We buried Voss on the hill above the fortress, the one place inside our walls where the ground still remembered what it felt like before all of this, before the dead started walking and the living started fighting each other over who got to survive it. Half the settlement turned out. Wren sent a delegation from the enclave, four of her people standing quietly at the back of the gathering, a small gesture that meant more than I think she realized.The morning had come up gray and cold, the kind of light that made everything look a little more honest than it usually did, stripped of anything soft or forgiving. I stood at the edge of the freshly turned earth and thought about how strange it was that the world kept insisting on ordinary weather even on days that felt like they should have earned something more dramatic, some visible sign that a person the world needed had just left it.I hadn't planned to speak. Voss had never been the kind of person who needed grand words

The document was waiting at the gate when we got there, sealed in a plain metal tube left on the ground exactly ten paces from our perimeter, close enough to be found, far enough that whoever delivered it hadn't wanted to risk our watch getting a clean shot. Jaxen retrieved it himself, checking it for wires or triggers before he'd let anyone else near it, the particular paranoia of a man who'd learned the hard way that Red Sun didn't do anything without calculating every possible angle first.Nobody had seen who left it. The watch reported nothing, no movement, no vehicle, just the tube appearing sometime in the last hour like the fortress itself had been given a moment of blindness to allow the delivery through. That alone told me something about how confident Red Sun had become, willing to walk right up to our perimeter without needing to hide the fact that they could.We read it together in the command post, Reyes and Wren's delegation and half the surviving leaders

Jaxen closed his mouth without speaking. He looked around the table one more time, slow, deliberate, and then his eyes found mine, and something passed between us that felt less like a question and more like a confirmation of something we'd both already decided long before this vote ever split evenly down the middle.I could see the exhaustion sitting behind his eyes, the same exhaustion I felt in my own bones, but underneath it something steadier too, the promise he'd made me on the wall just hours earlier already anchoring him against whatever came next."I'll break the tie," he said. "But I think the person who should actually be answering this isn't me."Every head in the room turned toward me.I felt the weight of that attention settle over my shoulders like something physical, heavier than any tactical decision I'd made since this war started, because this one wasn't really about strategy at all. It was about my own life, laid out plainly on the tab

Ruby wanted to run diagnostics. Jaxen wanted to mobilize every fighter we had left onto the walls immediately. Reyes wanted both, simultaneously, and argued for it loud enough that half the command post could hear her through the closed door. I stood at the edge of all that frantic motion and felt something else entirely, a low pull at the back of my skull that I hadn't felt in weeks, not since the early days after my integration when everything about my new body still felt foreign and uncontrollable.The rest of the room blurred slightly around the edges as the pull sharpened, the way sound sometimes fades when you're straining to hear something faint and important underneath it. Voices kept moving around me, arguing about walls and weapons and fighters, but none of it felt as urgent anymore as the thing pulling steadily at the back of my mind.The King sense. That was what Ruby had started calling it once we understood what it actually was, some latent function buried in the Eros-Su

I came back to myself on the floor of the command post, Jaxen's face hovering too close above mine, his hands braced on either side of my head like he'd caught me on the way down. My vision cleared in slow, unsteady increments, the blinding white finally fading back into the ordinary gray of the room around us."There you are," Jaxen said, and the relief in his voice cracked audibly on the last word. "You went somewhere I couldn't follow you for almost a full minute. Don't ever do that to me again without warning.""I didn't exactly plan it," I managed, my voice rough, my whole body aching in a way that had nothing to do with any physical wound.The room slowly came back into focus around me, Reyes standing near the door with her arms crossed tight over her chest, Ward hovering behind Ruby with the particular helplessness of someone who badly wanted to do something useful and had no idea what that something might be.Ruby crouched beside us, her tablet already out, fingers moving fast