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The blade came for my throat.
I twisted left, felt the edge kiss the air half an inch from my skin. Kael's words still echoed in my skull—*Commander, I found you seven years after they buried you*—but his steel didn't care about reunions. The crowd roared. Sand kicked up around our feet. I had maybe three seconds before he pressed again, and I couldn't afford to freeze.
He knew.
Kael Ironhand. My left flank in the southern campaigns. The man who'd carried wounded through shelling for six straight hours and never once asked for relief. And now he was trying to kill me in a blood pit while a hundred drunk slavers bet on which of us would bleed out first.
I blocked high, caught his next swing on my forearm guard. The impact rattled bone. He was stronger than I remembered. Pit life did that—hardened you or buried you.
"Stay down," he muttered, low enough the crowd couldn't hear. His blade angled for my ribs.
I didn't stay down. I ducked under, drove my shoulder into his gut, shoved him back three steps. The crowd loved it. Coins changed hands in the stands. Shana Bonewhisper leaned forward in her seat, eyes narrowed.
Kael recovered fast. Always did. He circled right, and I mirrored him, keeping distance. His gaze locked on mine, and I saw it—recognition, confusion, and something sharper. Grief, maybe. Or anger that I was wearing a dead kid's face.
"You look like hell," I said.
His jaw tightened. "You look sixteen."
"Not my choice."
"Didn't think the dead got choices." He lunged. I sidestepped, barely. His blade scraped my ribs, tore fabric, kissed skin. Blood welled hot against my side.
Pain flared, but I'd had worse. I spun, swept low, tried to hook his ankle. He jumped it, came down with an elbow aimed at my spine. I rolled, sand in my mouth, and came up spitting grit.
The crowd was on its feet now. This was what they paid for—two fighters who actually wanted each other dead.
Except Kael didn't want me dead. Not really. I could see it in the way he pulled his strikes, just barely. A quarter inch here, a fraction of a second's hesitation there. He was testing me. Trying to figure out if the boy in front of him really had Arlen Kash's instincts buried somewhere under the Ashmar skin.
I couldn't let him keep testing. Shana was watching. The slavers were watching. One wrong move, one hint that we knew each other, and we'd both end up hanging from the pit wall as examples.
I had to sell this. Had to make it look real.
I came in fast, low and dirty, the way pit fighters moved when they'd given up on honor. Kael blocked, but I hooked his wrist, yanked him off balance, drove my knee toward his stomach. He twisted, took it on the thigh, grunted. His free hand shot out, caught my throat, squeezed.
My vision sparked. The crowd noise dimmed. I clawed at his grip, felt his fingers like iron bands. This wasn't pulled. This was real.
Or real enough.
His face was inches from mine. Sweat dripped off his jaw. His eyes—pale gray, same as they'd been seven years ago—bored into me.
"Prove it," he whispered. "Prove you're him."
I couldn't talk. Couldn't breathe. But I could move.
I stopped clawing at his hand. Let my left arm drop. Then I tapped three fingers against his wrist. Twice.
Old signal. Unit code from the southern front. *Hold position, enemy rear.*
Kael's grip faltered. Just a fraction. Enough for me to suck in half a breath.
I tapped again. Four fingers, once. *Advance on my mark.*
His hand opened. I dropped, gasping, sand under my palms. The crowd thought he'd thrown me. They howled.
Kael stood over me, chest heaving. His blade hung loose in his right hand. He could end it now. Drive it through my spine, take the win, collect his purse.
Instead, he stepped back.
"Get up," he said. Loud enough for the stands. "I'm not done with you."
I got up. My throat ached. Blood still leaked from the cut on my ribs. But my head was clear now.
He believed me. Or he wanted to.
We circled again. Slower this time. The crowd didn't care—they thought we were both exhausted, dragging it out for drama.
"How?" Kael's voice was rough.
"Don't know," I said. "Woke up in this body. Six months ago."
"Ashmar?"
"Yeah."
His expression darkened. "They're all dead."
"Not all."
He lunged again, but this time I read it. Old sparring pattern. The same damn feint he'd used in drills a hundred times. I blocked, countered, let him push me toward the pit wall. To the crowd, it looked like he was dominating. To us, it was cover.
"They'll kill you if they find out what you are," he hissed.
"They'll kill *you* if they figure out you know me."
"I'm already dead. Been dead since they discharged me."
"You're fighting. That's not dead."
"It's close enough." His blade came down. I caught it on my guard, shoved him back. "Why are you here, Commander? What the hell are you doing in the pits?"
"Surviving. Same as you."
"Bullshit." He pressed in, faster now, and I had to work to keep up. "You don't survive. You plan. You hunt. So what are you hunting?"
Smart bastard. He always had been.
"Answers," I said. "About what happened to the Ashmar."
His next strike came hard. I barely turned it aside. "You think it was murder."
"I know it was."
"So do I." He drove me back another step. Sweat stung my eyes. "I was there, Commander. On the edge of the Dustborn sweep. We were told contamination protocol. Quarantine and relocate. But the orders changed."
"When?"
"Night before we moved in. New seal on the dispatch. Kill order. Every man, woman, child. Burn the camps. Salt the wells."
My blood went cold. I knew the Ashmar had been wiped. I'd pieced that much together from Alto's fragmented memories and the things people didn't say in the markets. But hearing it from Kael—hearing the military precision of it—made it real in a way it hadn't been before.
"Who signed it?" I asked.
Kael's blade hovered between us. The crowd was getting restless. We needed to end this soon, one way or another.
"That's the thing," he said quietly. "I saw the seal. We all did. It wasn't the king's."
I froze. "What?"
"It was a general's seal. High command. But not the throne."
The world tilted. If the kill order hadn't come from the king, then someone else had orchestrated the genocide. Someone with enough rank to forge orders, enough reach to deploy entire battalions.
And someone with enough to lose that they'd buried an entire people to keep a secret.
"Which general?" I demanded.
Kael's eyes flicked toward the stands. Toward the governor's box, where a girl in medic's gray sat beside an older man with silver braid on his uniform collar.
"Her father," Kael said.
I followed his gaze. Lira Tavan. The girl who'd patched me up after my second fight. The girl who'd looked at me like I was a person, not a commodity.
Her father had signed the order that killed Alto's people.
That killed *my* people now.
"He's dead," Kael added. "Died four years back. Heart failure, they said. But the order's still out there. And anyone who knows the Ashmar gift is still alive—"
"Is a target," I finished.
Kael nodded. "So what are you going to do, Commander?"
I looked at the blade in my hand. At the blood drying on my ribs. At the crowd baying for a finish.
I looked at Kael, my last living link to the man I used to be.
And I made a choice.
"I'm going to end this fight," I said. "You're going to let me."
"Like hell—"
"That's an order, Lieutenant."
The words came out flat. Cold. The voice I'd used when there was no room for argument and lives hung on obedience.
Kael went still.
I stepped in close, inside his guard. Put my hand on his wrist, the one holding the blade. Leaned in so only he could hear.
"*Fall back to rally point Dust,*" I said. "*Two clicks south, dawn position. Wait for my signal.*"
It was the last order I'd given before the ambush that killed me. The order that had saved half my unit when the enemy flanked us in the canyon. The order Kael had followed, even when it meant leaving me behind.
The order only he and I and the dead knew.
His blade trembled. For a second I thought he'd drive it home anyway, out of grief or rage or the sheer impossibility of it all.
Then his grip loosened.
I swept his legs. He went down hard, and I followed, knee on his chest, blade at his throat. The crowd exploded. Shana stood, clapping slowly, a smile sharp as wire across her face.
Kael stared up at me. His lips moved.
"Commander," he breathed.
I pressed the blade just enough to draw a single drop of blood. Enough to sell it.
"Stay alive," I told him. "I'm not done with you either."
I stood. Raised my blade. Let the crowd's roar wash over me.
And as the slavers dragged Kael out of the sand, he turned his head, just once, and his lips shaped words I read clear as orders on parchment:
"*The general's seal, not the king's.*"
Then he was gone, and I was alone in the blood sand with a secret that could shatter kingdoms.
Shana Bonewhisper descended from her seat, still smiling.
"Well done, Alto," she said. "I think we've found our star."