Vows To The Void Moon

Chapter 9: What the Morning Owed

Saoirse P.O.V

Neither of us slept properly that night, not in any way that counted as rest, and when the sky finally began to grey above the broadleaf canopy, I felt it more than saw it, a slow loosening in the quality of the dark, the Moon's weight overhead finally yielding to something gentler.

Cadryn was already awake. I don't think he'd slept at all, not truly, and I felt the specific, careful exhaustion in him that came from a man who'd spent the whole night keeping watch over more than just the perimeter.

'You should have woken me for a shift,' I said, sitting up against the cold stone at my back.

'You needed it more than I did.'

'That's not how watches work.'

'It's how this one worked.' He turned to look at me properly, and in the grey pre-dawn light his face looked less guarded than I'd seen it in days, the fatigue sitting plainly on him instead of managing carefully away.

My comm unit buzzed against my wrist before either of us could say more, the specific, insistent pulse that meant a live call rather than a routine automated ping, and I felt my stomach drop even before I'd looked at the display.

'Brael,' I said.

Cadryn went still in the particular way he went still whenever a variable he couldn't control entered the field. 'You should answer it. Silence would be worse than whatever you have to say.'

I answered it, keeping my voice in the flat, unbothered register I'd spent six years perfecting for exactly this kind of call.

'Vael.'

'You missed your scheduled check-in.' Brael's voice came through thin and crackling, but the edge in it was unmistakable even through the static.

'I let it ride for a few hours because you've earned that much trust in six years. I'm not letting it become a pattern without an explanation.'

'I encountered signs of an unauthorized crossing near the northern boundary markers,' I said.

'I extended my sweep to verify whether it was a threat to Sector Nine coverage before closing out.'

'So you extended your sweep without notifying command?'

'The situation didn't justify breaking radio silence at the time.'

The silence on the line lasted a moment.

'It's logged as an incomplete return, Saoirse.

That's not something I expect from you. Your reports are precise enough to use as training material. You don't leave gaps unless there's a reason.'

'There was a reason.'

'And that reason is?'

I felt Cadryn's eyes on me, and beneath the surface calm I was holding for Brael's benefit, I felt something colder settle into my own chest, the specific fear of a lie about to run out of road.

'Field business. Nothing that affects sector coverage.'

'That's not an answer.'

'It's the answer I can give you right now' I said.

'I need you to trust six years of judgment on this one.'

The silence on the line stretched long enough that I thought he might simply hang up.

'Six years of judgment has never once given me reason to question where you are,' he said finally.

'l am trusting it because I don't have a better option. But I am not doing it blind forever.

Check in properly within forty-eight hours, or I escalate it to a welfare sweep, and you know exactly what that means for your file.'

He cut the line before I could answer, and I stood there for a moment with the dead comm still against my ear, feeling the specific, sick weight of a clock I hadn't known was running until just now.

'Forty-eight hours,' Cadryn said quietly.

'Forty-eight hours,' I confirmed.

'That's all the time Brael's giving me. After that, he'll authorize a welfare sweep, and when they find Sector Nine empty, this stops being a scout running long on an old sweep and becomes a missing Riftlands scout during Void Moon season. That draws exactly the kind of attention we can't afford.’

We broke camp faster after that, the earlier ease between us replaced by a sharper, more focused urgency, and I found myself, climbing into the ridge country's exposed granite shelves, running arithmetic I didn't like the answer to, no matter how many times I ran it.

It was an hour past midday when I felt the second problem arrive, not through the comm this time, but through the specific, prickling awareness that had kept me alive through six years of contested ground.

Someone was moving parallel to us, a quarter mile east, following the same ridge line with the careful, practiced economy of a Riftlands scout on active patrol.

'We have company,' I breathed, pulling Cadryn down behind a granite outcrop before he'd fully registered the warning.

I recognized the shape of the approach before I recognized the scout himself, and when he came close enough for his face to resolve through the thin morning haze, my stomach dropped a second time.

Dennet.

Two years my junior, assigned to the sector directly south of mine, competent enough that Brael occasionally paired us on joint sweeps. Brael had only spoken to me that morning.

He wouldn't have ordered a welfare sweep yet. Dennet's bearing was too relaxed for that anyway, his path too consistent with an ordinary boundary patrol along his own sector's northern edge, one that simply happened to brush against the ridge we'd chosen. He would recognize me instantly if he saw me, and he would absolutely report it.

'He's not looking for us,' I whispered.

'He's just on his own patrol. But it won't matter if he sees me.'

Cadryn's hand found his blade, slow and deliberate. More of preparation than intent, Dennet was not their enemy. He was just a riftland scout following his patrol and neither of them wanted to end it in blood.

'Can you keep him from seeing us?'

There wasn't time. Dennet's path was going to bring him within thirty feet of our position within the next several strides, close enough that even careful stillness wouldn't save us if he happened to glance the wrong way.

I felt the compression arrive in my chest before I'd consciously reached for it, sharp and entirely unpracticed, and I didn't so much aim it as simply panic in its direction, a wordless, desperate push toward the specific feeling of nothing here, keep walking, this ground is already cleared.

Dennet's stride hitched.

He slowed, glanced once toward our outcrop with an expression that had gone briefly, strangely unfocused, and then looked away entirely, his attention sliding to the far ridge line instead, and continued on his original bearing without breaking pace again.

The birds went quiet first, an entire slope's worth of wrens and finches falling suddenly, uniformly silent, as t,hough something had passed low over the ridge that every small living thing had felt before I had.

A thin skin of frost crept across the granite under my palm, delicate and impossible in the mild morning air, gone again within seconds, as if the stone itself had flinched.