They rode home under a sky the color of old iron, and Mira didn't let go of Ethan's waist the whole way.
"You've gotten tall," she said at one point, over the hoofbeats.
"You've gotten thin," Ethan said.
"Fair trade." He could hear the smile in her voice — the laugh, buried but alive. "Tell me about Jackson. Tell me everything."
So he did. The walls facing outward. Maria's council. Tommy's sling. The doctor's clinic with no straps. Sam, Wren, Milo, Nora — four kids, four designations, four names. And Ellie — he told her about Ellie last, and longest, and Mira's arms tightened, and she said, "Oh, baby," in a way that meant she understood everything.
"And you?" Mira asked. "The broadcast. Your voice on every radio in the valley."
Ethan was quiet. "Vane said I was advertising. That the world wants doses, not truth."
"Vane's spent twenty years believing that." Mira's voice was steady. "She's wrong about the world the way she was wrong about me. I didn't talk for two weeks, Ethan. Not one word she didn't already know. The world is stronger than she thinks."
David was waiting at the gate.
He wasn't supposed to be — the doctor had ordered bed rest — but there he was, leaning on Tommy's shoulder, and when Mira slid off the horse, he moved, faster than a man with his injuries should have been able to move, and then they were holding each other in the middle of the street, and Jackson politely looked away.
Three years. Three years of cells and counting days.
"I told you I'd come," Mira whispered into his shoulder. "I told you —"
"You took your time," David said, and laughed, and cried, and didn't let go. Over her shoulder, his eyes found Ethan — and the look in them was the whole war, won and lost and won again. You brought her home, it said. My boy brought her home.
The kids watched from the clinic porch — Sam, Wren, Milo, Nora, four in a row. Nora leaned toward Sam and whispered, loud enough to carry: "Is that his mom?"
"That's his mom," Sam whispered back.
"She looks tough."
"She is tough. She scratched her name in a wall."
The radio crackled at dusk.
Marlene had the watch room — her people monitoring Vane's net, the way they'd done for two years. She came for Ethan and Maria herself, her face white.
"She's broadcasting," Marlene said. "On our net. On her net. Everybody's."
They gathered around the set. Static. Then — calm, clear, almost kind:
"People of the valley. This is Ilsa Vane. Yesterday you heard a boy read names on my relay. He told you I harvest children." A pause. "He didn't tell you why Jackson is keeping five of them."
Maria's jaw tightened.
"I built a system," Vane continued. "Imperfect, yes. But it kept medicine flowing to those who needed it. These people burned it down — and offered you nothing. No doses. No plan. Just names on the air." Her voice warmed, reasonable. "So here is my offer. To whoever delivers the boy called D-09 to Kestrel — alive, unharmed — I am offering a year's worth of doses. For your settlement. For your children."
The room went silent. Park's face had gone white. Okafor's hands were fists on the table.
"The market is dead, ladies and gentlemen," Vane said. "Long live the auction."
Static.
"She's framing us as hoarders," Okafor said flatly. "And she's paying in the one currency nobody can refuse. Someone's children, Maria. She just put a price on a boy's head and called it medicine."
"She's not attacking," Hale said in the council, an hour later. "Dana's watch reports Warden columns on all three roads. Not advancing. Sitting."
"A siege without walls," Maria said grimly. "She's cutting us off. No trade, no riders, no supplies in or out."
"How long?" Okafor asked.
"Six weeks of food. Maybe eight if we ration." Maria looked around the table — at the faces, at Ethan, very deliberately not at Ethan. "She's waiting for the bounty to do the work. Somebody out there will decide a year's worth of doses is worth one boy."
"Then we don't wait," Joel said from the back. His voice was low, and it carried. "We never wait. That's when we lose."
Ethan sat very still. He could feel Ellie's hand on the back of his chair — not holding, just there.
"We're not waiting six weeks," Marlene said. "She wants him delivered. She wants a transaction. So we don't give her one." She looked at Ethan. "We end her. Not the market — her. The money sends another one, fine. But the next one starts from zero, without her network, without her name."
"She's at Kestrel," Hale said. "Fortified. Expecting us."
"She's expecting an army," Ethan said quietly. "Or a delivery." He looked up. "What if she gets neither? What if she gets — me. Alone. Walking through her gate."
The room erupted. Maria was on her feet — "Absolutely not" — Joel shouting over her, Marlene's hand slamming the table, Park with his head in his hands. And Ethan sat in the middle of it, very still, the way he'd sat at every council since he was fourteen, and waited for the noise to burn itself out.
Ellie found him on the wall walk after, and her face was white.
"They put a price on you," she said. "A year's worth of —" She couldn't finish.
"I know."
"And your plan is to walk in there?" Her voice cracked. "Ethan —"
He took her hands — both of them, right there on the wall walk where anyone could see. "It's the only way to get close to her. She wants D-09 delivered? Fine. I'll deliver myself." He paused. "It's what my mother would do. Talk her way in, then —"
"Don't." Ellie's grip tightened. "Don't you dare make it sound like her."
They stood there, hands locked, the valley dark below. Somewhere west, Warden columns sat on the roads like coiled snakes.
"I'm still here," Ethan said quietly.
"For now," Ellie whispered. And didn't let go.