By the second day on the road, the world had narrowed to the sound of feet and wheels and breath. The caravan moved in a long, uneven ribbon across the flats, the sea a gray blade on the horizon and the sky a low sheet of pewter that refused to break. Gemma walked near the center, where the soldiers took turns flanking the civilians. Even people she'd only glimpsed in doorways, Renn with his dockman's hands, Sandra with her careful steps and haunted eyes, had joined the march. No one spoke much. The quiet felt like a pact.
The land changed slowly. Salt grass gave way to scrub, then to pale, wind-bent heather that sighed when they passed. Every so often they crossed stone causeways over runnels of brackish water, black as iron, slick with the faint oily sheen that had made Renn flinch the first time he'd seen it. Birds kept their distance. A gull wheeled once and dipped toward a pool, then lurched upward mid-flight as if burned, beating its wings toward a safer sky.
Gemma tested her palm for the fourth time that morning. She didn't strain or reach; she simply let the breath come in, held it at the bottom, and pictured a circle. Not a flame, not a blade, only a loop of light the size of a coin, suspended just above her skin. It rose like frost takes a window, thin and perfect, and the air within the ring hummed with the taste of tin. When she blinked, the circle brightened, and when she exhaled, it dimmed. She could make two at once now, three if she focused, though the third always trembled.
Candriela noticed before anyone else. "You've been practicing," she said, falling into step beside her.
Gemma tipped her palm. The circle hovered, steady as a coin on a string. "Only to keep it from shouting," she answered. "When it stays quiet, I can think."
Candriela's mouth twitched toward something like a smile. "Good. Think more than you shine. The moment you start to look useful, some fool with a banner will put you in the front and call it destiny."
"I won't let them," Gemma said.
"You won't get a vote," Candriela replied, soft but certain. "That's how fronts are made."
They walked a while without talking. The road climbed a shallow rise where the wind smelled of dried kelp and peat. The heather rolled down toward a low wetland, and beyond that, a band of darker earth where thornbushes crouched like animals drinking. Gemma tried the second circle and held both, one warm, one cool, until sweat pricked her scalp. When she let them go, the air closed with a sound so faint that she only felt it in her teeth.
Later, when Aros dropped back from the forward scouts to check the column, she showed him too. He studied the little orbit of light with the same careful attention he gave to maps and knives.
"Can you stop it faster than you start it?" he asked.
"Yes."
"And can you make it through something you care about without thinking you should?"
Gemma met his gaze. "I can make it, and I can stop it. The caring part is your problem."
That earned the smallest curve of his mouth. "Be responsible," he said, but the word wasn't sharp, only tired. "Power lies. It tells you that because you can, you should."
"You're thinking of Gustav," she said.
"For once, I'm thinking of everyone," he answered, which was not a denial. The lines at his eyes seemed deeper, the gray at his temples sharper than they'd been even a week ago. He walked as if the ground were a thin crust over something that might break. When he moved on, she watched him a long time, and it frightened her the way some things don't when you're a child and don't know to be afraid.
The day bled into a color without a name. Cloud shadows drifted over the flats. Far off, like teeth in a broken jaw, low menhirs stood in irregular ranks, old as a story no one tells anymore. The road aimed for them.
The first fly landed on Gemma's cheek before she saw the bodies. She brushed it away and felt the buzzing thicken, a tremor in the air like a swarm hiding in the light. Then the smell arrived, copper and milk and rot, and the caravan slowed of its own accord, people drawing closer, the line folding in until it felt like they were all one thing moving.
The field opened on the other side of the menhirs. The grass there was flattened into patterns of dark and darker, soaked through. Bodies lay where they had fallen: some curled as if sleeping, some opened like meat in a market, some missing pieces the way a shoreline is missing stones after a storm. They were not dressed like Custodians. They were farmers in work coats, women with shawls bound tight, boys not much older than Gemma with their hair still cut in village fashion. Hands had been tied on some; on others, not at all. Wherever a throat had been cut, the blood had soaked to the roots and held the red the way a secret holds a name.
Broko swore under his breath and started counting, lips moving, jaw hard. Talon raised one hand, and the front line halted. Candriela scanned the horizon, then the ground between each corpse, reading the story no one had written. She pointed to a set of tracks that crossed and recrossed what might once have been a path, and Aros nodded like a man who recognized the handwriting of a ghost.
"Keep the children back," Diana would have said, and Gemma's heart stumbled at the empty space where that voice should be. No one spoke her name. No one had to.
They threaded through the dead, careful not to step where someone had been made to kneel. Renn went quiet as a quarried stone. Sandra held the strap of a stranger's pack for a woman whose hands shook and did not let go until they were past the worst of it. The flies made a slow, endless whisper. Somewhere out in the scrub, a thing with a thin voice called to another of its kind, and no answer came.
They reached the far side of the killing ground and found the ditch. At first Gemma thought the ditch had been dug to drain the field. Then she saw that what she had taken for water was a continuous dark smear, and that what moved on the surface were not ripples but wasps drinking. Aros crouched, touched the mud beside it with the back of his fingers, and stood again without speaking.
Beyond the ditch, the land dipped, then climbed toward a saddle between two low hills. That was where the boy appeared: a lean figure in a torn shirt, bare legs up to the knee spattered black-brown, hair stuck to his forehead, the whites of his eyes the only bright thing in him. He stumbled over the rise and slid the last few steps, hands out as if he were falling out of the air.
"Help," he said, and his voice cracked into something small and ragged. "Please, please, it's still here."
The front of the column bunched. Talon lifted his hand again and moved forward alone. Aros cut across the line to meet him. Candriela was already angling to the boy's other side with the deliberate calm of someone approaching a tethered dog.
"Where?" Aros asked, steady and simple.
The boy shook his head as if the question itself hurt. "Near the creek. It's not a creek anymore," he said, swallowing hard. "It's black. It touched them and they went quiet. Then..." His hands made a motion that wasn't quite a gesture and wasn't quite a memory. "It pulled them open."
Gemma felt the circles prickle under her skin and pressed her palm to her stomach until the urge to call them eased. The boy's chest heaved. His pupils were enormous, a dark that ate whatever tried to live inside it.
"Name?" Talon asked.
"Jori," he said. "From Kesten. We were headed for Preta for trade." He looked over Talon's shoulder, counting the caravan with a quick, animal glance. "You shouldn't be here. It smells what the Light touches."
"What did it look like?" Candriela asked.
Jori flinched. "Wrong," he said. "Like ropes pulled through meat. It moved fast until it didn't, and then it opened. And when it opened, the air made a sound." His throat worked. "I don't want to hear it again."
Renn stepped forward with a waterskin. "Here," he said, voice careful, the way you speak to a net that could tear if you breathe too hard. Jori drank and sputtered and drank again, some of it running down his chin, streaking clean paths through the dried blood.
Aros scanned the saddle and the low hollows on either side. He spoke without raising his voice. "No fires. Civilians to the lee of the standing stones. Broko, take six and sweep a crescent ahead. Candriela, with me. Talon..."
"I'll place the line," Talon said. There was no heat in his tone, no hurry, only the certainty of a man who has drawn this diagram many times and knows where each mark goes. He turned to Jori again. "How long since you ran?"
Jori looked at the sky, lost, then at his own hands as if they were clocks. "Since the bells," he said finally. "Since the bells stopped."
Gemma moved before she realized she'd decided to. She took the boy's wrist, light, so he could have pulled away if he wanted. "It won't smell us if we keep the air still," she said. "And the air will be still if I ask it." She didn't know if that was true. It felt true in the way some things did now, new truths rising like a tide.
Aros gave her a look she knew, the one that weighed everything and then weighed it again. "Stay between me and Candriela," he said. "If I tell you to stop, you stop. If I tell you to run, you run."
"Understood," she answered.
They moved forward in a staggered line, thirty paces between each pair of scouts, the column behind them thinning into a long, uncertain spine that tried to be quiet and almost managed it. The sky lowered. Somewhere far to the south a weatherfront was turning the sea white, and the light from it made the grass ahead look the color of old bone.
As they neared the saddle, Gemma felt it: not a sound at first, not even a pressure, but a hollowness in the air, as if the world there had been scooped out and not filled back in. The circles wanted to bloom. She held them down, held herself together, breathed through the pinprick ache behind her eyes.
Jori pointed toward a clutch of low alders thick with last year's catkins. "There," he whispered, and his whisper went too far, as whispers do when they're afraid they won't be heard. "That's where it opened."
Gemma saw nothing. She almost relaxed. Then the flies lifted in a single sheet and fled toward the wind. The brush flexed inward, not outward, as if something beneath it had drawn a breath.
"Back," Aros said, calm at first, then sharper. "Back, now."
Jori clamped his hands to his ears and screamed. Gemma didn't scream. She closed her eyes and pictured a circle the size of the world. The air obeyed her, not perfectly, not completely, but enough to quiet the sound to something she could survive.
"Monster," the boy gasped, pointing with a shaking arm that had no strength left in it. "Please. Don't let it open again."