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"She's not breathing right."
Cyrus shoved past Lien, dropped to his knees beside the soldier. Kael was already there, two fingers on the man's throat. Her face—blank. Locked down.
"He's gone," Kael said.
The convoy kids pressed close to the wagons, silent. Even the little ones knew.
Lien crouched beside him. "He called you Reaper."
"I heard."
"You gonna tell us what that means?"
Kael stood, wiping her hands on her pants. Didn't answer. Didn't need to. Cyrus had seen the ink—command chains woven tight up her forearms, kill-marks in clusters. Third Legion executioner units. The kind they sent when a camp mutinied.
"We moving or staying?" Lien's voice, flat.
Kael looked at Cyrus. "The key. You still have it?"
He pulled it out. Small, blackened steel, warm against his palm. The dying soldier had shoved it into his hand, whispering coordinates with his last breath. Blood-linked, probably. Broadcasting their position to every military relay within fifty miles.
"This is suicide," Cyrus said.
Kael's mouth twitched. "You got a better idea?"
He didn't.
"Then we use it."
The checkpoint sat a quarter-mile up the road—concrete bunker half-buried in the hillside, gate rusted shut, tower empty. Scorch marks blackened the walls. Old fighting, maybe five years back when the northern front collapsed.
Cyrus led them forward on foot, the key heavy in his fist. Kael walked beside him, rifle slung low. The kids followed in the wagons, wheels creaking.
The air tasted wrong. Copper and rot, something sharper underneath. The Scar Roads didn't heal right after the war. Things grew here that shouldn't—twisted fauna, half-dead predators with too many teeth.
"Stop," Kael said.
Cyrus froze.
The checkpoint gate was moving. Not opening. *Moving.* Rust flaked off in sheets as something pressed against the bars from inside.
"Back to the wagons," Kael said. Quiet.
"What is—"
"Back. Now."
Cyrus turned and ran. Behind him, Kael's rifle cracked once, twice. A shriek split the air—wet, wrong, not quite animal.
Lien was already pulling kids down from the wagons, herding them into a knot. "What the hell is that?"
Cyrus didn't look back. He shoved the key into the checkpoint panel, hands shaking. Old Imperial tech—ran on blood and bone. He pressed his thumb to the reader, felt the needle bite.
The gate shuddered. Gears ground deep in the concrete. The barrier began to rise.
"Cyrus!" Kael's voice, sharp.
He turned.
The thing crawling through the gate was the size of a horse—matted fur, exposed muscle, joints bending backward. Eyes filmed white. Scar beast. The war had poisoned the land so deep that animals caught in it came back warped.
Kael put three rounds into its chest. It stumbled, howled, kept coming.
"Get them through!" She didn't look at him, already reloading.
Cyrus grabbed the nearest kid—a boy, maybe six—and shoved him toward the rising gate. "Go. All of you. Move!"
Lien didn't argue. She took two of the smaller kids by the hands and ran. The others followed, stumbling.
The beast lunged. Kael sidestepped, smooth, and drove her knife into the side of its skull. It collapsed, twitching. She pulled the blade free, turned.
Another one crawled over the hillside.
Then another.
"Cyrus, how long?"
"Gate's almost—"
"Now would be good!"
The kids were through, most of them. Lien was counting heads on the other side, face pale. Cyrus ran back for the last kid—a girl with a bandaged arm.
She was crying. "It bit me it bit me it bit me—"
Cyrus looked down. The bandage was soaked through, red and black. The girl's skin around the wound was darkening, veins spiderwebbing up her arm.
Scar poison.
He knew that pattern. He'd seen it a hundred times in field hospitals, back when he still wore a medic's band. You had maybe an hour before it hit the blood. After that—nothing.
"Cyrus!" Kael's voice.
He scooped the girl up and ran. She was light, too light. Shaking.
Kael backed through after him, firing as she moved. The beasts didn't follow past the threshold. They stopped at the barrier line, pacing, snarling.
The gate slammed down.
Silence.
Cyrus set the girl down. Her lips were blue. Lien crouched beside her, eyes wide. "Is she—"
"Poisoned," Cyrus said. His voice came out flat. "Scar venom. It's in her blood."
"Can you fix it?"
"I'm not a medic."
"You were." Kael stood behind him, close enough he could feel the heat of her. "The way you looked at her arm. You know what it is."
Cyrus closed his eyes. His hands remembered before his brain did. The angle of the cut, the spread of the venom. He could see the treatment in his head, clear as glass. Burn out the infected tissue, flush the vein, seal it before the poison reached her heart.
He didn't have the tools. He didn't have the supplies. He had a pocket knife, a half-empty med kit, and a memory of how to do this that was five years old and covered in guilt.
"Cyrus," Lien said. "Please."
The girl was looking at him. She'd stopped crying. She just looked tired.
He swore, low and vicious, and pulled out his knife.
"Hold her down."
Lien didn't ask questions. She pinned the girl's shoulders. Kael knelt, took her legs.
Cyrus cut.
The girl screamed. He worked fast—peeling back the bandage, scraping out the blackened tissue. His hands didn't shake. They never shook when he was working, even now. He packed the wound with gauze soaked in grain alcohol from the convoy supplies, then stitched it shut with thread he sterilized over a lighter flame.
When he was done, the girl had passed out. Her breathing was shallow but steady. The dark veins were fading.
Cyrus sat back on his heels. His hands were covered in blood. He felt hollowed out.
Lien was staring at him. "You said you weren't a medic."
"I'm not."
"That's not—"
"I said I'm not." He stood, wiping his hands on his pants. They were shaking now. "She'll live. Keep the wound clean."
Kael stood too, slow. She was looking at him different. He didn't like it.
"We need to keep moving," he said. "That key lit us up like a flare. Anyone tracking military signals knows we're here."
"Then we move," Kael said.
They got the convoy rolling again. The Scar Road stretched ahead—cracked strip of old Imperial highway cutting through dead forest. The trees here were gray, leafless, bark peeling in long strips. Nothing moved in the underbrush.
Cyrus walked at the front, beside Kael. She didn't say anything for a long time. Then—
"Thank you."
He didn't answer.
"I mean it. You didn't have to do that."
"She's a kid."
"You still did it."
He looked at her. Her face was unreadable, but there was something in her eyes—something that made his chest tight.
"Don't," he said. "Don't look at me like I'm decent. I'm not."
"I'm not asking you to be."
He didn't know what to say to that.
They walked in silence.
The lights came on at dusk.
Cyrus saw them first—deep in the forest to the east. Military flares, green phosphorescent, the kind that burned for hours. Three of them, spaced in a search pattern.
Kael saw them too. Her hand went to her rifle.
"We need to move faster."
"We're already pushing the horses—"
"Then we leave the wagons."
"We can't. The kids can't walk that far."
Kael's jaw tightened. She knew he was right.
The flares drifted closer.
Then, from somewhere ahead—from the direction of the checkpoint they'd passed through—a voice echoed across the Scar Road.
Loud. Amplified. Familiar.
"Cyrus Vale."
He stopped breathing.
"I know you're out here. I know you're with her."
Kael's hand closed on his arm. "Who is that?"
Cyrus couldn't answer. His throat had closed up.
The voice came again, calm and cold.
"This is Captain Rhys Corvin, Fourth Recovery Unit. Cyrus, if you can hear me—come in. We just want to