Crimson Veil

Chapter Eighteen — Cracks

✦ Eve's POV ✦

Dax found me on a Friday.

He came into the ward mid-morning with a bruised hand from a sparring session that he had wrapped himself with the ambitious confidence of someone who had watched bandaging done enough times to believe they understood it. The wrap was wrong in three different ways and I undid it and redid it while he sat on the treatment bed and watched me work with an expression I didn't look at directly.

"How's the shoulder?" I asked.

"Good. Better. The exercises helped." He was quiet for a moment. "Eve."

I kept my eyes on the bandaging. "Mm."

"I need to say something and I'd rather say it than not say it, even if it makes things strange between us."

I finished the wrap and tied it off and sat back and looked at him, because he deserved that.

He met my eyes with the directness that had always been one of the things I liked about him. "I like you," he said. "Not as a friend, or not only as a friend. I think you probably know that."

"Dax—"

"I'm not asking you for anything," he said, quickly, carefully. "I'm not — I know that the answer is no. I know it's no for reasons that don't have anything to do with whether I'm someone you could like, and I know that because I'm not blind and I've watched the last several weeks." He paused. "I just didn't want to not say it. Because I think saying true things is better than not saying them, even when saying them is uncomfortable."

I looked at him. He was good — genuinely good, the kind of person who was warm all the way through rather than warm on the surface. And he was right that I had known, and he was right that the answer was no, and he was right about the reasons.

"You're a good person, Dax," I said. "Genuinely. And I'm sorry that—"

"Don't apologize." He said it with a smile that was real even if it had something else underneath it. "Don't do that. Just — tell me we're still friends."

"We're still friends," I said. "Obviously."

He nodded. He looked at his newly wrapped hand. "He's going to do right by you," he said, not looking up. "Voss. He's—" He stopped. Started again. "I've served near Black Division for two years. I know what he's like with his soldiers. What he's like when he decides someone matters." He looked up. "He's going to do right by you."

I didn't know what to say to that so I said nothing, which was perhaps its own kind of answer.

Dax slid off the treatment bed and straightened his uniform. "Okay," he said. "That's done. I'm going back to pretending I'm fine with everything, which I will actually be fine with in approximately two weeks." He grinned — the easy, genuine grin that was simply who he was. "How's the hand?"

"Come back in four days," I said. "And wrap it properly next time."

"Where's the fun in that."

He left, and I stood in the middle of the ward and felt the specific ache of caring about someone who cared about you in the wrong direction, and the particular gratitude of having it handled with that much grace.

~ ~ ~

The informant problem arrived that same afternoon through Caine, delivered with his usual economy of expression and zero preamble.

"We have someone who wants to talk," he said, in the corridor outside the ward. "Low-level. Embedded in Second Division. He's been feeding information to the Crimson Veil faction for eight months and he's scared now — the night attack shook something loose in him." He looked at me steadily. "He'll talk. But we need to know if he's telling the truth."

I understood what he was asking. "You want me to read him."

"During questioning. You don't need to be in the room — adjacent, within range. Just confirm whether what he's saying has the emotional quality of truth or performance."

I thought about Mira's warning — keep the extensions small, don't let Aldric's watchers see activity. "It needs to be quick," I said. "I can't hold an extended read without potentially being visible to whoever Aldric has monitoring me."

"The questioning will take twenty minutes. Can you do twenty?"

"Yes." I paused. "But Caine — if he's telling the truth and I confirm it, Adam acts on that information. I need to know that what I'm doing is being used carefully. Not just efficiently."

He looked at me for a moment with that quiet, measuring quality. "He won't waste it," he said. "Or you."

It was the right answer. I nodded. "When?"

"Tonight. Eighth hour."

I went back into the ward and told myself the tightness in my chest was the weight of what was coming and not anything else, and I almost believed it, and I kept working until the evening bell and then I went to do the thing that needed doing.

~ ~ ~

The room they used for the questioning was small and windowless, off the Black Division's section of the stronghold. I was placed in the corridor adjacent — close enough, Caine confirmed, for my range — with Bowen beside me and strict instructions to signal immediately if I needed to stop.

I extended carefully. Slowly. The way Mira had taught me — a controlled reach, the shielding holding steady underneath it, in and out fast.

The man inside was frightened. Genuinely, deeply frightened — the kind of fear that had been building for days and had broken open when the night attack made real what had previously been possible to treat as abstract. Beneath the fear was something I recognized from the handful of times I had read people who were confessing rather than performing: a quality of relief. The particular lightening that came from putting down something heavy.

He was telling the truth.

Every answer I could catch the edges of — the information about how recruits were identified, the communication methods, the names of two other embedded soldiers he knew about — carried the clean emotional signature of honesty.

Twenty minutes. I pulled back at eighteen, carefully, and let the shielding settle back into its resting state.

I looked at Bowen. "True," I said quietly. "All of it."

He nodded once and sent the signal.

Walking back to the healers' quarters afterward, I thought about the two names. Two more people in the stronghold who had been living double lives, who had been watching and reporting, who had been in the same hallways and the same mess hall as all of us.

It was a particular kind of loneliness, I thought — not my loneliness, but the loneliness of a community that had discovered it couldn't entirely trust itself. The grief of finding rot in something you had believed was solid.

I thought about Adam in his command room with this information, adding it to the map of what he knew, moving pieces around a board that was getting clearer by the day.

Together, he had said.

I held that word like the wrist cord under my sleeve — a physical anchor, something solid at the center of the still water.

Together.