The clearing smelled like burned metal and charred wood. She crossed it slowly.

  Harren hadn't moved from the tree. He couldn't. His remaining leg was bent at an angle that said it wasn't supporting anything, and his one good arm pressed flat against the bark behind him, the only thing keeping his back upright. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth down his chin and dripped onto the collar of his robe. Each breath he took was audible from ten feet away.

  His eyes tracked her. Sharp and steady, even now.

  He's still in there. Wounded isn't dead.

  She kept walking.

  "So." The word came out with an effort, dragged up from somewhere that clearly hurt. "Your first creations were tools of war." He paused to breathe. The pause lasted longer than pauses should. "With us, we would have guided you. Given you libraries, resources and protection." Another breath. Blood on his lips when he opened them again. "The church's name would have lasted forever. And yours alongside it."

  She didn't answer. The fire behind her crackled and shifted, and somewhere above her a branch gave way with a long tearing sound.

  She kept walking.

  "Look around you." His voice roughened. He coughed, wet and violent, and spat blood into the dirt beside him. "You chose the stupidest path available. You could have built things that mattered. Things that helped people." His eyes moved across the burning trees, the bodies in the grass, the scorched clearing. "Instead you built this."

  He's not wrong about what I built.

  He's wrong about everything else.

  She stopped. Not in front of him. A few steps short of arm's reach, far enough that she was outside whatever range still meant dangerous. Even with one leg gone and blood on his teeth, Harren was a man who had killed four soldiers in three seconds and sat back down calmly. She wasn't going to forget that.

  She knelt.

  The forge activated in her palm with a low hum, the mechanism unfolding and locking into position. The air around it began to move in slow circles, drawn inward, cycling.

  Stay where you are. Don't get closer.

  Harren watched the forge.

  His eyes went to it and stayed there. The flame, the mechanism floating above her palm. His lips parted slightly. Something moved through his face, hunger maybe, or grief, the expression of a man watching something extraordinary that he knows he will never touch.

  Then he laughed.

  It started genuine and hoarse and ended in a coughing fit that shook his whole body, left blood on his lips and his shoulders heaving. When it subsided his eyes moved from the forge to the distance between them, and he was still almost smiling.

  "Very smart," he said, the words dragged up from somewhere that clearly hurt. "Very smart, engineer."

  She said nothing.

  He cut Napoleon in half and sat back down like he'd closed a door. Don't forget that. Don't get close.

  The flames at the edges of the clearing flickered and weakened as the forge pulled air inward. The fire closest to him sputtered and choked down to nothing. She could feel the subtle thinning of the air around her, but the forge recognized her and left her untouched.

  Harren's chest worked harder. She could see it from where she stood, the labored rise and fall, his body trying to pull in air that kept getting thinner. His head dropped slightly. The hand pressed against the bark behind him began to slide.

  His eyes lost focus in stages.

  Then closed.

  His body slumped sideways into the roots.

  She cut the forge.

  The air returned. The nearest flames recovered slowly, licking back up the bark where they'd died.

  She stood where she was and watched his chest.

  Still breathing.

  She stood over him for a moment. Looking at him. At the blood drying on his chin and the ruin of his leg and the face that had stayed pleasant through all of it. Through Napoleon. Through every word he'd said about purpose and grace and the future he'd mapped out for her like it was already decided.

  She pulled the dagger from his belt.

  Her hand wasn't shaking. She noticed that. She'd expected it to shake.

  She turned the blade in her hand and crouched over him and drove it into his chest.

  His eyes opened.

  She scrambled back before she'd finished thinking about it, pure reflex, every muscle firing at once. His body jerked upward in one violent spasm, his arm swinging out toward her, fingers already closed around something. Fast. Even now, even like this, fast enough that her heart lurched.

  But there was nothing behind it.

  No strength. No legs to push from, no body that worked anymore. His arm dropped before the motion finished and his fingers opened and something small and dark fell against his own palm.

  Then cracked.

  The sound was like ice splitting under weight, sharp. Something dark seeped from the break and spread across his hand the way ink spreads through wet cloth. Up his fingers. Across his knuckles. Up past his wrist and climbing his forearm.

  She stood back and watched it move.

  He had that the whole time.

  The thought arrived slowly, and then all at once.

  The whole conversation. While he was laughing. While he was watching me cross the clearing. He had that in his hand and he was waiting for me to walk up to him.

  The darkness reached his shoulder. Kept climbing.

  She stood there and watched it and didn't move toward him and didn't look away.

  That close.

  A folded corner of paper sticking out from inside his jacket, just past the pocket's edge. She recognized the shape of it immediately.

  The dungeon directions.

  She looked at his chest. At the blackened skin. At the hand that had held the crystal.

  Every rational part of her said leave them. There was no good version of touching anything on that body.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  She reached in anyway, two fingers, as fast as she could manage, and pulled the papers free before the darkness reached that side of his jacket. She stepped back quickly and didn't look at her fingers until she was far enough away that it wouldn't matter.

  She looked at her fingers.

  Nothing. No darkness, no spread.

  The breath came out slow and uneven.

  Behind her something in the canopy gave way, wood splitting through branches, and the fire surged where it landed. The heat hit her back hard.

  Napoleon.

  She ran.

  The last place she'd seen him was near the center but the explosion had scattered everything. She swept the perimeter with her eyes down, across scorched grass and debris and bodies she wasn't looking at as people anymore.

  You have to be here.

  She found the lower half tucked against a root where the blast had thrown it. The legs were still. The cut edge had stopped sparking. She picked it up and held it and kept moving.

  Find the rest of him.

  She scanned the burning tree line, smoke stinging her eyes. The flames were climbing higher, moving higher through the trees. In ten minutes the whole section would be gone.

  She saw them then.

  Small lights near the base of a tree thirty feet out, barely visible through the smoke, blinking on and off in long slow pulses. She was running before she'd finished registering what she was looking at.

  Napoleon lay on his side at the base of the tree, his front half, legs folded in tight. His eyes were barely there. Red light coming and going, each pulse slower than the last, the gaps between them getting longer.

  She dropped to her knees beside him.

  "Hey." Her voice came out rougher than she intended. "I'm here."

  His eyes pulsed. On. Off. A long pause.

  On.

  Don't you dare.

  She lifted him carefully, one hand under his body, and the moment she touched him one of his front legs moved and pressed against her finger. Faint. The smallest possible pressure.

  Her throat closed.

  He recognized you. That wasn't a random response, his memory is still in there.

  The good news ends there. His power system is dying and it's taking everything with it if you don't act.

  She understood before it finished.

  Turn him off. Full shutdown sequence. Unless you'd prefer to watch.

  "Okay."

  She cradled him carefully and pressed the sequence into his eyes, one by one.

  His front legs folded in on the third. His eyes dimmed on the fifth and went dark on the sixth.

  He went still all at once. The shoulder where he always sat felt empty without him there.

  She held both halves of him and didn't move.

  I'll fix you. When I do you'll be better than before because I actually know what I'm doing now. I promise.

  She tucked both halves carefully against her chest with one arm and stood.

  The support board was a few feet away, scorched along one edge but solid. She strapped it across her back. The clock was harder to find, half-buried under ash and debris near the blast radius, but she found it.

  The fire was louder. The heat on her face was getting hard to ignore.

  Move.

  Footsteps and low voices cutting through the fire noise, three or four people moving fast but not clean about it, the kind of movement that comes from people who just got out of something bad and weren't sure it was over yet.

  She ran for the dead tank and hit the ground behind its body, pressing flat against its side. The armor plating was warm from the fire. She eased her head up far enough to look over it.

  Four soldiers in church armor. One limping badly, one with his breastplate caved in on the left side, all four with swords drawn and eyes on the tree line, like they were still expecting something to come out of the smoke. They crossed the clearing in a diagonal that brought them straight toward Harren's body.

  Who were they fighting? Reth? Someone else?

  Two spheres in her pocket. The fire was going to be on her in minutes regardless.

  Not wasting evolution points again.

  She opened her HUD.

  [LEVEL 5 EVOLUTION AVAILABLE]

  [CONFIRM: YES]

  She pressed yes.

  Two seconds of nothing.

  Then it hit.

  She pressed her face into the dirt and ground her teeth together and didn't make a sound. Every part of her wanted to curl up, to roll, to scream, but the soldiers were thirty feet away and she couldn't. She dug her fingers into the earth and held still and rode it out.

  Do not make a sound. Do not.

  It peaked somewhere past the thirty-second mark and she genuinely thought her vision was going to go completely black, and then it started to pull back, edge by edge, until it was just a bad headache and then just pressure and then nothing but the metallic taste running from her nose to her lips.

  She wiped her face on her sleeve and looked through the gap under the tank.

  Shit.

  The soldiers had found Harren.

  They stood around the body in a loose circle, nobody kneeling, nobody touching. Just looking. One of them reached toward it and another grabbed his arm and pulled him back hard.

  She still had two spheres. She could save them. Walk out, let them go, disappear into the camp while they dealt with Harren's body. They were already beaten up, already shaken. They weren't looking for a fight.

  She looked at their swords, still drawn, still scanning the tree line.

  Four soldiers. Armed. If they grab me I'm not getting away from them, not in the state I'm in.

  Fire at my back. And too far to activate the forge.

  She found one of them in her pocket and clicked it three times.

  She eased up just enough and threw it in a low arc over the tank's edge.

  It landed in the dirt between them with a soft impact they all heard at once.

  They turned toward the sound.

  She dropped back down and pressed flat.

  The explosion shook the ground under her palms and the heat rolled over the top of the tank in a wave. She pressed flat against it and waited for it to pass.

  When she looked again, nothing was standing.

  The smoke was thick and black where they'd been. Two of them lay still. One was on his side, not moving. The fourth had made it two steps before going down, one arm stretched forward in the dirt.

  [EVOLUTION BAR: COMPLETE]

  [LEVEL 6 EVOLUTION AVAILABLE]

  The message sat there in her vision.

  Later.

  The fire jumped to the trees, fed by the new air from the blast, and the heat on her face went from bad to worse in seconds.

  She ran.

  Find Reth. Get out.

  The smoke was everywhere, thick and low, and she had to cover her mouth with her sleeve to breathe. The fire behind her was loud enough that she couldn't tell what was in front of her until she was almost on top of it. She came in through the eastern gap half blind and found four dead soldiers in the dirt, Reth standing over a fifth with a captured shield, bringing it down on him again and again, and Jaren ten feet away with a sword out, finishing another.

  Reth looked up at the sound of her footsteps. Something shifted in his face, brief and almost invisible. Not a smile. The corner of his mouth, nothing more, the expression of a man who expected her to make it and is seeing that he was right.

  "You made it." He looked her over once, quick and clinical. "Harren?"

  "Dead."

  Reth nodded once and said nothing else.

  A tent flap opened and Torin came through, his shoulder wrapped in rough bandaging, his face pale, but moving on his own.

  "I got them out," he said.

  Reth crossed to him and put a hand briefly on his shoulder. "Good."

  She went into the tent.

  The children were gathered toward the back, some sitting, some standing. She felt their eyes on her the moment she walked in.

  Don't.

  She didn't look at them.

  Her pack was against the far wall. She crossed to it and crouched down and opened it carefully, both halves of Napoleon still against her chest. She found the softest section inside, the one with the extra cloth she used for fragile components, and laid both halves in gently, making sure nothing was pressing against the cut edges.

  You're going to be okay. I'll fix you.

  She closed the pack slowly and stood and put it on.

  These kids sold me out and Napoleon paid for it.

  She walked back out. A few seconds passed and then they filed out after her, one by one, until they were all standing there in the open.

  She turned to face them without really looking at any of them.

  "What are your plans?"

  Nobody answered immediately.

  Jaren spoke first. "The mission is over. Without the map and the instruction documents, we have no way to reach the dungeon." He paused. "Do you know anything about Harren? He had the documents."

  She looked at him steadily. "He's in the forest."

  A pause while that landed.

  "There's a border," Jaren continued, quieter now, "at the edge of the dome entrance. We all agreed before we came in. Whoever makes it there is giving up the evolution. That's where we're going."

  "Understood." She looked at all of them once, briefly. "I'll go my own way. Good luck."

  Jaren took a step toward her. "I'm sorry. About all of it. I know that's... that's how they trained us, and I know that doesn't fix anything." He stopped. "Torin told me about Napoleon. I'm sorry."

  "I don't care." The words came out flat, not angry, just factual. "Go where you're going. We're done here."

  She looked at Reth.

  He was already standing apart from the group, pack on, a captured church shield strapped across his back. His face had taken hits, a cut above one eye still seeping, his jaw darkening on one side. His clothes had cuts through them in two places that hadn't come from branches. He stood straight anyway, like none of it had registered yet or like he'd decided it hadn't.

  He looks worse than I do.

  "Coming?" she said.

  "That was always the plan."

  Torin stepped forward and reached for her hand. She saw it coming and moved back one step, just enough. His hand closed on air. He stood there looking at it, then at her.

  She turned and walked out of the camp.

  Reth walked beside her without looking back at any of them. No farewell and no final words.

  Behind them the fire had taken the tops of the trees, the sky orange and thick with smoke already drifting through the camp in grey sheets.

  I built weapons for them. I tried.

  The dungeon directions pressed against her ribs from inside her jacket.

  Not anymore. From here on, whoever earns it.

  She kept walking.