2026-07-25 21:40:14
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0054
We moved the water detail to round the clock watches within the hour, but Ruby's beacon triangulation still needed another full day to finish narrowing down Red Sun's base location, and Jaxen refused to just sit still waiting for Voss to make good on his threat."We go on the offensive," he said, spreading a rough hand-drawn map across the command room table. "Hit one of their supply routes before they hit our well. Force them to react to us instead of the other way around.""That's aggressive," I said."That's the point."Ruby, still bandaged and exhausted, pulled up a satellite image on her tablet that she'd managed to salvage some use out of despite the damage. "There's a supply convoy scheduled to pass through this junction based on patrol patterns I've been tracking. If we hit it clean, we cripple their logistics and buy ourselves breathing room."We moved out before dawn, a small strike team, me and Jaxen at the front, Ward and two of the new
0053
Jaxen didn't tell me who Voss actually was until three days later, and even then it came out sideways, half answer and half something he still hadn't fully worked through himself."He was a captain," Jaxen said, staring out at the treeline from the watchtower, arms braced against the railing. "Before everything. Different unit than mine, but we crossed paths twice on joint operations. He was good. Disciplined. The kind of officer men actually wanted to follow instead of just obeyed because rank said so.""And now he's Red Sun's enforcer.""Now he's whatever they needed him to become." Jaxen's jaw worked, something bitter twisting behind the words. "That's what worries me. Voss doesn't improvise. If he's running Red Sun's field operations, everything they've done so far has been calculated. The firebombing wasn't rage. It was a message."I didn't get to ask what kind of message, because that was the exact moment the watch bell started ringing again, three
0052
The movement at the eastern fence turned out to be nothing worse than a small scattered pack of shamblers drawn by the smoke still hanging over the fortress, and we cleared them without losing anyone, but the false alarm cost us the rest of the afternoon, adrenaline and exhaustion leaving everyone hollowed out by the time the sun started sinking again.Ruby had gone back to her makeshift terminal the second the all clear sounded, muttering about lost momentum and cold trails, promising she'd pick the beacon frequency back up first thing in the morning if her nerves settled enough to focus. Nobody argued with her. Nobody had the energy left to argue about anything.I found Jaxen afterward in the ruined section of the eastern wall, sorting through a crate of recovered debris the drone strike had scattered across the yard, most of it warped beyond use, some of it worth salvaging if you had the patience to sort through the wreckage piece by piece. He had that patience toni
0051
The wreckage of Ruby's workshop still smoked two days later, a black scar on the yard that nobody had found the heart to clear away yet.We gathered in what was left of the command room instead, the makeshift break room table crowded with salvaged tablets and burned scraps of paper Ruby had pulled from the workshop's remains before the fire finished them off. She looked exhausted in a way sleep wasn't going to fix, dark circles under her eyes, a bandage wrapped around one forearm where a piece of shrapnel had caught her the morning of the attack."Okay," she said, pulling up a grainy image on her tablet screen. "This took some doing, but I managed to pull partial flight data off one of the drone fragments we recovered from the blast site. It's not much. Enough.""Enough for what," Jaxen asked, arms crossed, standing rather than sitting, the way he always did when he wanted to be first through a door if something went wrong."Enough to confirm this wasn't
0050
I woke up smiling.That should have been my first warning. Nothing good ever lasted long enough in this world to still be there when you opened your eyes, but for one stupid, soft minute I lay in my bunk replaying the inch of space between me and Jaxen on the watchtower, the warmth of the whiskey, the way his voice had gone rough when he asked if I remembered his hand on my knee. I let myself have that minute. I didn't know yet it was the last easy one I'd get for a long time.The sound that ended it wasn't an alarm. It was worse than that, a low whistling drone that built fast, too fast, climbing in pitch until my whole body understood what it was before my brain caught up."Incoming!" someone screamed from the watchtower, the same watchtower, the same voice that had interrupted us hours ago, except now Sasha's tone had nothing careful or apologetic left in it. Pure terror instead.I hit the floor of my bunk half a second before the first explosion tore through the eastern section of
0049
Ward found the bottle wedged behind a false panel in the pharmacy delivery van Ruby had dragged back to the fortress for parts, and the second he held it up in the fading afternoon light, the whole workshop went quiet."Is that," Ruby said slowly, "real whiskey?""Unopened," Ward confirmed, turning the bottle so the label caught the sun. "Some kind of anniversary edition, by the look of it. Whoever drove this van was saving it for something.""Well, they're not coming back for it," Ruby said, already reaching for it with the shameless confidence of someone who'd decided the matter was settled. "So I'm declaring tonight a safe night. We survived Rourke's patrol, we survived the fence breach, Peter's not dead, that's cause enough."Jaxen, examining a rifle scope nearby, glanced up with the particular skepticism he reserved for anything that threatened the fortress's careful routines. "We're still on war footing.""We're always on war footing," Ruby said. "Doesn't mean we can't have one
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