The Grid woke him up.
Not with sound. It didn't make sound. But the blue light in his peripheral vision went from dim to bright in the space between one breath and the next and Hart's eyes opened and his body was already sitting up before his brain finished coming online.
His back screamed. The wound. He'd rolled onto it in his sleep. The bandage had stuck to the sheets and pulling away from the mattress meant pulling the bandage away from the scab and that was. Not great.
He sat on the edge of the bed. Gerald the water stain was still on the ceiling. Dawn light through the window. Grey. Always grey.
The Grid text was new. He hadn't seen this format before.
[ADVISORY]
Bond II signature detected.
Classification: Inferno Kitsune (Primal)
Source: Ember Quarry. 23km southeast.
Estimated awakening window: 72h.
Note: Window is non-renewable. Failure to establish contact within window results in signature dissolution.
Hart read it three times.
Bond II. A second one. Twenty-three kilometers southeast at a place called the Ember Quarry. Seventy-two hours before the window closed and the signature dissolved, which he assumed meant gone forever based on the way the Grid worded things like a doctor delivering bad news in the most clinical language possible.
Inferno Kitsune. He didn't know what a kitsune was. Fox maybe. The word sounded like fox.
Sable spoke from his shadow. She'd been there all night. She was always there all night.
"You see something."
"Bond II," Hart said. "There's another one. Like you. Twenty-three kilometers away."
Sable was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet Hart was learning to read. Not silence because she had nothing to say. Silence because she was choosing.
"Ember," she said.
Hart looked at the floor where her voice came from.
"You know this one."
"I know all of them." Flat. The way Sable said things that carried more weight than the words suggested. "There were ten of us. Before the sealing."
Ten. The Grid said ten bond slots. Sable said ten of us. The numbers matched and Hart's stomach did something that wasn't hunger.
"She's been waking," Sable said. "I can feel her. The quarry is a fire-Essence zone. Old volcanic vents. She would go there. Fire is what she is."
Hart stood up. His back pulled. His shoulder was stiff again. The Bronze card was on the desk where he'd left it last night, cheap card stock already curling at the corners from the damp.
Twenty-three kilometers. That was a full day's walk if he pushed it. Or six hours if he ran part of it which he couldn't because his back was torn open and his Essence Core was still stabilizing from the fight two days ago.
And the Greymarch clock was at 48 hours. Maybe less.
"I can't leave," Hart said.
He said it out loud because saying it out loud made it real. The Greymarch was escalating. Beasts were going to hit the wall again. Harder this time.
The three Bronze-tier scouts had been a greeting card from something bigger and he was the only certified Warden at Graveston with a combat-capable beast. If he left and the breach happened while he was gone, people would die.
But if he didn't leave, the Bond II window would close in 72 hours and whatever the Inferno Kitsune was, it would be gone. Non-renewable. The Grid didn't use that word lightly. The Grid didn't use any word lightly.
Sable rose from his shadow. Not fully. Just her head. The wolf's skull breaking the surface of the floor like something coming up for air. Mercury eyes looking at him from ankle height.
"You need her," Sable said.
"I need to be here."
"You need to be stronger." She didn't blink. Never blinked. "The things coming from the Greymarch are not Bronze. They are Silver. Maybe higher. You cannot fight them with one bond and a skill you cannot control."
Hart's right hand went to his left wrist. He caught it. Redirected. Put the hand flat on the desk next to the Bronze card.
"If I leave and the wall breaks. People."
"People die when Wardens are weak," Sable said. "They also die when Wardens are absent. Weak lasts. Absent doesn't."
That was. Hart didn't have an argument for that. He had a feeling that it was wrong but the feeling couldn't explain itself and Sable's logic was the kind that didn't care about feelings. Hard. Old. The logic of something that had watched civilizations make this exact mistake for longer than the wall had existed.
"How long," he said.
"If you leave now. Before full dawn. Six hours to the quarry on foot. The bonding may take hours. Return by nightfall if it goes well."
"If it goes well."
"Ember is not me." Her eyes were level with his shin. "I came to you. She will not. She will test you first."
Of course she would. Because nothing about this was going to be simple. Nothing had been simple since the ceremony and Hart was starting to think simple was something that happened to other people's lives.
He looked at the Grid. The 72-hour window. The 48-hour Greymarch clock. Two timers running at different speeds toward the same person.
"I need a reason to be gone," Hart said. Thinking out loud now. "If Hask comes looking. If there's an alarm and I'm not here."
Sable sank back into his shadow. Just the voice now. From the floor.
"You read reports," she said. "You told me. Incursion tallies. Patrol rosters."
"Yeah."
"Tell them you went to check the eastern perimeter. Scouting. Your wolf detected movement and you went to investigate. A Bronze Warden with a beast is expected to patrol."
Hart almost smiled. Almost. Sable had been listening when he talked about the reports. She'd been in his shadow that whole time and she'd heard everything and now she was using his own reading habit to build him a cover story.
"That's not bad," he said.
"It is adequate." Which was Sable's version of a compliment.
He got dressed. Carefully. The jacket was still torn but it was the only jacket he had. Boots from yesterday. The Bronze card went in the pocket with the hole in the lining. He didn't know why he kept carrying it. The card didn't do anything. It was just a card.
He wrote a note. Short. Left it on his desk where someone would find it if someone came looking which they probably wouldn't because nobody had come looking for Hart Morrow in three years but now he was Bronze and people might start.
Gone to check eastern perimeter. Detected movement near Sector 4. Back by evening. -- Morrow
It looked like the kind of note a responsible Warden would leave. The handwriting was his. Messy. Rushed. Good. Neat handwriting on a patrol note would look wrong.
The hallway was empty at this hour. Dawn was a grey smear through the windows at the end of the corridor. Hart moved through the building the way he'd always moved through it. Quietly. Without being noticed. Three years of being invisible was finally useful for something that wasn't just surviving.
The east gate was unmanned at predawn. Budget cuts. Graveston couldn't afford night guards on all four gates so they rotated and the east gate was unmanned between four and six AM. Hart knew this because he'd read the patrol rosters because he read everything because for three years reading was the only thing he could do.
He slipped through. The Greymarch was ahead of him. Dark. The border where the town ended and the wild started was marked by a ditch and a row of stone posts that hadn't been maintained in years. Beyond that. Trees. Fog. The smell of wet earth and something under it, something metallic, like the taste of ozone from the ceremony except spread thin across miles.
The Grid pulsed.
[ADVISORY]
Bond II: 22.7km.
Greymarch threat level: Elevated.
Recommend: Caution.
Caution. Right. Eighteen years old, Bronze Warden with a torn jacket and a healing wound walking into beast territory at dawn to find a fire fox in a quarry twenty-three kilometers away while a breach clock ticked behind him.
Caution seemed like the minimum.
Sable's weight was warm in his shadow. Moving with him. She didn't say anything. She'd said what she needed to say. The rest was his.
Hart walked into the Greymarch.
The fog closed behind him. Graveston disappeared. The trees here were taller than anything inside the wall, old growth that nobody had touched because nobody came out here unless they had to. The ground was soft. Leaves and mud and things decomposing underneath that made each step feel slightly wrong, like the ground was deciding whether or not to hold him.
An hour in and his back was a steady line of heat under the bandage. Not pain exactly. More like a reminder. The wound was there and it had opinions about walking.
Two hours. The trees got thicker. Darker. The canopy closed overhead and the light went from grey to something closer to brown.
Something moved up there and he stopped and Sable shifted in his shadow and the movement turned out to be a bird. Just a bird. His heart rate took a while to come back down.
Three hours. The Grid updated.
Bond II: 14.2km.
Greymarch threat level: Elevated.
No hostile signatures within 500m.
No hostile signatures within 500 meters. Which was a way of saying the danger wasn't close. Wasn't close RIGHT NOW. The emphasis on the right now was Hart's, not the Grid's, because the Grid didn't do emphasis. The Grid did facts and advisories and let you supply your own dread.
The air changed around hour four. Warmer. The fog thinned. The trees gave way to scrubland and then to bare rock and then Hart was standing on the edge of something.
A quarry. Or what used to be a quarry. The ground dropped away in a wide bowl maybe two hundred meters across. The rock at the bottom was dark, almost black, and there were cracks in it. Thin ones. Glowing. Orange light coming up through the stone in lines that looked like veins in a body that was too big to be a body.
The air smelled like sulfur and hot metal. Hart's lungs didn't love it.
The Grid pulsed. Bright.
Bond II: 0.0km.
Inferno Kitsune: Present.
Awakening window: 68h remaining.
Compatibility scan: Pending proximity.
0.0 kilometers. The kitsune was here. Somewhere in the quarry. Among the cracked rock and the glowing veins and the sulfur air.
Hart looked down into the bowl. The orange light shifted. Moved. Like something underneath the stone was breathing.
From somewhere deep in the quarry, something laughed.
Not a human laugh. Not an animal sound either. Something in between. High and crackling, like fire eating through dry wood, and it echoed off the quarry walls and climbed up to where Hart stood and wrapped around his ears like it had been waiting for him specifically.
Sable's shadow went very still at his feet.
"Ember," Sable said. The single word carried more weight than Hart expected. Not fear. Something older. Something between caution and recognition and a thing he didn't have a name for.
"She knows we're here," Hart said.
"She knew before we arrived."
The laughter came again. Closer. The orange light in the cracks got brighter. The quarry floor shifted. Heat rose in waves Hart could see, bending the air like it was being squeezed.
Somewhere down there in the fire and the sulfur and the cracked stone, the second Primal was awake and she thought something was funny.
Hart's back was bleeding through the bandage again. He could feel it. Warm and wet and new.
He went down into the quarry.