CHAPTER 28

The assignment came through Yelena the day after Nox left, a shared-clear notice with two guild names on it instead of one.

The booking came with a survey attached, and I read that before I read the terms. Two pages. Moorland and shallow interior, with a surveyor’s signature at the bottom.

The office that had filed it was in Edinburgh, four hundred miles from the moor it described. I put it in my coat.

“Split gate,” Lisa said, reading over my shoulder. “We’re going in with another team. Half the yield each.”

“Gwen agreed to split a gate?” It didn’t sound like her. “She could buy the moor it opened on.”

“She tried to buy the gate. That’s the point.” Lisa turned the notice so I could see Yelena’s note in the margin. “A booking that opens in a fortnight, D-rank standard, nothing about it worth arguing over. Yelena put a stupid number on it and the Association still handed it to an older guild ahead of us.”

“Because of the money.”

“Because of the newness. Money gets you to the front of the queue. It doesn’t get you served ahead of a charter that has been on file for eleven years.”

She said it patiently, using the tone reserved for everything she had learned while I was gone.

“Gates are the one thing Gwen’s account can’t simply buy. There are more guilds than there are gates, so the Association allocates by seniority first and notices money second.”

“And we’re two weeks old.”

“Two weeks old, provisional charter, bottom of every list that matters. The money moves us up the lists. It doesn’t move us off the bottom of them.”

“So we don’t get our own.”

“So we get half of somebody else’s, and we’re lucky the somebody else said yes.” She checked the second name on the notice. “Meridian Guild.”

I hadn’t met any of them before, though the name was familiar. Meridian had been a rising star even back in my Aegis years, one good season away from taking Albion’s second spot in the national rankings. Apparently they had kept rising, and kept their gate access with it.

“They didn’t have to share,” I said.

“No. Established guild, secure booking, no reason to split the yield with a two-week-old they’ve never worked.” Lisa folded the notice. “Which makes me want to know why their captain said yes before we do anything else today.”

We met them at the entrance, a nondescript stretch of moorland an hour outside London.

The file listed it as a D-rank standard. Low threat, shallow interior, a clear you could walk out of before lunch.

Priya had brought a day pack. So had we. Nobody had brought the kind of kit you carry when you think you might not be coming back the same day.

Priya raised a hand in greeting before either of us had finished approaching, easy and unbothered, as if running into a rival guild at a gate assignment were a pleasant surprise.

“You’d be from Zarya, then,” she said. “Priya. Heard the name once or twice, never actually met either of you.”

“Lisa. This is Noah.” Lisa nodded toward the file in Priya’s hand. “You booked this one. We know that. Thank you for the half.”

“It’s a D-rank standard on a slow week. I can spare the half, and I was curious.” Priya glanced between the two of us, counting. “A new guild with more money than anyone can explain, buying its way toward a charter it can’t quite reach. That’s worth a wasted afternoon to get a look at. Just the two of you?”

“Just the two of us,” I said.

“Small team for a D-rank this far out. Bold, or understaffed. I won’t guess which.”

“A bit of both, currently,” Lisa said.

Priya didn’t push further.

“We ran a pair for eight months ourselves,” she said instead. “You learn things about each other you never learn with four. Mostly things neither of you wanted known.”

“Is that a recommendation?”

“It’s a warning delivered warmly. I find people take those better.”

Callum gave a small nod from a few steps back, already scanning the treeline out of habit.

Owen offered something between a wave and a shrug. Then he spent thirty seconds redoing a boot lace that hadn’t needed it. That told me how he felt about the assignment.

“Shall we, then,” Priya said. She led the way in without waiting for an answer, walking with the confidence of someone who had never been wrong about a gate.

The gate swallowed the entrance with the familiar shift in pressure. What waited on the other side bore no resemblance to moorland.

Lisa caught me scanning the perimeter instead of the path. She adjusted her position to cover my blind spot and kept clearing without asking.

White stretched in every direction, further than any D-rank interior had any right to extend.

The snow underfoot was deep enough to swallow a boot to the ankle. Sky overhead ran the wrong color entirely, streaked with green and violet. Cold hit hard enough to catch in the throat on the first breath.

Behind us, the way in still showed a rectangle of English moorland in the drizzle, close enough to walk back through in four steps.

Owen walked back through it to check. He came out again with rain on his shoulders and snow on his boots.

“It’s still there,” he said. “That’s the only reassuring sentence I’ve got.”

“That isn’t in the file,” Callum said, crouching to check the snow’s depth with one gloved hand.

“No,” Priya said, the easy confidence draining out of her voice. “That’s really not in the file.”

“The file said D-rank standard. Shallow interior.” Lisa turned a slow circle. “There’s nothing shallow here. This goes past the horizon.”

“Paperwork gets things wrong,” Owen offered.

“Paperwork gets a threat level wrong by a notch. It doesn’t put a tundra behind a door surveyed as moorland.” Priya’s jaw set. “Somebody stood on that moor and wrote a report. Either they never came through here, or something has changed since.”

Neither option was good. Nobody argued the point.

“Tundra,” Lisa said, turning slowly. “A whole tundra biome inside a moorland D-rank.”

“That isn’t supposed to be possible,” Owen said.

“No. It isn’t.”

“Great. So this is just a thing that happens now.”

“Apparently.”

Priya crouched beside Callum, studying the aurora-lit sky.

“Whatever this is, we should assume distance and duration both matter. A biome this size behind a D-rank door isn’t a same-day job.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Then we’re doing this together,” she said, standing up. “Splitting up in a space this size isn’t caution. It’s just a slower way of losing people.”

Nobody argued with that.

They did something before setting off that neither of us had ever been taught.

“Callum,” Priya said.

“Range is good. I can hold it about six hours before it starts costing me.”

“Owen.”

“Shadow is fine. I can stop something twice its own weight. I’d rather not find out about three times.”

“Light is good. I need line of sight and distance, and I’m no use at all inside four feet.” Priya looked over at us. “Everyone says what they can’t do before we start. Then nobody has to be brave about it later.”

“Does that work?”

“It has twice. It failed once.” She said it flatly. “We still say it.”

Lisa went next, stating her need for something dead nearby, a detail she had never mentioned to strangers before.

I said my core was cracked and that I was rationing. It was the first time I had told anyone outside the flat.

Callum took point without being asked, moving through the snow with an economy of motion that made the deep drifts look effortless.

He paused every few dozen yards, reading something in the snow the rest of us couldn’t see. Each time, he nudged our heading a degree or two.

You only saw the corrections if you looked back and measured the drift he had saved us.

“He’s good,” Lisa said quietly, watching him work.

“He’s very good,” I replied.

“Nox used to do that. The heading corrections. Small enough you never noticed until you looked back.”

“I know.”

“I miss it. The noticing without being told.”

I watched Callum’s back a while longer instead of answering. I was measuring him against Nox, and neither of us had asked to do that.

It was the second hour before I realized what was actually wrong, and it wasn’t the scouting.

With three of us, someone had always been behind me. It had never been a decision. Nox took the rear, and I had stopped checking over my shoulder somewhere around the second week without noticing.

I had checked eleven times since we came through. I counted them once I realized I was doing it.

You keep turning round.

“I know.”

He is in Japan and there is a competent stranger doing his job at the front of this line, and you are still turning round.

“I know.”

I am not criticizing. I am telling you that I have been turning round with you, and I would rather one of us admitted it.

Owen fell in beside us a few minutes later, hands jammed in his pockets against the cold. “You two are quiet. Is everything alright back there?”

“Fine,” Lisa said. “Just adjusting.”

“Adjusting to what?”

“Being one person short of what we’re used to.”

Owen nodded slowly. “Fair enough. We lost someone for a stretch once too. Different reasons. Same kind of hole, probably.”

“Did it get easier?”

“Eventually. Never all the way.” Owen shrugged, unbothered by his own honesty. “You just get better at working around the gap. Does not mean it closes.”

Neither of us had anything to add to that. Owen fell back into step beside Priya without waiting for a reply.

We moved for the better part of an hour before the first real problem showed itself. A low shape broke the snow’s surface fifty yards ahead, pale-furred and long-bodied. It watched us come on with a patience no fear could have taught it.

“Wolf,” Callum said, “if a wolf had never once needed to stop growing.”

It was easily the size of a horse, its fur the exact white of the snow, eyes a green too vivid to belong to anything natural.

No attack came. The creature simply watched, head low, waiting to see what five strangers in its territory intended to do next.

“Does anyone have a plan?” Owen asked.

“Not yet,” Priya said. “Let us not be the ones who make the first move.”

Owen’s hand had already gone halfway to his shoulder before she finished the sentence. He put it back down.

“Sorry.”

“Do not be sorry. Be slower.” Priya hadn’t taken her eyes off the thing in the snow. “We’re all quite tired and none of us has eaten since the moor.”

“Lisa,” I said, quiet. “Anything reading off it?”

She was crouched slightly, fingers spread, listening for something the rest of us couldn’t feel.

“Old. Whatever is in there’s old.”

“It means something.”

“It might mean everything. I can’t tell yet.”

We stood there in the cold while snow settled on our shoulders.

The wolf-shaped thing watched us back, patient in a way that felt far worse than a charge.

“It’s counting us,” Lisa said, very quietly. “I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. It has looked at each of us in turn and started again from the beginning.”

It had. I watched it do the second pass, taking its time over Owen, who was still holding his side from a boot lace he had never needed to tie.

Then it turned and left, unhurried, without once putting its back fully toward us.

Nobody said anything for a long time after that.

“Well,” Priya said eventually, her voice tight. “It has gone off to tell somebody.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No. I’m choosing to say it out loud so it stops being the thing I’m thinking privately.” She shouldered her pack. “Callum. Find us somewhere with a wall at our backs before it gets dark, if this place goes dark.”