Chương 117: Chapter 116 – Five Pairs

Alder's Cross wasn't much of anything. A handful of farms strung along a road that hadn't seen proper stonework in years, a well nobody had gotten around to capping, and a miller who'd walked two hours to Rushbrook's gate the day before to report that somebody had been taking from him a little at a time for three weeks running — a sack of flour here, a coil of rope there, nothing big enough to chase alone but too steady to be bad luck.

"Could be nothing," Voss said, studying the miller's account against her own notes while the patrol waited at the crossroads.

"Could be some kid working up the nerve to steal something worth actually stealing. Or it's exactly what it looks like and some traveling opportunist's found himself a soft target three weeks running."

"Could be," Sam said. He didn't think it was nothing. He hadn't thought anything was nothing in two weeks, which was its own kind of problem — a man who suspected everything ended up seeing patterns in things that were genuinely just bad luck, and Sam had spent enough years soldiering to know that was its own way of getting people killed. So he kept the thought to himself and let Voss run the job the way she'd run every other one. She split them at the well.

Five pairs, each one taking a stretch of the road and the farmland either side of it — far enough apart to cover ground fast, close enough that a shout would carry between two of them if it needed to. Orlo went with one of the quiet brothers. Petra-Anne paired off with the other. Voss took the miller's own farm herself, since he'd asked for her by name and there was no good reason to refuse a man who'd walked two hours to report a stolen sack of flour.

That left Sam with a woman named Ressa, newer to the roster than most, sharp-eyed and light on her feet, her Kithren trotting ahead of them both — a compact, quilled thing built low to the ground, more badger than anything else beneath the spines, that Ressa called Needle without ever explaining why. It didn't need explaining. The name fit the moment Sam saw it move.

"You're the quiet one," Ressa said, twenty minutes into the walk, when the silence had stretched long enough that she'd apparently decided to do something about it.

"Heard about you before I ever met you. Figured half of it was exaggeration."

"Which half."

"The half where you don't talk." She grinned, sideways, not unkind about it.

"Guess I owe somebody a drink." Candice paced along Sam's other side, quiet and watchful, and Sam let Ressa fill the silence the rest of the walk without much effort on his part — she talked the way some people did when they were still working out whether a job was actually dangerous or just tedious, filling the empty air rather than sitting inside it. He didn't mind it.

It was a different kind of quiet than the one he usually kept, borrowed rather than his own, and it let him watch the tree line instead of managing a conversation. Their stretch of road ran quiet for the first mile — one farm accounted for, an old man mending a fence who hadn't seen anyone he didn't know in a month — and then Needle went rigid at a hedge line and Ressa's hand came up flat before Sam had even registered the change in her Kithren.

The man broke from the hedge a half-second later, running low with a sack over one shoulder that clinked with something metal every stride, and didn't so much as glance back before Candice was already moving. She didn't need to catch him. Needle did it first, a spiked shoulder taking the man across the back of the knee and dropping him hard into the dirt, the sack skidding out ahead of him and spilling a coil of stolen rope and two chisels across the road.

He came up swinging anyway, wild and untrained, and Sam closed the gap and took the arm before the swing finished, twisting it flat against his own back with enough pressure to make the point without breaking anything.

"That's the miller's rope," Sam said.

"Wasn't stealing." The man's voice cracked halfway through the lie, muffled against the dirt.

"Found it. Somebody left it just lying there—""On a hedge line two miles from his farm." The man stopped talking. That was answer enough. Ressa had him bound with his own belt inside a minute, efficient about it in a way that told Sam she'd done this more than once before joining the roster, and the whole thing was over almost before it had properly started — three weeks of flour and rope and a man's growing fear that he'd never catch whoever was doing it, solved by pure bad luck and one badger-Kithren's ears.

It should have felt like a win. Sam walked the rest of the stretch with the man in tow and found it didn't sit that way at all — a job this ordinary, cracked this easily, sitting right alongside everything else that refused to crack no matter how hard he pushed at it. Two farms further along, a family had lost a hen to something with claws three nights back and assumed a fox, which Sam didn't correct even though a fox wasn't what had left the print he found near their coop.

Ordinary work, thin and unremarkable on top of the one real thing that had happened, exactly the kind of stretch that made a man start doubting which parts of the day mattered and which didn't. They were the second pair back to the crossroads, prisoner and all. Voss came in third, unhurried, the miller having talked her ear off the whole visit about a fence that needed mending more than it needed guarding.

Orlo and his partner arrived fourth, laughing about something that had happened on their stretch, some story that would keep until they were somewhere with a drink in hand. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Petra-Anne and Tomas didn't come back at all. Voss gave it ten minutes past the agreed time without much concern — a stretch running long wasn't unusual, not with fences to check and farmers who liked to talk.

She gave it twenty more with her jaw working and her eyes on the road they should have come down. At thirty past, she stopped pretending it was patience and started calling names into the trees instead, loud enough to carry, and got nothing back but her own voice returning flat off the hillside.

"Where are they," she said, to nobody, to all of them. Nobody had an answer. That was the part that sat wrong from the very start — with Corren, with the tracks that stopped, there'd always been someone left to describe what happened, some thread to pull even if it led nowhere. Here there was nothing. No witness. No account. Just two people who'd walked out toward the old millrace an hour ago and simply hadn't walked back.

Voss was already reorganizing, calling names, pulling the remaining eight into a single search line with the flat, fast efficiency of someone who'd run a hundred drills for exactly this moment and never actually expected to use one. Sam let her run it for the first ten seconds, and then stepped in anyway, because two missing people wasn't a routine job anymore and every minute they spent second-guessing who was in charge was daylight they didn't have.

"Everyone stays together from here," he said, and his voice carried further than he meant it to, further than he usually let it.

"No splitting off, not for anything. We follow the millrace stretch as one line, and anyone who sees something calls it out — nobody goes to check it alone." Nobody argued the order, not even Voss, who fell into it like she'd been waiting for someone to say it out loud. That told Sam how the rest of them had really been feeling under the surface too, all this ordinary-job pretending finally cracking now that two names had gone quiet at once and neither was coming when called.

The millrace stretch gave them nothing for the first quarter mile — the same clean road, the same undisturbed farmland, nothing so much as a broken fence post to mark where two people might have stopped being two people walking a job. Then Candice's ears went flat all at once, and she cut off the road toward a stand of pale birch without waiting to be told. The prints were there.

Both sets, evenly spaced, unhurried, running side by side the way two people walk when they're talking and not paying much attention to the ground. No hitch in either stride. No sign either of them had seen anything worth reacting to before whatever happened, happened. And then, at the base of the third tree in, both sets of prints simply weren't there anymore. Not scuffed. Not doubled back. Not lighter, the way a man's weight went lighter right before he was carried off the ground entirely.

Just absent, the way a sentence stops when the page runs out rather than because the thought was finished. Candice worked the ground for the better part of twenty minutes and came back with nothing that told anyone anything new. No scent past the birch. Not theirs. Not anything else's either. Nothing at all? Cold ground. Like nobody's stood here in days, not minutes. Ressa crouched beside the last pair of prints, quiet now, all the earlier talk gone out of her.

"That's not natural," she said, finally, the words coming slow, like she didn't want to be the one to say them first.

"Two people don't just stop existing between one footprint and the next. Both of them, same spot, same moment?"

"No," Sam said.

"They don't." They searched another hour past that, wider circles, calling both names until the calling started to feel less like a search and more like a ritual nobody quite believed in anymore, and found exactly as much as Sam expected them to find, which was nothing. No blood. No struggle. No gear left behind, no torn cloth caught on a branch, none of the small ugly evidence a real fight always left scattered behind it even when the fighting was brief. That absence was the loudest thing in the whole clearing.

By the time Voss called the search back for the day — reluctant, furious about it in a way she didn't bother hiding, snapping at nobody in particular about how two grown adults didn't just vanish off a road they'd both walked a dozen times — the light was already going amber at the edges and nobody had anything to show for the hours but tired legs and two names they'd have to write into a report that explained nothing.

Sam walked the last stretch back toward Rushbrook beside Ressa, Candice a quiet outline ahead of them both, and found himself doing the same thing he'd done after the untamed Kithren job three days back: running the tally, adding two more names to a list that was getting longer than he liked. A man with a gap in his memory. Prints matching a boy who'd never left the gate. Eleven Kithren that fought like soldiers instead of animals.

And now Petra-Anne and Tomas, gone clean between one footprint and the next, together, no blood, no fight, no trace, exactly the way someone who knew precisely what they were doing would take two people if they didn't want anyone to know they'd been there at all. Three patrols, Candice said. All different problems, on paper. They're not different problems. No, she agreed. I don't think they are either. He didn't say anything else the rest of the walk.

There wasn't anything left to say that wouldn't have sounded like a guess dressed up as a conclusion, and Sam had never been the kind of man who mistook one for the other, no matter how badly he wanted to by the end of a day like this one. Back at Rushbrook's gate, Voss went to see to the search log and whatever paperwork a missing man generated, and the rest of the patrol scattered toward food and bedrolls with none of the noise that usually followed a day out.

Sam stayed by the gate a while longer than he needed to, Candice sitting quiet at his feet, watching the road they'd come in on like it might still produce an answer if he looked at it long enough. It didn't. Roads didn't work that way, whatever a man wanted from them. He had a communicator stone back in his pack, the kind every Logistics Lead carried for exactly this — two missing patrollers, a real report, not a suspicion dressed up as one. He hadn't used it yet.

Using it meant Duncan would hear about Petra-Anne and Tomas within the hour, and Duncan would want details Sam didn't have, and somewhere behind that conversation sat the harder one Sam still wasn't ready to start: that this wasn't the first pair of names on the list, and it probably wasn't going to be the last. Tomorrow. He'd use it tomorrow, once there was more than an absence to report.

He went to find his own bedroll instead, Candice curling in beside him the way she always did, and lay there a long while without sleeping, turning the last two weeks over in his head piece by piece until none of it looked like coincidence anymore. A gap in a man's memory. A dead animal that had died mid-plan instead of mid-panic. Two people who'd walked into a stand of birch talking to each other and simply stopped being there. None of it made sense sitting on its own.

Stacked together like this, it stopped needing to — and he was starting to think whoever was behind it wouldn't stay satisfied with ten people for much longer.