"...There's more here."

  Hazel crouched at the mouth of the cave, one knee pressed against stone still warm from whatever had died inside it, and ran her gloved fingers along a streak of pale residue coating the rock wall.

  Behind her, Adrius said nothing.

  The cave was a ruin. Whatever had happened here—and the evidence was telling a story Hazel didn't love—had left the wall collapsed. Scorch marks blackened the ceiling. Dragon fire. It was maybe a few weeks old. The stone had cooled but still stank of sulfur.

  And underneath the destruction, was the slimy worm-like residue. Trails of it along the ground. Smears on broken rock.

  She stood, brushed grit from her knee, and turned.

  Adrius knelt deeper into the cave. His dark coat was immaculate—it was always immaculate, even out here in the frozen ass-end of Rajkovia. His gloved hand pressed flat against a section of the cave floor. His eyes were half-closed and his jaw was tight. Whatever he was reading, he didn't like it.

  "Three individuals… two of them are Sacred. One... anomalous."

  "I can feel its grief.. Deep grief. Fury built on top of that…"

  “...And something I have not encountered before. A coldness that does not match the intensity of the other two."

  Hazel crossed her arms. The cave wind pushed against her back, carrying the smell of pine and old snow from outside, and her coat's wind affinity hummed faintly in response, the green-threaded fabric adjusting to the pressure without her asking it to.

  "Fischer," she said.

  "Fischer." Adrius confirmed it. He rose from his crouch, pulled his glove taut, and looked at the patch of crusted residue near the collapsed wall. "The worm residue is likely his. The taste of his emotions match with SDC psychological evaluation from before his sentencing."

  Before his sentencing. Hazel remembered him from his sentencing. She'd confirmed it when she read his file on the transport to Rajkovia, sitting in the hold of a Covenant supply ship. Fischer. The SDC had stamped him as a high-risk asset, too dangerous to deploy and too useful to execute, and shipped him off to the dimensional frontier with the rest of the Sacred convicts.

  And now he was loose in the dimension of Rajkovia feeding Origin and with no leash.

  She walked to the spot where Adrius had been kneeling and looked down. The stone was cracked in a spiderweb pattern. Blood filled the cracks. Human blood, from the color. And around the edges of the impact site, more of the worm residue, this one was almost paste-like.

  Someone had died here.

  "...What of the other Sacred, who—"

  "From what I taste we can assume it is one of the female convicts… it is distinct from Fischer's." Adrius moved to the cave entrance, and looked out across the Hearthlands.

  Two convicts, loose in dragon country. Hazel's hand drifted to the jade pendant at her throat. She pressed her thumb against the cool stone and held it there, grounding herself. Her sister's pendant.

  "Their trail leads through there," Adrius said. He pointed. The tundra stretched toward a distant tree line, dark pines barely visible against the grey.

  A gust of wind pushed through the cave mouth, carrying frost and the faint, acrid smell of something dead further down the mountain. Hazel's coat adjusted again.

  "Command sent a recall order this morning," she said, looking at Adrius. "They want us back at the Saltholm garrison. Something about reallocation of investigative resources."

  Adrius didn't turn. His golden eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, and for a moment the only sound was the wind and the distant, creaking groan of ice shifting somewhere on the mountain above them.

  "No," he said.

  "...Warden."

  "These convicts are mine, Hazel… they were from my prison. I assured the tribunal that the dimensional frontier program would contain them, and it has not. That failure is mine to correct."

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  "...Inform Command that we are in active pursuit of the fugitives and that recall is not operationally viable at this time."

  Hazel stared at him. The wind pushed her ponytail sideways and she let it, the strands whipping across her jaw.

  "Fine," Hazel said. She adjusted the knife sheath on her belt, checked the straps on her bracers, and walked past him toward the cave entrance.

  "But when Command sends a second recall and you ignore that one too, I'm putting it on record that I advised against this."

  "Noted."

  Hazel stepped out of the cave and into the cold. The Hearthlands spread before them, vast and empty and grey, and somewhere out there two convicts were walking toward something they thought would save them.

  She pulled her coat tighter and followed the Warden west.

  I sat with my back against a tree trunk, and stared at the cracked Regalia I'd pulled from the dire wolf's corpse that morning.

  A hairline fracture ran through the band, splitting the surface in a crooked line from one edge to the other. This ring had been leaking for a while. Whatever properties it had once carried were fading, bleeding out into the frozen ground where the wolf had died.

  But my worms were interested.

  I could feel them stirring under my skin, concentrated in my hand where I held the ring, pressing against my palm from the inside like they wanted to get closer. They'd been doing that since I'd picked the thing up.

  I turned the ring over. The worms pressed harder.

  The question was whether I could repair it. I had Cedric's memories—fragments, pieces, half-finished thoughts from a dead man's mind that my Origin had absorbed along with everything else when I'd fed on him.

  Those memories had been fragmented and hard to access. Buried under layers of organic static. Until Rell left.

  I didn't want to think about that. About why her absence had unlocked something in me, about what it meant that losing my sister had given me access to a dead stranger's complete knowledge.

  But the memories were there now, and they were telling me things. Cedric had known about Horn's Rest which I knew from the fragments. He'd stopped there dozens of times during his career, resupplying, trading drake materials, picking up contracts. And he'd known about something else, too. Something hidden in the old stone foundations beneath the waystation, sealed behind wards that only a Dragoon's Regalia could open.

  The inheritance was Regalia—old pieces, stored by Dragoons who'd died in the field and whose gear had been recovered but never reclaimed. Horn's Rest had been collecting the stuff for decades. Scale armor, horn weapons, eye charms, clawed gauntlets. An armory, locked away and forgotten, and I had the key sitting in my gut.

  That was the plan. Get to Horn's Rest. Open the cache. Arm up. Finding a way home, surviving whatever this dimension threw at us, figuring out what the hell was happening with the dragon population.

  I hadn't told Zo. She didn't need to know that.

  So I sat with the cracked ring and chewed my pine needle and kept my mouth shut.

  Across the fire, Zo was doing something with her hands.

  The nerve damage from her burns was old news. She'd taken dragon fire during the fight, and the side of her body had paid for it. The burns had healed but the nerves underneath hadn't fully healed yet. Her hand shook. Her eye twitched when she was tired. Small things, manageable things, things she compensated for with raw aggression and an Origin that turned incoming damage into fuel.

  But the hand exercises were new. She did them every night now with an obsessive focus. Open. Close. Open. Close. Watching the veins flex and relax.

  She wasn't just stretching stiff tendons. I knew that tight, hungry focus in her eyes. It was the exact same look I caught in my own reflection when I pushed the bone plates too far just to see if they'd hold. She was mapping her Origin. Testing her own limits.

  She was growing.

  Zo was dealing with the same thing I was. Alone. In silence. While sitting five feet from the one person in this dimension who might actually understand her.

  And she hadn't said a damn word.

  I watched her flex her hand again. Open. Close. The veins tightened.

  "You good?" I asked.

  She looked up. The fire put copper highlights in her cyan hair and turned her magenta eyes warm, almost soft, which was a trick of the light because Zo Fontaine had never been soft about anything in her life.

  "Fine." She flexed the hand one more time, then laid it flat on her knee. "...Just stiff from the cold."

  I looked at the fire, then back at her. Her Origin practically vibrated with kinetic heat; she could probably survive a blizzard naked if she moved fast enough.

  But I didn't push it.

  Because pushing meant she'd push back, and pushing back meant questions about my worms, about the memories, about the cracked ring I was turning over in my fingers and the dead man's knowledge telling me exactly where to take it. And I wasn't ready for that conversation any more than she was ready for hers.

  "We should be at Horn’s Rest soon."

  "You keep saying Horn's Rest." Zo picked up a stick and poked the fire. Sparks kicked up and died in the cold air. "Is there really anything there for us…"

  "From what I know there should be food, supplies and people."

  "...People…"

  "It's a Dragoon waystation. They're supposed to take in travelers."

  "...Supposed to." She jabbed the fire again. A log shifted and the flames flared, throwing her shadow against the trunk behind her.

  "Fine. Horn's Rest it is." She tossed the stick into the flames. "But if they try to arrest us, I'm kicking you in the balls."

  “...”

  The fire crackled. Wind moved through the pines above, making the branches groan and creak. Somewhere in the distance, something howled… a dire wolf, probably, calling to its pack across the frozen Hearthlands.

  I turned the cracked ring over one more time. The worms pressed against my palm, hungry and patient, and the dead man's memories told me exactly what to do with it.

  Zo flexed her left hand. Open. Close. Her veins flexed, bulging blue-green in the dark.

  The fire burned low, and neither of us fed it.

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