The alarm did not stop.
It had a particular quality, not the sharp urgent pulse of the border breach signal I had heard in drills during my three days at Ironpeak, but something lower and more continuous, a sound that vibrated in the chest rather than the ears, the kind of sound that was designed not to alert but to warn. The difference between those two things, I was learning, was significant.
Alerting said something is coming.
Warning said something is already here.
Caden released my hand.
Not roughly. Not in the way of someone leaving. In the precise deliberate way of a man shifting from one mode into another, the way you put down something carefully before you pick up something heavier.
He turned to Rowan.
"Numbers," he said.
"Three confirmed inside the eastern tree line," Rowa
