He ran his fingers along one of the fracture edges. "This is arcane stress-fracturing, and you can see the resonance scoring on the stone."
"Whatever was used on this had a lot of force."
Elizabeth slowly folded the map. "The survey was done eighteen months ago, and there have been no reports of anything happening in this corridor."
She looked up at the trees above the ridge and then back down at the debris field. "That ans it wasn’t reported."
"Bandit activity?" Apollo said as he ca up behind them. "We did get attacked earlier, and that cost us our carriages."
Iris said from the left, "Bandits don’t usually do precise demolition work." Her voice was flat and calm, and she had already moved a little away from the main group toward the trees, scanning the top of the ridge.
"This was on purpose. Soone wanted this road closed."
[Foresight active. No imdiate hostile presence within forty-ter radius. Passive.]
Rex kept his expression neutral. He wasn’t surprised by the corridor collapse.
He had known about the undead-side intelligence for this area since Mordecai’s network had flagged the canyon approach weeks ago. The exact timing wasn’t his arrangent, though.
Soone with their own reasons for blocking the primary passage had done this. It’s either a second party with interest in the Key, or Gelion’s second-stratum contacts acting outside the scope of Rex’s standdown order... again...
Either way, it wasn’t his imdiate problem.
"If Nerith is attempting to betray in any way, I might as well summon so of my undead to create chaos, and I will instruct one of them to focus on Nerith until she has no options left."
His imdiate problem was approximately thirty ters to the right and slightly behind him.
Nerith was gone.
Rex turned casually, scanning the group as if he were rely reorienting himself. Elizabeth, Alexander, Apollo, Talyra, Aisella, Iris, Mireya—eight individuals in total. The absence of the ninth was noticeable.
The leaves had been the signal. When soone’s emotional anchor is a connection to nature and they need to breathe, they go toward water.
The sound of running water to the southeast had been audible for the last ten minutes of the march. Rex hadn’t paid it close attention because it wasn’t relevant to his objectives.
But now... it was.
"Just a mont," Mireya said behind him, stepping toward Aisella. "I need Nerith to look at sothing."
"She noticed a plant formation an hour ago that I want her to compare to what’s growing on this ridge." She looked around the group. "Has anyone seen her?"
The answer, from seven faces, was no.
Apollo volunteered imdiately, which Rex had predicted. The man had a particular compulsion toward the won in his circle that made him reflexively available whenever one of them was unaccounted for.
It wasn’t possessiveness, more like an ingrained responsibility reflex. Rex didn’t judge it, but he just used it.
"I’ll find her," Apollo said, and he looked at Rex. "Co with ?"
"Of course," Rex said pleasantly.
’What a damn fucking fool as always...’
...
They found the basin about three hundred ters southeast, where the trees opened around a natural pool fed by a waterfall coming down from the ridge face.
Nerith was sitting on a flat rock at the water’s edge, her feet pulled to one side, her staff across her knees. She wasn’t doing anything.
Just sitting with her head slightly bowed, shoulders set in the way they were when soone had been crying and was working to stop.
The amber leaves were flat against her hair.
Apollo stopped at the tree line and read the scene. Then he crossed the distance quietly and sat beside her on the rock without asking, close enough that their arms were nearly touching.
He let the quiet sit between them for a mont.
"Hey," he said finally, softly.
Nerith looked at him sideways. She pressed the back of her hand to her face once and said nothing.
"You don’t have to say anything," Apollo said. "I just wanted to make sure you were here."
"I’m here to look for the waterfall to calm my mind..." She looked at the water. "Sorry if I just leave like that without saying anything."
"It’s okay." He waited.
The waterfall filled the silence with sothing that wasn’t silence at all, just a sound that made room for other things.
After a while, Nerith said, "It’s the channel..."
"At the lower levels of the channel, the sound changes register."
"I’ve been feeling the shift start since this morning, and it’s been..." She stopped. "It’s a lot to manage while also managing everything else."
"Is that really what it is?" Apollo asked, his tone not accusatory but genuinely curious.
A pause. "No," she said. "Not entirely."
Apollo looked at her. He had the patience of soone who had learned that waiting was sotis more useful than asking.
Nerith picked up a small stone from the rock beside her and turned it over in her fingers. "Do you ever feel like you’re not sure if you’re seeing sothing clearly or if you’re seeing it the way you want to see it?"
"All the ti," Apollo said. "Constantly."
She didn’t seem to expect that answer. The leaves shifted slightly.
"And how do you tell the difference?"
"Usually I can’t," he said. "Usually I just have to decide which version I’m going to act on and see what happens."
He looked at the water. "It’s not a great system."
Nerith almost smiled. "No."
"What are you trying to see clearly?" he asked.
She remained quiet for a long enough ti that it seed as if she was carefully choosing what to include in her response.
"Soone," she said. "On the expedition."
Apollo tilted his head. He didn’t push.
Rex on the other side, watching from the trees, noted the restraint and filed it. And he was watching them, trying to wait to see if Nerith was going to tell on him or not.
Nerith hadn’t noticed Rex yet, and Apollo was considerate enough to allow Rex to wait without interrupting their monts together, which was also ideal for Rex.
"There are things I can’t..." Nerith turned the stone over again. "There are things that don’t fit together."
"About how soone acts and why they act that way..."
"I keep trying to make the two pictures match, and they won’t."
"What does your channel tell you?" Apollo asked. "Not what you think, but what do you feel when you’re near them?"
She set the stone down on the rock carefully, like she was placing it sowhere specific.
"Calm," she said. "It always indicates calm. Old growth. Stable ground."
She looked at the water. "And I don’t know what to do with that, because calm isn’t the sa as safe, and I think I keep using them like they an the sa thing."
Apollo was quiet for a mont. Then he put his arm around her shoulders, and Nerith leaned into it slightly, which was the particular motion of soone who had been holding themselves still for a long ti and found that the option to stop was unexpectedly welco.
’Fucking cute...’
"Can I ask who it is?" he said.
Rex sees the signal right away, and both of his hands are already burnt with different kinds of magic, where he’s ready to knock Apollo down and punish Nerith on the spot, but then he can see the uncertain things happening in both Nerith’s eyes.
She was silent, probably thinking what kind of answer she should probably say to Apollo.
"No," she said, and it was the most perfect response from her to avoid trouble.
"I see." He nodded. "It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it."
They sat with the waterfall for a while. The light through the canopy had the amber quality of late afternoon, and the water caught it in the way that moving water always did, in pieces and fragnts rather than whole.
Then Apollo said, "Can I tell you sothing?"
Nerith looked at him.
He gazed at the water, and his expression conveyed the sense of a decision unfolding in real ti. "I’ve been thinking about saying this for a while, and I keep deciding it’s the wrong ti..."
"I think I’ve been wrong about that."
"Apollo," she said, a note of caution in her voice.
"I know," he said. "I know the timing is not right, and I know there are a hundred reasons why saying this today of all days is probably the worst version of when I could have said it."
He looked at her directly. "But you’re sitting here at a waterfall trying to work out whether sothing is safe, and I think you deserve to know that at least one person on this expedition is straightforward about what they feel."
The leaves lifted from their flat position.
"I care about you," Apollo said. It wasn’t dramatic or ceremonial; it was simply an honest declaration, steady and unguarded.
This was sothing that had been true for a long ti, and now it was being expressed aloud for the first ti.
"Not the way I care about everyone in our group—it’s different. I’ve been trying to figure out how to manage it without complicating things, but..."
"...I’m not doing a very good job."
Rex tries to hold his laugh, knowing where this is going to lead them. ’Oh...?’
’He finally has the balls to confess...?’
’Is he worried about her or so shit...?’
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