"Two hours," the runner had said, and that number had been sitting in my chest like a stone ever since. Two hours to turn a fortress built for waiting out the dead into something that could survive a coordinated assault by people who actually knew how to fight back.We didn't waste a minute of it."Perimeter first," Jaxen said, already moving, already barking assignments before Voss had even finished rolling up the maps we'd been using thirty seconds earlier for a completely different kind of war. "North wall gets the heavy rifles. South wall's more exposed, that's where they'll try to split our attention.""You think this is a diversion," I said."I think Thorne doesn't do anything by accident. If Red Sun's coming straight at us instead of picking us apart slow, that's not desperation. That's a message."I didn't like what that message probably was. I didn't have time to sit with not liking it either.The fortress came alive around us in a way I'd never seen before, not even during t

The meeting point was an old grain co-op halfway between our territory and theirs, chosen because it belonged to neither of us and could be watched from three directions at once. I brought Jaxen and Reyes. They brought two people I didn't recognize and a woman who introduced herself simply as Wren, no last name, no rank, just Wren, like the word itself was supposed to carry enough weight on its own.It did. Something about the way she stood told me it did. She had the posture of someone who had spent years making decisions that other people's lives depended on, the kind of stillness that came from having already survived the worst version of every scenario she could imagine, and probably a few she couldn't."You're smaller than I expected," she said, looking me over with an assessment that felt clinical rather than rude. "Given what you survived.""I get that a lot lately.""I imagine you do." She gestured toward the cracked concrete table someone had dra