Chương 122: Chapter 121 – Someone to Blame

"What about Sam?" Kalsar didn't answer right away. He looked at Hazel first, and Hazel looked back at him, and Ant had the sudden, sinking sense of being the only person in the room who didn't already know something.

"There's someone coming in from Rushbrook," Kalsar said finally.

"Should be able to answer all of it better than I can secondhand. I don't want to give you half of this and get it wrong."

"Kalsar—""I mean it, boy." His arms stayed folded.

"What I can tell you is we're going to need Duncan for this conversation. Get him." Ant went cold in a way the coffee hadn't touched. He didn't ask why. He didn't think he wanted the answer badly enough to hear it twice. Duncan took longer to come down than the message should have needed. When he finally did, he came down loud, the way he always did, boots too heavy on the stairs for a house that hadn't fully woken up yet. The volume didn't quite reach his face, though.

He looked like a man who'd celebrated something the night before and was only now feeling exactly how much it had taken out of him, one hand braced against the wall on the last few steps, eyes squinting against a light that wasn't even that bright.

"This better be good," he said, dropping into a chair like his knees had given the decision up without consulting him.

"Whatever it is, can it wait 'til my skull stops trying to leave through my ears?" Nobody answered that either. Duncan looked between them: Kalsar's folded arms, Hazel's hands wrapped around a mug she wasn't drinking from, Ant standing instead of sitting. The color started going out of his face before he had a reason for it to.

"What," he said, and it wasn't a joke this time. The door went before anyone could tell him. Voss came through the gate at a walk that had nothing left to hurry with, and the first thing Ant registered wasn't her face. It was the smell that came in with her, cold outside air and something underneath it, iron and old sweat, the smell of a person who'd walked a long way without stopping to clean anything off first. Then he looked at her properly and understood why nobody had said anything yet.

Tear tracks had dried on her face hours ago, salt-crusted pale lines down cheeks that hadn't been wiped since. Her eyes were red-rimmed and hollow in a way that had nothing to do with lack of sleep. She stood in the doorway a second too long, like she'd forgotten what came after arriving.

"Voss." Kalsar was already moving toward her.

"Tell me what happened," Ant said.

"Where's my brother." Duncan was on his feet, and the hangover had gone out of his voice entirely, replaced by something harder underneath it.

"Voss. Where is he. Don't tell me he's off doing something stupid on his own again." Voss's mouth opened. Closed. She looked at Duncan like the words wouldn't come out in the right order no matter how many times she tried arranging them. When she finally spoke, it came out flat and rehearsed, like she'd said it to herself the whole walk here just to get it small enough to survive saying out loud.

"We were ambushed. Two waves, then a serpent-type held back the whole time, Epic-grade, Sam's lens confirmed it. He sent us back, me, Orlo, Ressa, Denna, with everything we'd found. The cloth. The colors. All of it." Her jaw worked.

"He stayed. Him and Vell and the outer patrol, to cover us."

"And?" Duncan's voice had dropped to something Ant had never heard from him before.

"Vell went down covering her own people." Voss's hands had curled into fists at her sides. She wasn't bracing for a fight. She was just holding on.

"Candice kept fighting after she went down. Couldn't stand, and she kept fighting anyway, took four more of them with her from the ground before it finished her." A breath.

"Sam went right after. Something got behind him. Nobody saw it coming, not even him. I wasn't there for that part. I only know because..." She stopped. The room went quiet enough to hear it, actually hear it, four separate heartbeats in four separate chests, none of them keeping the same time. Duncan didn't move. Didn't speak. For one long moment he simply stood there, staring at Voss like the words hadn't landed yet, like there was still a version of the next second where she said something different. Ant.

Mahkir's voice, low, close, without any of his usual edge in it. I don't like this room. Neither do I, Ant thought back, and meant it more than the words could carry. Then Duncan turned, and his eyes found Ant, and whatever had been holding him up until then went somewhere else entirely.

"This is your fault." His finger came up, level, steady in a way the rest of him wasn't.

"You let him go out there. You let him lead patrols into whatever this is, and you never once thought to pull him back."

"Duncan." Hazel started to say more, then didn't.

"No." He was on his feet now, chair scraping back hard enough to nearly go over.

"You're the clan leader. You're supposed to keep your people alive. You should never have let him go alone."

"He wasn't alone." The words came out of Ant quieter than he meant them to, because there wasn't anything louder left in him to say it with.

"Might as well have been." Kalsar rose. He didn't do it fast, didn't do it loud. He just stood there until the room turned toward him, and only then did he speak. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"Sam made his own choice," he said.

"He was a grown man, a Logistics Lead, and he chose to stay and cover his people. Looking for someone to blame doesn't help him and it doesn't help you. You heard Voss. If you want someone to point that finger at, find out who's actually behind this."

"Great idea, Kalsar." Duncan's laugh had nothing in it worth calling a laugh.

"Brilliant. And how do you propose we do that, exactly? Send more people out to get killed the same way he was?"

"Let's think about what we actually know." Hazel's voice cut through before Kalsar could answer, level, working the problem the way she'd work a bad weld: turn it over, find where it failed, don't waste breath being angry at the metal.

"We know they're organized. We know they're coordinated, five separate incidents, all reading the same way, nothing about it accidental. We know they're strong." She held up a hand before Duncan could interrupt.

"But not overwhelmingly so. End of the day, Sam took a good number of them down with him, and Candice took four more from the ground after she couldn't even stand. If Voss's numbers are right, that's not the work of some untouchable power. That's a capable clan. Maybe not an elite one."

"So," Ant said slowly, "one our size."

"Would make sense." Kalsar's eyes had drifted past Ant toward the door, and his face went carefully blank, no alarm in it, the same look he wore right before he told a room to be quiet without using the word. Rebekah came in first, Raven and Ray a step behind her, and whatever they'd caught of the tail end of the shouting had already put caution into all three faces. Kalsar held their eyes for a second, enough to say listen, don't talk yet, and none of them needed telling twice.

Kalsar gave them the short version under his breath while Duncan collected himself: the ambush, the false colors, the Epic-grade serpent-type that had waited out two waves before it finally moved. Vell dead covering her own people. Sam and Candice both gone with her, covering whoever made it out.

Duncan looked back at Voss, and the aggression had gone out of him as fast as it had come, replaced by a hollowed-out patience that was worse to watch, the voice of a man asking a question because it was the only thing left he could still do.

"Is there anything else you can tell us?"

"Not much." Voss's arms had wrapped around herself without her seeming to notice.

"Sam told us to run and none of us wanted to, but we did. Not that it would've mattered if we'd stayed. That serpent-thing..." She shook her head.

"It looked far too powerful for the six of us to have made a difference against, even together."

"Serpent," Ray said, and the flippancy that usually rode under his voice was gone, his eyes narrowed on a memory he hadn't expected to need again.

"Dark scales? Almost black where the light didn't catch it, sort of a deep, old red underneath?" Voss looked at him properly for the first time since she'd walked in.

"Yes," she said.

"That's it exactly. How would you know that?"

"I never had a lens on it myself," Ray said, "but if Sam's confirmed it Epic-grade and that was enough to pull a retreat order out of him, that tracks with something I remember." He glanced sideways at Ant, and something in his expression had gone somewhere Ant had rarely seen it go: no jokes waiting behind it, no performance.

"I remember it because it near enough took Hexa's tournament from her without breaking stride. An Epic serpent-type, unnamed on the roster." A pause, deliberate, like he was choosing the next word with more care than his usual vocabulary tricks needed.

"It was Marigolds' champion. Won them the whole Epic bracket."

"What are you thinking, Ray?" Ant asked.

"Might be nothing." Ray spread his hands, and the gesture didn't match how grim his eyes had gone.

"Might be an absolute coincidence, a lot of clans have serpent-types, it's hardly a rare breed of Kithren. But three things lining up at once is a lot to hand to coincidence: Epic-grade, that coloring, and strong enough that Sam pulled a full retreat rather than risk the fight. No animal weighs its odds like that. A clan that's already beaten one of ours in a ring does." He shrugged, but the shrug didn't make any of it feel smaller.

"Might be nothing. Might be a something worth chasing." Duncan was already rising, and his hand had gone to the strap across his back where the shield sat like it had grown there.

"That's good enough of a start for me."

"Sit down, you fool." Raven hadn't raised her voice at all, which was somehow worse than if she had. Duncan rounded on her.

"Excuse me?"

"Sam was the stronger of the two of you," she said, flat, each word set down like a stone in a wall.

"And if whatever's out there took him down anyway, and took Vell with him, what exactly do you think your chances are, storming their base alone?"

"Woman." Duncan's voice had gone cold in a way that didn't suit him at all.

"Today is not the day to be getting in my way." Raven just looked back at him. It was equal parts unhinged and calmly lethal, the look of someone who had already decided exactly how a fight with him would end and felt nothing about it either way. Duncan held her gaze for two full seconds and then sat back down without another word, some of the color gone out of his face that had nothing to do with the hangover. You know, the voice said, from somewhere behind Ant's own thoughts. Unhurried.

Conversational, the register it reached for whenever it decided the moment called for something helpful rather than cryptic. In my day, when we wanted to find out what a clan was doing, we sent people in to join them. At a low rank. Medium clans run to the hundreds. High-tier clans, thousands. Easy to be one face in a crowd that size.

"Your day?" Ant said it out loud before he'd decided to, and the words stopped him dead in the middle of whatever he'd been about to say next, his own mouth still half-open around nothing. Silence answered him. Not the room's silence. The voice's.

"What do you mean, in your day?" Ant asked it again, quieter this time, only in his own head now, aware of the room around him and not wanting whatever this was to spill out into it. How do you mean, it responded, and there was nothing in the tone to grab onto, no defensiveness, no evasion he could point to and call a lie. Just the same flat, patient neutrality it always used. You said it.

"In my day." You literally said you sent people to spy on other clans, like you were there, Ant pushed, frustration climbing faster than he wanted it to. As much as you'd like to think of me as such, I am a system. I did not have a day. A pause, and then, the contradiction it had just spoken sliding straight past it without so much as a stumble: However. That does sound like a sensible approach. It kept doing this.

Every time Ant thought he'd finally caught it slipping, actually caught it being something more than lines of stored knowledge answering a prompt, it folded back into the same flat, systemic register like nothing had happened at all. The worst part wasn't the contradiction. The worst part was how easily it wore both versions, like putting either one on asked nothing of it at all. What do you think, Mahkir? Your system has a split personality, Mahkir said, distaste thick enough to taste.

I don't trust a voice that can't decide what it is. Not about that. About the idea. Mahkir considered it properly for a moment, the humor dropping out of his tone entirely. I dislike hiding. I dislike the notion of not simply walking up to their gate and taking it apart stone by stone until someone tells me what I want to know. His voice went colder underneath the words, old and patient and entirely without mercy.

But if pretending to be small gets me closer to whatever killed Candice, then I will pretend to be as small as it takes. By any means necessary. Ant didn't answer right away. He looked around the room instead: Duncan hollowed out and silent now, Voss still holding herself together with both arms, Hazel and Kalsar watching him wait on something none of them could see, Ray still not quite back to himself, Raven and Rebekah quiet by the door.

"Get me Maren," Ant said, cutting across whatever conversation had started to pick back up in the gap he'd left.

"I have an idea. But we're going to need her for it."