They moved in three columns.Ronan had designed it. The lycans formed the outer column on each flank — fluid, spread across the terrain, operating on instinct and pack signals that bypassed human language entirely. The hunters occupied the center, where the path was most defined and their particular skills — reading compressed earth, identifying recent passage, cataloguing the specific irregularities that distinguished human movement from animal — were most useful.Elias moved between them all.Not because he was undecided about where he belonged. Because the position was genuinely useful. He was the only person in the column who could have a conversation with Ronan about pack-wide strategy and then turn and discuss trail sign with Thomas without either exchange losing substance. The between-space was his operational ground.He was learning to stop apologizing for it.The terrain was different south of Ronan's territory. The high mountain pine gave way gradually to mixed woodland, the

The river crossing was exactly the problem Soren had anticipated and then some.It was a substantial river — glacial melt, running fast and cold over a boulder-strewn bed that made it difficult to read depth from the bank. The color was grey-green, the surface broken by standing waves where the current accelerated between rock formations. In summer it might have been manageable. In the tail end of winter, with the snowmelt beginning in the upper elevations, it was a different proposition entirely.There was one crossing point within reasonable distance. A natural ford at a wide, relatively shallow section, the banks low enough to access without scrambling. Wide enough for two people abreast.And on the far bank, visible to Asha's sharper eyes from a reconnaissance the previous evening, a small structure. Prefabricated. Dark metal. A monitoring station."Occupied?" Elias asked."Was," Asha said. "Three hours ago, one body heat signature inside. Stationary.""Is.""Almost certainly," sh

They went in at the shift change.Terran had given them the timing — the window between outgoing and incoming external patrol when the overlap was thinnest and both teams were occupied with their own handover logistics. Four minutes, he estimated. In practice, closer to six. Enough.The entry point was the maintenance access on the facility's western face — a utility corridor that connected the ventilation and filtration systems and was therefore staffed only by the engineering team during scheduled maintenance runs, which happened in the morning shift, not the night.Elias went in with a team of seven: Soren, Maren, Luna, two of Ronan's pack in human form, Corvus the hunter, and Terran, who walked into the facility he had been monitoring from the outside with the stiff, deliberate movement of someone committing to an action before their nerve could catch up with their intention.Elias understood that feeling intimately.The corridor was dim, functional, smelling of chemical compounds

They were clear of the facility before the full response mobilized.Ronan had a gift for the specific geometry of exits — the alpha understood instinctively how pursuit behaved, the angles it took, the speeds it could sustain, the points at which it would exhaust itself against terrain. He led the coalition on a route that was three kilometers longer than the direct line but that crossed two ridges and followed a watercourse whose rocky bed left no readable track.By the time the facility's external response teams reached the perimeter, there was nothing to follow.They ran for two hours. Not in panic — in the deliberate, ground-eating pace of a group that had planned this phase the way it had planned the entry. Elias ran at the pack's center and felt the specific, clean satisfaction of a thing done as planned, which was its own kind of grace after so much improvisation.They stopped at a pre-designated position — a natural hollow in the ridge, sheltered, defensible, far enough from t

They found the railway on the third day south.It emerged from the forest like a relic — the rails themselves long since corroded to rust-red, the ties rotted through in places, the embankment eroded by decades of mountain weather. But the infrastructure remained: the graded cut through the ridgeline, the retaining walls that kept the slope from reclaiming the route, the occasional skeletal framework of a former loading station, stripped of its buildings but still defining the shape of what had been.Soren walked the first fifty meters with her eyes on the rails."Recent traffic," she said. She crouched and touched the inside edge of one of the rails. The rust gave way to clean, grey metal at the contact surface — the bright line of something that had been in regular use against something that hadn't. "The rails look abandoned. They're not.""How recent?" Elias asked."Days, not weeks." She stood. "They're moving something. Or they were.""Getting their most valuable assets out," Luna