Chương 123: Chapter 122 – Somebody Else's Name

Maren came in still tying her robe, hair escaping the knot she'd shoved it into an hour ago, and stopped two steps past the door when she saw the room. Kalsar. Hazel. Ray, half-awake and pretending otherwise. Raven by the window, arms crossed, already looking like she'd resigned herself to losing the rest of the night over whatever this was. Rebekah cross-legged on the table itself, which Kalsar hadn't said anything about yet, which meant he hadn't noticed yet.

"You said you had an idea," Maren said, to Ant, like the rest of the room wasn't there.

"I need you to change my chip." Every head in the room turned. Maren's mouth opened, closed, opened again.

"Change it how."

"Name. Level. Mahkir's name too." He kept his voice even. He already knew how the next five minutes were going to go, and he wanted to get through them before anyone could talk him out of it.

"I go in as a nobody. Low-level recruit, fresh chip, patrol grunt. Marigolds are recruiting. Has to be, a clan that size, that many patrol routes. I walk in, I find out what they know, I walk back out."

"You want me to falsify a registered chip." Maren said it slowly, like saying it slowly might change what it meant.

"That's not — Ant, that's not a gray area. That's Cerlan law, and it's not soft law, it's registry-integrity law, the kind they actually enforce."

"I know."

"They pulled a clan's charter over less. There was a case eleven years ago, a broker in Ashfont who—""Maren." She stopped. She'll do it, Mahkir said, low, from the corner where he'd folded himself onto the cold stone like it was exactly where he wanted to be. Watch her face. She's already decided. She's just still arguing with herself about it out loud. Keep that to yourself, Ant told him, and didn't need to see Mahkir's ears flick back to know he was smug about being right. Maren was still looking at the floor.

When she looked back up, she'd made a decision she hadn't had thirty seconds ago.

"I'll lose my license if it's ever traced," she said.

"Not a fine. Not a warning. They pull the whole certification, and I never touch a chip reader again as long as I live."

"Then don't do it," Ant said.

"I didn't say that." Her voice cracked on the last word. She hated it, he could see her hate it, in the fast, useless swipe of her hand pushing hair off a face it hadn't actually fallen onto.

"I told you what it'll take from me. That's different from saying no." She looked at him properly now, and there wasn't anything soft in it.

"I lost Sam's report before I lost Sam. I read the account twice before I believed it, because that wasn't supposed to be the kind of thing that happens to people I know. I am not doing that again over a piece of law nobody in that clan is going to ask to see my paperwork for." A breath.

"I'll do it. But you're not the only name on the sheet when this goes wrong, so don't sit there acting like it's just your risk to take." Nobody said anything for a second. Kalsar's arms were crossed, and the look on his face was the one he wore right before he said something nobody wanted to hear.

"You're the clan leader," he said, flat, no lecture in it, just the fact of the thing laid on the table.

"Three hundred people out there, and you're proposing to walk into the one place that's already killed one of ours, wearing a stranger's name."

"I know what I am."

"Then you know what it looks like if you don't come back."

"I've thought about that part more than you'd think." Ant looked around the room. Hazel's arms were folded tight across her chest. Ray, for once, wasn't smiling. Raven had gone quiet in a way that meant she was deciding whether the argument was even worth finishing.

"I'm not well known, Kalsar. I've got a face people know from a tournament stage two months ago, and even then, half the people who watched that fight were watching Mahkir, not me. I don't know every face in this clan. Three hundred new people since the surge. I couldn't pick half of them out of a crowd if you paid me. You think Marigolds knows every face in theirs? A clan that size?"

"You're a different problem entirely, and you know it," Hazel said.

"You're not some new recruit nobody's looked twice at. You're the man who broke their four-year streak in a ring in front of half the continent."

"Then I'm banking on the fact that nobody in a Marigolds patrol unit expects the man who broke their streak to be standing next to them holding a mop." He didn't say it like a joke.

"And if it goes wrong, if someone does put a name to my face, I've got Concealment. I can be gone before they finish the sentence." He shrugged, like the rest of it followed naturally from that.

"Besides, we don't even know if Marigolds are actually involved. Ray's guess is a good one, but it's still a guess. That's the whole reason I'm going, to find out. Which means there's no guarantee I'm walking into anything worse than a long, boring patrol shift with a bad haircut."

"Concealment's not invisibility," Raven said.

"It's a delay. You know that."

"It's enough of one."

"For you, maybe." Raven's mouth was a hard line.

"Not for whoever's standing next to you when it happens." That landed, and Ant let it land, because she wasn't wrong and he wasn't going to pretend otherwise in front of her.

"I'm not saying it's clean," he said.

"I'm saying it's the best shot anyone in this room has. You want to send someone else in? Fine. Name them. Someone whose face means less than mine and whose skill set gets them back out if they're made." He waited. Nobody named anyone.

"That's what I thought."

"We're still not happy about it," Kalsar said, which wasn't agreement, not quite, but it was as close as Kalsar got when he'd run out of better objections and wouldn't admit it outright.

"You'll still have to go through their intake," Hazel said.

"Whatever that looks like. Testing, vetting, however a clan that size decides who gets to carry their colors. That's more exposure than just walking through a gate, Ant. That's days, maybe longer, of somebody with a trained eye looking straight at you and deciding whether to trust you."

"Then I make sure the chip holds up under whatever they throw at it." He looked at Maren.

"Can you do that? Not just change the name: build something that reads clean if they run it properly?"

"I can build you a real person," Maren said, almost fierce with it now, like the competence of the answer could make up for everything she'd just argued against.

"Level, class history, a home clan that folded eighteen months ago so there's no one left to check the story against. It'll take me the rest of the night. It has to be right the first time. There's no fixing a chip once it's inside a reader's system. If I miss something, you find out when they do." She swallowed.

"I'll do it right."

"I know you will." That got a look out of her, quick and pleased and gone almost before it landed. Across the room, Raven caught it, and didn't bother hiding that she had.

"Right," Raven said, straightening off the wall.

"If we're doing this properly, he needs a story that survives more than one conversation. Nobody sends a lone man into a strange clan without somebody asking why he's alone." She said it like she'd already worked the whole thing out on the walk over, which, knowing her, she probably had.

"I'll go with him. Wife's the cleanest cover: explains why you're together, explains why neither of you talks about your last clan much, explains why you'd take a low-tier posting instead of shopping around for a better one. Married men don't get asked as many questions." Nobody spoke. Somebody was about to say something they shouldn't, and everyone in the room seemed to sense it coming at once.

"Wife," Duncan repeated, from the corner where he'd been sitting with his arms folded and his eyes somewhere on the floor since the meeting started, and something in his voice was doing its best to sound like the old Duncan and not quite managing it.

"Never took you for a cradle snatcher, Raven." Raven's head turned toward him slowly. The kind of slow that meant somebody was about to regret opening their mouth. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"Careful," she said, and it wasn't loud.

"I'm just saying." Duncan's grin didn't reach anywhere near his eyes.

"He's what, twenty-three? You're—""Thirty-eight," Raven said, before he could finish it for her.

"Say it like it's an insult again and see what happens." Duncan held her stare for exactly as long as it took him to remember what had happened the last time he'd pushed her tonight. Then he looked away first, whatever was left of the fight in him folding back into the same raw quiet he'd been sitting in since Voss walked through the door hours ago. Nobody said anything. It wasn't really about the fifteen years, and Ant could see that much without Raven having to say it. Duncan wasn't picking at her age.

He was picking at whatever he could reach, because reaching for anything was easier than sitting still with what he actually had to carry tonight. Raven didn't look away from him a second longer than she needed to. Underneath the flat warning in it, something had softened. She wasn't going to let it go, but she wasn't going to make it worse either. Not tonight. Not with him. And she wasn't wrong about the number, either way. Fifteen years wasn't nothing, whatever either of them wanted to pretend about it.

"The years aren't the issue," Maren started, too fast, the words already half out before she'd decided what came after them, "it's about — I mean, operationally, if you're building a cover that's supposed to hold up under real scrutiny, you'd want someone who—""I'll do it." Rebekah said it before Maren finished the thought, swinging her legs down off the table like she'd been waiting for exactly this opening and hadn't wanted to seem too eager about grabbing it.

"Married life, undercover, dangerous clan full of people who might want us dead." She said it lightly, but her eyes, when they landed on Ant, weren't light at all. Whatever always surfaced in her once a room tipped toward real danger had surfaced now, steady under the performance.

"Sounds like exactly what I signed up for when I followed you." Maren's mouth was still open on whatever she'd been about to say. She closed it.

"You sure?" Ant asked, because it felt like the thing to ask, even though some part of him already knew what the answer was going to be before she gave it.

"Very." Rebekah smiled, and this one had a little more teeth in it than the flirting usually did.

"Besides, Raven's already got a job. Somebody's got to run the Kithren pens while we're gone."

"She's got a point," Raven said, and didn't sound remotely put out about losing the assignment, which told Ant more about how she felt about it than anything she could have said out loud.

"Then it's settled," Ant said, before anyone else could volunteer an opinion nobody had asked for.

"Rebekah and I work up the story. Maren, you build the chip." He looked at Kalsar.

"Everyone else needs to know what's happening, because I'm not doing this quietly and having half the clan find out from a rumor." Kalsar was already moving toward the door.

"I'll wake the rest," he said.

"You two—" a nod at Ant and Rebekah "—go build your marriage. Try not to enjoy it too much."

"No promises," Rebekah said, and didn't look at Maren when she said it, which somehow made it worse. By the time Kalsar had the rest of HQ up and gathered, bleary, half-dressed, nobody asking questions yet, Natalia was standing at the front of them, arms folded, her voice pitched to carry without needing to rise.

"No more single-lead patrols," she said, before Kalsar had finished laying out the plan. Her voice wasn't raised. It didn't need to be.

"Not tonight. Not until this is settled. Every route doubles up, and one of the senior leads goes with every pair. I'll take a route myself, so will Kalsar, so will anyone else who's led people through worse than this. It's a slower night for coverage. I'd rather have a slow night than another empty chair at breakfast."

"That cuts our ground in half," someone near the back said.

"Then it's half the ground, held by people who come home from it." Natalia looked around the room as she said it, not past anyone: the youngest fighters first, the ones who'd flinched hardest at the news, holding on each of them a second longer than she needed to.

"Routes get planned so no two units cross paths tonight. Anyone out there wearing our colors who isn't in your own group gets treated as hostile until proven otherwise. I'd rather someone apologize to a friend by mistake in the morning than not have that friend to apologize to." Nobody argued with that.

"If the serpent shows, nobody engages it. Nobody." She said it plainly, no dressing it up and no softening it either.

"Mark its position. Retreat. Send word. It's already put two of ours in the ground, and it wasn't even trying hard to do it." Her eyes found Andy, then Garrick, standing a little apart from the rest, same as always.

"You two stay loose tonight. No fixed route. Word comes in that the serpent's been spotted, you go, together, and you don't wait on anyone's permission to do it." Garrick nodded once, silent as ever. Andy didn't nod at all. He just watched the room a moment longer, cataloguing who moved where and how fast, before he turned and started checking the strap on his gear without another word. Ant stood at the edge of it all with Rebekah beside him, watching exhaustion and fear move through the room in equal measure.

Routes drawn. Names assigned. An entire clan bracing itself around the hole he and Rebekah were about to walk into on purpose. Mahkir hadn't said anything in a while, which was its own kind of loud. You're quiet, Ant told him, low, just between them. I'm thinking about how long I have to sit here doing nothing while you wear someone else's name into a clan that might be the one that did this to us. Mahkir's tail moved once against the stone, slow, deliberate. I don't like it. I know. I'm coming anyway.

However I have to do it. Ant didn't answer that one out loud. He didn't need to. The cover story took longer to build than the chip did. Maren worked in the back room off her office, door shut, a single lamp burning low enough that anyone walking past wouldn't think twice about it.

Ant and Rebekah took the kitchen instead, empty at this hour, the whole space smelling of yesterday's stew still clinging to the pot Hazel never quite scrubbed clean, and a colder note underneath it of the well-water someone had left standing too long in a bucket by the door.

"Names first," Rebekah said, hopping up onto the counter like she owned it.

"Can't build a marriage without names."

"Obviously." Ant pulled out a stool, sat, immediately regretted it when one leg proved shorter than the other three.

"What do you want to be called?"

"Something plain. Nobody remembers a plain name, which is the whole point." She tapped her chin, theatrical about it, clearly enjoying herself more than the situation strictly called for.

"Beth."

"Beth."

"You don't like it."

"Didn't say that either."

"You made a face."

"I have one face. It does what it wants." He rubbed the back of his neck, aware he was stalling and aware she knew it too.

"Fine. Beth. What about me?"

"You need something forgettable and Southern-sounding, since we're claiming a clan from down past Ashfont way. Something like—" she squinted at him like she was reading it off his forehead "—Ethan."

"Ethan."

"Ethan's good. Ethan's a man who's never once been the most interesting person in a room, and that's exactly what you need to be for the next however-long."

"I'm hurt."

"You'll live." She grinned, and there was real warmth under the teasing, the kind that had been there since the first week she'd talked her way into staying.

"Now the clan. Maren said folded, eighteen months back, no survivors worth tracking down to check the story against. We need a name for it. Something small enough nobody's heard of it, but real-sounding enough that nobody questions it either."

"Ashholt," Ant said, before he'd fully thought it through.

"There's a village east of the old Shell Razor camp with that name on the map. Nobody's clan, as far as I know. Should be safe to borrow."

"Ashholt it is." She said it out loud twice, trying the sound of it in her mouth.

"Ethan and Beth of Ashholt. Married three years. No kids, long story we don't tell strangers. You were low-tier before your bond, worked patrol muscle mostly, never made a name for yourself. I kept the books." She looked at him sideways.

"Can you actually do sums, or is that going to be a problem the second someone asks you to split a bar tab?"

"I can do sums."

"Good, because I genuinely cannot, and if this whole thing hinges on my arithmetic we are already doomed." He laughed before he could stop himself, short and surprised out of him, and she looked pleased in a way that had nothing performed about it, like landing that mattered more than anything else in the room.

"What about Mahkir," Ant said, once the laugh had faded and the actual weight of the thing settled back down over both of them.

"Maren's changing his registered name too, but a chip doesn't explain why he looks the way he does if anyone in Marigolds has ever seen a lynx-type before."

"Then he stops being a Flaming Lynx for a while." Rebekah shrugged, like it wasn't much of a puzzle at all.

"Every clan that size has a hundred Kithren nobody's bothered cataloguing properly. Give him an unremarkable name, keep him quiet, keep him ordinary. He doesn't perform any skill in front of anyone he doesn't have to. No fire. No claws that look like they belong to something that's fought an Epic. Just a lynx who follows his handler around and doesn't cause trouble." I don't cause trouble, Mahkir said, injured, from where he'd draped himself half across the kitchen doorway.

Trouble causes itself in my general vicinity and I happen to be standing there. That's not better, Ant told him. It is what it is.

"He says it is what it is," Ant relayed, and Rebekah laughed properly this time, head tipping back, and for one unguarded second the whole weight of the night lifted off the room. The lift didn't last. It couldn't, not tonight. By the time Maren found them, chip in hand, small enough to sit in her palm, the readout on it already scrubbed and rebuilt into two names that had never belonged to anyone real, the sky outside had gone from black to the flat grey that came an hour or so before actual dawn.

She didn't say much handing it over. Just watched Ant's face while he turned it over once between his fingers, like she was checking whether he understood what she'd just put in his hand.

"It'll hold," she said.

"I checked it four times."

"You always do."

"Come back," she said, quieter, not quite managing to keep it as steady as the rest.

"Both of you." Nobody answered that one directly. There wasn't really an answer that would have made it easier to hear. They left before full light, Rebekah in a plain traveling cloak with nothing of her usual colors showing, Lem folded small and quiet at her side instead of underfoot the way he usually was. Mahkir walked a half-step behind Ant, ears low, saying nothing at all.

Not sulking, just watching the road ahead the way he watched everything that mattered, like he was already deciding where the next threat was going to come from. The territory line came up faster than Ant expected. A worn marker post, half-swallowed by bramble, the paint on it too faded to read anymore. Past it, the first patch of ground that wasn't Oath of Defiance's to walk without a reason. Rebekah slowed beside him, just enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

"Last chance to turn back, Ethan."

"Not really," Ant said, and kept walking.