The jungle stepped into their clearing without asking permission.
It came low and jointed, forelimbs narrow as scythes, plated in wet slate that caught drops and turned them into beads. A frill along its neck pulsed in soft bursts of light, quick little blinks that did something ugly to your timing if you stared. Its jaw opened sideways first, then forward, like a cabinet that had learned to be carnivorous.
Kade murmured lanes and spacing. "Two lines. Rem front left. Evelyn off-angle. Lysanne threads. I take second contact."
The bracelet on Rem's wrist tightened once. Not ice. Pressure with a memory. Evelyn's palm found the upper ridge of his back, just below the shoulder blade. He heard her count without hearing her voice.
"In four," he said. He filled his ribs. "Out six."
The band eased. The dagger's weight in the small of his back settled like it wanted to be useful.
The stalker tipped its head in a way that made it look thoughtful. The frill blinked a pattern that promised to ruin anyone who believed in patterns. Evelyn did not. She lifted her hand and shaped two spirit lances in the same breath, a pair of dull white lines that hummed only at the edges. She threw them with an odd rhythm, not left then right, not even and odd. The frill stuttered to match the false beat.
"Window," Kade said, because the word was faster than a sentence.
Rem slid into the space that opened. He did not sprint. Sprinting is loud. He let the creature come to him and gave it angles instead of meat. The ground under his feet was slick and honest. He shifted weight through the hips, let the dagger's mass carry his arm down and across along the seam in the chitin where plates met with the impatience of bad carpentry. Cut on the Slip landed clean. The shell cracked and shed a crescent of dark.
The stalker ran backward like a spider that had learned regret, then came forward twice as fast. The jaw spread. A feint with the tail clipped Rem's calf while the real lunge came for his thigh. He failed a parry by the width of a thumbnail and took a rake along the outer muscle that burned like salt, but his stance held. The dagger stayed in the line of his body. Kade's hook spun from the side and knocked the frill against a root, breaking the creature's borrowed rhythm. Evelyn stacked a spirit shield in one fast layer against Rem's knee. The next step he took did not slide even though the dirt had decided to be glass.
"Trip line set," Lysanne sang from somewhere unhelpfully cheerful. "Two pins at ankle height, right of the rock, do not be a hero about it."
Rem did not look. He heard the shape of the warning and fixed it beside the shape of the stalker's shoulders. If he drew it across that line clean, everything would get easier for a breath.
The creature gathered itself. Muscles rippled under plates. One forelimb stabbed for his hip and the other scythed down for the shoulder, a pattern meant to make a person choose which part of themselves to keep. Rem let his own weight vanish at the last instant. He slid a half step to the wrong place, bumped the inside of the forelimb with his elbow, and pivoted his hips through the movement so the stalker had to carry the dagger's mass for him. The blade kissed the soft line inside the joint. Something important parted.
The stalker shrieked in a pitch that wanted to make hands forget what fingers were for. Evelyn's sigil flared at its chest for half a heartbeat and died the same way, by design. Rem committed the full weight of his body into a vertical cut while the lines of the world were still simple. The dagger came down like a decision that had been waiting all day. Shell cracked. Sternum plate split. The sound was not like bone. It was like something that never expected to be opened from the outside.
The jungle changed its breathing. It does that when a bigger idea walks into a room.
Silence thickened for three seconds, then learned manners again. Insects remembered how to be background. Far off, water went back to being older than everything.
Rem stood still until his hands knew the fight was over, then eased the blade back. His thigh stung and his calf throbbed with a promise he intended to keep short. Mud crawled up the side of his boot and pretended to be leather.
Lysanne reached him already unrolling a bandage. "Show me the rake," she said. The cheer did not reach her eyes. She irrigated the wound with something that argued with the local chemistry and held a compress down with steady fingers. "It looks loud and is not deep. You will hate bending your knee more than you hate bleeding. That means you still have both."
Rem glanced at the compress. "You carry that much medical in that little bag."
"I carry exactly enough," she said, and then gave him a thin smile. "Try not to make me prove that wrong."
Kade stepped to the edge of the clearing and let his eyes listen. He did not hear a second stalker. That was not a reason to relax. He tipped his chin once and that was the entire report.
Evelyn circled the fallen body. She crouched and set her palm near the split sternum where heat still hung. The wrong sweetness did not ride this creature. It belonged to the island, not to the pipeline that had followed them. She stood and moved to the false beacon staked on the rock.
The seal on its side would have fooled a clerk. It hummed like Imperial kit that wanted to be proud. Evelyn tilted her head. "Listen," she said.
Rem went closer. He did not hear anything until he did. A thin tone lived on the edge of perception, as if someone had bottled a whistle only animals were supposed to understand and then diluted it with rain. The hair along his forearms disagreed with the frequency.
Lysanne pressed the heel of her hand against the casing and closed her eyes like she was identifying a tea from the smell. Her mouth sharpened. "Lure tone," she said. "High enough to itch a lot of ears. Not loud enough to break wards. Annoying enough to make partial wards look somewhere else. If you were a large hungry something, this would feel like someone tapping a spoon."
Kade knelt and studied the seam where the beacon met the rock. Mud around the base had dried in an earnest hurry. He ran a finger along the joint and lifted it clean. A wafer of black lacquer snapped free from a hidden recess under the casing, no bigger than a fingernail. A nick at two o'clock, fine as a bite mark.
Lysanne's eyebrows went up the way they do when arithmetic shows you a prime where you wanted an easy composite. "Field edition," she said. "Same motif. Same habit. They carried the trick in a pocket."
"We leave it intact," Kade said. "They are counting on pride. If we tear their toy apart, we change the story and they get to write a new one. Mark it our way and go."
Lysanne nodded and cut a sign only she and two other people in the world would recognize into the base of the casing with a pin as small as spite. "If we pass this way again, I will know if someone passed between us," she said.
Rem let his palm rest on the rock for a breath. The island pressed back. Not hostile. Not kind. Present. He took his hand away and the presence remained, which is what presence does when it belongs to land and not to people.
"Tracks," Evelyn said. She pointed with two fingers to a set of prints that had failed to be clever. The stride was human and careful. The heel dug deeper on the right with a habit that said old injury or a bad shoe. "They came from the east ridge, looped through the ferns to keep the impression shallow, then cut out along the mangrove roots. They did not count on rain knowing how to remember."
Lysanne crouched beside the line and laid a thread across two prints, then a second thread a palm-length ahead. "Stride just under average," she said. "Weight light. Satchel carried left. The left hand brushed the casing. I can tell by the oil. If we get a second touch later, I can confirm a match."
"You can smell left hands," Rem said.
She grinned. "I am very good at parties."
A bolt thudded into the mangrove trunk near his head.
Everyone moved without being told to. Kade stepped into the open where a second shot would spend itself on the wrong silhouette. Evelyn brought her hand up and bent light into a hard mirror-flash that lived for the span of a heartbeat and died, enough to blind a man with better training than the one who held the crossbow. Lysanne rolled behind the rock and slid the Beacon case into the shadow. She palmed a white capsule the size of a bean and snapped it underhand into the undergrowth where she had seen a satchel shape. Salt popped and made eyes cry in ways that felt personal.
Shapes peeled off the green. Not students. Not Association uniforms. Camo netting cut to look like ugly leaves. Two with crossbows, one with hooked blade for foliage that could cut back, one with a satchel and the kind of boots that whisper to mud. Professional quiet and bad manners.
"Not exam," Kade said. "Break contact."
Rem held mass in a way that read as invitation, then faded left so that a crossbowman aimed at where he had been and found Kade's empty air instead. Evelyn spread two thin spirit lines at shin height between saplings in front of the second shooter, not to trip him, to slow the part of his body that thought it understood momentum. He stumbled three steps short of where he wanted to be and had to decide whether to shoot bad or not shoot. He picked pride and missed.
The satchel man cursed softly. Lysanne lobbed another capsule that burst like cut limes, not deadly, very convincing. Rem shifted the entire line of the fight two paces behind a wall of roots by offering them a body that was never quite where they chose to aim. Kade reached around the wall and took the crossbow out of a hand that realized too late it had married poorly.
One of the camo nets snapped toward Evelyn with the hooked blade, a short, mean arc meant to catch at the elbow. She met it with a parry of spirit glass that existed only long enough to tell the hook it had chosen the wrong century. The hook sparked and skated. The wielder swore in a dialect that did not belong to any Academy.
They did not turn it into victory. That was not the job. Kade cut them free of the trap in six movements that looked like he was rearranging furniture. Evelyn stained the air with one more light-blind to make the retreat feel like an insult the human eye would take personally. Rem stepped backward in a measured rhythm that told his body the fight was not fleeing, it was moving elsewhere to be right. The saboteurs did not follow hard. They were not here to die where the trees could see it.
In the scuffle, a token flake skated out from the satchel man's pocket and kissed Rem's boot. He palmed it on the way past without looking. The lacquer felt too smooth for a thing that liked mud. He slid it into a pouch.
They gave the clearing back to the stalker's body and the false beacon and took a curve through ferns that made soft jealous noises when they brushed past. As they moved, the ground developed an opinion about ankles. Leeches leaned from the undersides of leaves with religious patience. Lysanne salted Rem's calf with a snap of her thumb and two grains that made the leech decide it had better hobbies.
"You are enjoying this," Evelyn said when the trail narrowed and the rain thickened to ropes.
Rem kept his eyes on the roots. "My body is," he said. "My head is still catching up."
"Keep your head in front," she said, and her hand ghosted near his shoulder without touching.
They reached a fallen trunk as wide as a city table and halted. The bark was slick and a little wrong. Evelyn leaned until her hair almost touched it and breathed along the grain. "Mana eddy," she said. "Harmless if you are polite. Makes compasses sulk."
"Then we are polite," Kade said. He touched the wood with the back of his fingers and swung up in one clean step. "Three points of contact. Rem, keep the blade low. If you slip, you will cut me in half."
"Encouraging," Rem said. He set the dagger against his spine and crossed the trunk with his weight spread and his focus fixed on the next place his foot wanted. The band at his wrist stayed quiet. The eddy tugged at the part of his head that liked numbers. He counted louder.
On the far side the land rose into a rib of darker soil and slick stone. They climbed to a low ridge and looked down into a basin where palms made a roof for rain. The central tower showed itself through mist and heat like a patient animal. A signal lamp near its crown beat a rhythm for ships that did not exist, steady and useful, except every tenth pulse leaned wrong for the width of a breath.
Ardent had drilled intervals like they were truth and grammar. Wrong intervals were how you caught a liar who liked clocks.
"Every ten," Rem said.
"Every ten," Evelyn agreed. Her eyes stayed on the tower. "That is a message for someone who is not us."
From here they saw banners in a distant treeline where another team had chosen to be seen. The cloth hung right. The font weight on the ID tag under it did not. Lysanne shaded her eyes with one hand and let out a thin breath.
"They have copied our house alphabet," she said. "They did not copy our typesetter. I will never forgive that."
Kade watched wind move across the canopy. He does not often look like he is listening to weather. He did now. He set his jaw a little. "This test is a cover for someone's work," he said. "Could be four someones. Could be one. We do not give them the scene they want."
"We plant our beacon where the ground tells the truth," Evelyn said. She looked along the ridge until she found a shoulder of stone that the rain respected and the roots could not complain about. "There."
Rem knelt at the ridge edge and studied the basin. The island spoke in paths if you knew how to hear them. Boar trail along the wet hollow. Birds breaking in a V where something large passed twenty minutes earlier. A scrap of blue cloth caught on a thorn that did not grow near uniforms. He filed each detail and let none of them own the others.
Kade used the time to teach without making it a class. "Front man sets pace," he said. "But pace is a conversation. If you move faster than your back line can think, you are a boy dying in the right direction. If you move slower than your front line can learn, you are a story about someone else's rescue. Find the midpoint and lie to it."
Rem nodded. "I can do midpoint."
Evelyn checked the straps on the Beacon case and looked him over once more. "You are loose in the shoulders again," she said. "Remember the draw is from the hips. The blade will obey you if your feet do."
"Yes, Nerd," he said, and that managed to sound like respect and habit at the same time.
The bracelet behaved. It did not know what was coming. It never did.
The ground shivered under their boots. Not a quake. A drum roll from far right of the tower's base, deep and patient as something old turning over in sleep. Birds exploded out of the canopy in a sheet, then cut east like someone had tugged a thread tied through their ribs. Wind changed lanes. The signal lamp leaned wrong on the fifth pulse, then corrected itself and pretended it had not.
"Central wards hiccuped," Kade said. He did not swear. "Move. Beacon first, tower second. If the enemy wrote the schedule, we write a better one."
They slid off the ridge into thicker green. Roots braided and tried to teach ankles humility. Vines gave advice. The rain turned from ropes to a curtain and then to needles and back again. The forest breathed in once, as if considering the weight of four people who planned to inconvenience its day. It did not decide out loud. That is the hard part about places. They keep their opinions until it is time to have teeth.