The retaliation came four days after Rennet's Crossing.
It didn't come for the evacuation.
It came for the camp.
Not directly.
Dresk's forces never found the cliff face, never discovered the carefully folded settlement that had kept forty, then fifty, then fifty-one people alive through months of exactly this kind of danger.
But the patrol that reached the camp's outer watch line at dusk wasn't searching for Rennet's Crossing's missing fifty-one.
It was sweeping wider.
Far wider than any Imperial patrol had swept before.
Dresk's answer to an escalation the resistance hadn't intended to provoke.
Six soldiers appeared through the trees.
The outer watch caught them almost immediately.
For two minutes, the perimeter held.
Two minutes was all it took for the camp to wake.
All it took for people who had spent months learning how to survive an attack to remember where they were supposed to stand.
Ashe reached the perimeter first.
Her blade was already drawn.
