attention that fills the mind to capacity, which was useful, because my mind had developed an unfortunate habit of drifting in directions that weren't tactically productive. Her scent reached me when the night air shifted — something sweet, unexpectedly clean against the rot and char of the surrounding landscape. Like strawberries. It reminded me of Aphanea in the way that any good thing in a bad place reminds you of another good thing, the comparison unbidden and immediate.
I compartmentalized it. Filed it behind the work and kept moving.
The rotation to the west took us deeper into shadow, which was good for concealment and complicated for everything else. The spider-scorpions came close twice — close enough that I could hear the specific sound their legs made on the hard ground, a rhythmic chitinous clicking that I was going to hear in whatever sleep I managed after this. They didn't sense us. Their tracking seemed to run primarily on visual input, which confirmed a theory I'd been building and gave me something to work with going forward. Sound could be a vulnerability. Filed that too.
Two hours to the second location. Another fifteen minutes to finish the second set of traps. Then south, with Rhonda peeling off to the west to link up three kilometers back while I completed the final arc alone.
Except she didn't peel off. Not immediately.
We reached the southernmost position and I set the last of the traps, running the detonator wire with careful hands, checking each connection twice. When I turned to give her the all-clear signal, she was already beside me — closer than operational spacing required, her body parallel to mine in the low scrub, near enough that the warmth of her was a physical presence in the cold night air.
The moonlight was doing things to her face that the fluorescent lights back in town had never done. Her eyes were the color of deep water in it — ocean blue, darker at the edges, catching the light with an intensity that had no tactical relevance whatsoever and was very difficult to look away from. I took in her scent again, closer now, and felt my body respond to it with the directness that the body applies to things it wants before the mind has finished forming a position. I was aware of her in every specific, unhelpful detail — the line of her jaw, the slow rise of her chest, the fullness of her against the ground beside me. My thoughts moved to Aphanea, then back to Rhonda, then further back to Grace and Kathy waiting on the ridge — a current running through all of it that I clamped down on with deliberate force and redirected back toward the mission.
The bulge in my pants was not a strategic asset. I refocused.
"You sure you want to go it alone?" she whispered.
"I'm not putting you in more danger than necessary." I kept my voice at the edge of audibility. "You're Orkan's daughter. That matters. If something happens to you on my watch, I won't forgive myself. That's not a standard I can operate under."
Her expression shifted — something tightened in it that wasn't tactical. "Damn it, Thomas. I'm a grown woman. I don't need protecting. Someone needs to watch your back in there."
I reached out and put my hand on the side of her head, drawing her closer, not calculating the motion before making it. Her face was inches from mine. The moonlight sat in her eyes like something caught. "Rhonda." I kept my voice steady against the pull of her proximity. "We beat the odds with modern tactics. I get in, I get Aphanea, I get out. You pick us up on the eastern edge when we move. That's where I need you — not inside, not taking fire. Outside, alive, ready to move. Otherwise this genuinely is a one-way trip for me."
She held my gaze for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes — a current beneath the control, real and unmanaged in a way I hadn't seen from her before. "You giant fool," she whispered, and the roughness in her voice had nothing to do with the mission. "You better not die for this woman. You can't see what's right in front of you."
I wanted to ask her what she meant. I started to.
She kissed me on the cheek instead — soft, deliberate, her lips warm against my skin in the cold night air, her breath carrying that same faint sweetness that had been quietly dismantling my composure for the last two hours.
Whatever discipline I had left made one last case for itself and lost.
I pulled her in. Both arms around her, drawing her against me with a completeness that left no ambiguity about intent, feeling her body go still with the surprise of it — that split second of stillness that precedes a decision — and then she was kissing me back and every thought I'd been carefully managing dissolved into the singular, overwhelming fact of her mouth against mine. The kiss was not tentative. It was not exploratory. It was the kind of kiss that happens when two people have been moving toward each other for longer than either of them has admitted and have finally run out of distance to cover.
I felt her hands in my jacket, gripping the fabric. Her body pressed the full length of mine, and the warmth of her against me in the cold dark was something I was going to carry in my body long after this night was finished. I kissed her with everything I'd locked away — the loneliness of the years, the weight of the things I'd done, the stunned gratitude of a man who'd stopped expecting to want things and had been proven wrong in the best possible way. She gave it back in kind, and it was its own kind of language, and in it she said something I didn't have words for yet but intended to find them.
When she finally pulled back, her eyes were different. Darker, softer, resolute. The mission was still there — it had never left, for either of us — but something else was there alongside it now that hadn't been before, named and acknowledged and impossible to un-know.
She held my gaze for one more second. Then she was moving — low and fluid and absolutely silent, disappearing into the dark like she'd been born to it, like the night had made room for her specifically.
I lay still in the scrub and watched the space where she'd been and breathed.
There was a conversation waiting on the other side of this. I intended to have it. But first there was a camp to breach, a woman to bring back, and a crude wooden wall between me and both of those things.
I gave Rhonda two minutes to reach distance, then I moved.