Crimson Veil

Chapter Five — Rumors and Rust

Eve’s pov:

Sera decided, on our sixth day at the stronghold, that we needed to go to the evening gather.

I said no. She ignored me, which I was beginning to understand was simply how Sera operated when she believed she was right, and since she believed she was right approximately eighty percent of the time and was correct about seventy-five percent of that, I had started picking my arguments more carefully.

"You have been in that ward for six days straight," she said, pulling her hair back with the practiced efficiency of someone who had made this exact motion ten thousand times. "You have eaten exactly one meal that wasn't consumed standing next to a supply cabinet. You spoke to no one yesterday who wasn't bleeding."

"I spoke to you."

"I was bandaging my own finger. I was technically a patient." She looked at me in the mirror above the small basin in our quarters. "Eve. Come to the gather. Talk to people who aren't injured. Eat something that isn't ward rations. You can go back to being relentlessly dedicated tomorrow."

I looked at the treatment notes in my hand.

"Leave those," she said.

I left them.

~ ~ ~

The evening gather happened in the large hall on the stronghold's ground floor — a wide stone room that in the daytime served as a secondary training space and in the evenings was transformed, with the kind of casual efficiency that military posts seemed to excel at, into something closer to a communal space. Long tables, benches, lamps burning warm against the grey stone walls. The smell of food and something fermented that I chose not to examine too closely.

It was louder than I expected. Soldiers from several divisions mixed together with the ease of people who shared walls and drills and the particular intimacy of proximity, and the sound level had the comfortable density of a room full of people who were genuinely glad to be somewhere warm and off duty.

Sera navigated it like she had been here for years.

I stayed close to her and tried not to look like I was assessing the room the way I always assessed rooms — mapping the emotional register of it, noting where the energy was high and where it was flat, identifying the people whose states were loud enough that I'd need to keep physical distance. The new shielding technique Mira had given me helped. Not perfectly, not yet, but it was something — a layer of deliberate calm between me and the ambient noise of other people's interior lives.

We found seats at the end of one of the long tables with plates of food that were significantly better than ward rations, and I was just beginning to feel something approaching genuine relaxation when someone sat down across from me.

"You're the new healers," he said. "Seventh Division intake, arrived last week."

He was perhaps twenty-five, with the kind of face that had probably been causing problems for people since he was old enough to understand how it worked — easy good looks, a smile that knew exactly what it was doing, dark eyes with warmth in them that seemed genuine rather than performed. He was in the uniform of Third Division, and he wore it with the relaxed confidence of someone comfortable in his own skin.

"Observant," I said.

He grinned. It was a good grin. "Dax Fenrir. Third Division. I've been meaning to introduce myself since I saw you in the ward on your second day."

"You were a patient?"

"Briefly. Sprained wrist. Theron patched it up before you could." He looked faintly disappointed about this. "I'm hoping for a more interesting injury next time."

Sera, to my left, made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh. "Sera Vann," she said. "And this is Eve Ashcroft. Please don't injure yourself on purpose. We have enough to do."

"I would never." He settled onto the bench with the ease of someone who was welcome everywhere and knew it. "How are you finding the stronghold? Seventh Division treating you well?"

"Everyone's been very kind," I said, which was true and also the kind of answer that didn't require elaboration.

"Wait until you've been here a month," he said. "The kindness holds. It's the strange part, actually — for a military post this size, the divisions get along surprisingly well. Even Black, mostly." He said this last part with the slight shift in tone that everyone seemed to use when Black Division came up in conversation — a small, involuntary adjustment.

I reached for my cup. "You work alongside Black Division?"

"Adjacent to. We rotate some joint field exercises." He glanced toward the far end of the hall. "You've met Voss?"

"Briefly."

"Then you know." He said it simply, without drama. "He's—" He paused, searching for the word with the air of someone being genuinely careful about it. "There's nobody better in the field. I've seen him in combat exercises and it's something else. But he's not..." He paused again.

"Warm?" Sera supplied.

Dax smiled. "I was going to say accessible. Warm is a different category entirely." He looked at me. "Did he actually talk to you? When you met?"

"A few words."

"That's more than most people get." He said it without envy, just as information. Then the smile came back, easier now. "Anyway. You didn't come here to talk about the Commander. What do you do when you're not healing people? Any of you have interests that don't involve blood?"

He was disarming. I could feel it — not manipulative, just genuinely practiced at making people comfortable — and I found myself talking more than I usually did with someone I had met eight minutes ago. He was easy to be around in the way that some people simply were, a quality of easiness that didn't require anything from you in return.

We talked for an hour. Sera liked him immediately, which was not surprising — Sera liked most people immediately, with the selective warmth of someone who was genuinely interested in the world. I liked him too, in a careful way, the way I liked most things that seemed pleasant on the surface — holding a slight reserve, waiting to see what was underneath.

He was still talking when I felt the shift.

It was the same thing I had felt in the ward — the alteration in the room's ambient quality, the way attention moved before anyone consciously decided to redirect it. I looked up before I fully understood why.

Adam Voss had entered the hall.

He wasn't alone — Caine was with him, and two other Black Division soldiers — but the group moved through the space with the slightly separated quality of people that the room instinctively gave a wider berth to. Not avoidance exactly. More like the way a river moves around something solid.

He didn't scan the room the way most people did when they entered a social space, looking for familiar faces or available seats. He moved directly to a table near the far wall with the efficiency of someone who had already made every decision about this before walking through the door.

But he looked at me.

It was brief. A glance that lasted perhaps two seconds and contained nothing I could have named. Then he sat down with his back to the wall — naturally, automatically, the position of someone who never left their back uncovered — and the conversation at his table began.

Dax, I realized, had said something I hadn't caught.

"Sorry," I said. "What?"

He was watching me with an expression I couldn't fully interpret. Then he smiled, easy and uncomplicated. "I asked if you wanted more tea."

"Yes," I said. "Thank you."

I did not look toward the far wall again.

But I was aware of it, the way you were aware of a fire in a room — not looking at it directly, but always knowing exactly where it was.