The patrol had been quiet enough that Ant almost let his guard down, four hours of empty road and Priya's running commentary on a neighbor's ongoing feud over a fence line, when they came back through the east gate and Corlan was already waiting.
He didn't wait for Ant to finish peeling off from the others. He was at the stable door before Ant had even handed off his share of the gear, and the way he cut across the yard to intercept him alone told Ant this wasn't going to be about sicklebacks or Kithren fur color.
"Word came down this morning." Corlan kept his voice low, pitched for Ant only, Priya and Marcus already well ahead toward the mess hall. "You're being pulled off standard patrol. New unit, starts tomorrow."
"What kind of unit?"
"The kind where I don't get told the details either, which should tell you something about how far above my say this is." Corlan's jaw worked once, like the admission cost him more than he wanted to show. "I know it exists. I know it answers to someone past my rank. I know you and Ben are both being moved into it as of tomorrow morning, and that's the whole of what I was given to pass along."
"Ben." Ant kept his face flat. "Any reason the two of us specifically?"
"If I had to guess, the sicklebacks and the vortex both went into a report somewhere, and somebody read that report and decided they liked what they saw." Corlan shrugged, though it didn't sit easy on him. "I didn't ask for details I wasn't going to get. Neither should you, not out loud, not where the wrong person hears you asking."
"That's not exactly comforting."
"Wasn't meant to be." Corlan turned to go, then stopped, half turned back like the words had caught somewhere he hadn't expected. "For what it's worth, whatever this is, you earned the look. Just watch yourself in there. Whoever's running units above my clearance didn't get there by being careless about who they let in."
He walked off toward the stables without waiting for a response, and Ant stood there a moment longer than he needed to, turning it over. A secret unit, no details given, Ben placed in it alongside him like that was a coincidence anyone was meant to swallow whole.
He's not coincidence, Mahkir said, low, once Corlan was out of earshot. He's been circling long enough that someone finally decided to put him where he could circle with permission.
That's what I'm thinking too.
Then we go in already thinking it, instead of pretending otherwise until it's too late to matter.
Rebekah's reaction, once he found her at her usual bench and told her, was quieter than he expected. She didn't reach for her pen the way she usually did when she needed something in her hands. She just sat with it a moment, turning the information over the same way Ant had in the yard.
"They're moving both of you at once," she said finally. "That's not just a promotion for you. Ben's a rising name in his own right, tournament loss or not, and command doesn't fold two fighters like that into the same unit unless they're planning to use both of you hard. More visibility, not more suspicion. Nobody's decided anything is wrong yet. They've just decided you're both worth watching for what you can do, which is its own kind of danger."
"That's a cheerful read."
"I'm not trying to be cheerful. I'm trying to be right." She looked at him properly, some of the usual brightness dimmed but not gone. "Whatever this unit is, you go in assuming every word out of your mouth reaches someone who isn't in the room. Ben's not the only person who'll be listening, and you have no idea yet who else has ears in there."
"You think it's that organized."
"I think anything that operates above Corlan's clearance and doesn't announce itself to the rest of the yard is organized enough to worry me, yes." She reached across and squeezed his hand once, brief, before letting go. "You need to be sharper than usual tomorrow. Sharper than usual means saying less than you want to, even when it feels rude, even when Ben's being charming about it."
"Yes, boss."
"Don't 'yes, boss' me. I'm allowed to worry about you without it meaning I've forgotten who's actually running this." She said it with half a laugh in it, but the point landed anyway. "I just happen to be very good at worrying out loud."
"I can manage rude."
"I know you can. It's the charming part I worry about." A ghost of her usual grin showed through, there and gone. "Go get some rest. I have somewhere to be tonight."
"Where?"
"Somewhere you don't need to worry about." She was already gathering her shawl, already moving with the brisk certainty she used when she'd decided something and didn't want to be talked out of it. "I'll tell you everything in the morning. I promise."
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She didn't wait for him to argue.
The warehouse sat two streets past the armory exactly where the anomalous entry had said it would, a squat brick building with a loading door on the north side and a single guard posted at the front who spent most of his rounds leaning against the wall rather than walking it. Rebekah watched from the shadow of the grain store across the lane for the better part of an hour before she moved, timing the guard's laziness against the church bell two streets over, three slow circuits and one long stretch where he didn't move from the wall at all. Lem stayed low and still against her ankle through the whole wait, patient in the way he always was when he understood a job needed doing quietly.
She crossed the lane during the guard's fourth circuit, keeping to the darker side of the street where the moon didn't reach, and found the side door exactly where memory of the rough map had promised it would be.
The lock was old, rusted at the hinge, loud enough to wake half the street if forced by hand. She crouched by it anyway, and Lem pressed close against the metal, fur shifting color the way it did right before he chose an element, settling on something between amber and rust. Warmth bled out from where he touched, patient and controlled, not enough heat to scorch or smoke, just enough to soften old iron until the mechanism gave with barely more than a whisper.
Inside, the air was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature outside.
The warehouse was empty.
Not abandoned-empty, not the settled dust of a place nobody used. This was recent. Rebekah could see it the moment her eyes adjusted: clean rectangular outlines pressed into the dust across the floor where crates had sat stacked in neat rows until very recently, drag marks cutting toward the loading door where something heavy had been hauled out without much care for quiet. Whatever had been here, and there had been a great deal of it, was gone.
She moved through the space slowly, Lem circling ahead of her with his nose low, investigating everything the way he always did, methodical, unbothered by an empty room that had so clearly not been empty a few days ago. A desk sat against the far wall, drawers half open, and Rebekah went through them by feel more than sight, unwilling to risk a light this close to the street.
Paper. A stack of it, receiving logs by the feel of the ruled lines under her fingers. She carried the top few sheets to the one high window where moonlight actually reached the floor and read as fast as she dared.
Dates. Quantities, written in a shorthand she recognized from the main record's own anomalous entries, code that meant something to whoever wrote it and nothing to anyone who wasn't supposed to be reading it. And at the bottom of the most recent sheet, a note in a different hand, hurried, like it had been added after the fact: further deliveries expected, timeline unconfirmed, awaiting word.
No origin. No supplier's mark, no clan crest, no name anywhere on any of the sheets she could find. Whoever was sending these deliveries had been just as careful about leaving a trail as whoever had been receiving them, and whoever had cleared this building out had done it recently enough that dust hadn't even settled back into the outlines left behind.
Lem's ears came up sharp at the loading door, and Rebekah froze with him.
Footsteps outside. Slow, unhurried, the guard finishing a circuit he usually skipped.
She folded the sheets she'd already read into her sleeve, left the rest exactly as she'd found them, and started back for the side door. On her way past the desk she caught sight of the drag marks again, longer than she'd first noticed, curving away from the loading door toward a second exit at the rear of the building she hadn't spotted on the way in, half hidden behind a stack of empty pallets that had been left standing on purpose or by accident, she couldn't tell which. She didn't have time to check it. The footsteps outside were closer now, and whatever the second door led to would have to wait for a night when she wasn't already counting seconds.
She was back out the side door and into the shadow of the grain store before the guard rounded the corner, Lem silent at her heels the whole way. She didn't breathe properly again until she was three streets clear and certain nobody had followed.
Empty. The whole building, emptied out days before she'd even known to look, and whatever proof it might have held was already somewhere else entirely. A second door she hadn't had time to check. A guard whose rounds were lazy right up until the one night she needed him to stay that way.
Ant was awake when she let herself back into their quarters, though he pretended for half a second that he wasn't, some instinct in him wanting to give her the choice of whether to wake him properly or not. She didn't bother with the pretense.
"Empty," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull off her boots. "The whole warehouse. Someone cleared it out, and recently, judging by the marks left behind."
"Cleared out how recently?"
"Days, not weeks. There were outlines in the dust still sharp enough to read." She handed him the folded sheets from her sleeve, and he angled them toward the window to catch what little light there was. "Receiving logs. Quantities, dates, a note about further deliveries expected. Nothing that says where any of it comes from, or where it went."
"So we know something's moving through this clan that shouldn't be, and we have no idea what it actually is."
"Correct." She said it plainly, no comfort dressed over it. "Somebody's being careful. Careful enough that even the paperwork they left behind by accident doesn't give us anything to work with."
Ant set the sheets down, staring at the dark ceiling instead. "And tomorrow I walk into a unit nobody will tell me anything about, with a man who's spent two weeks deciding whether I'm worth reporting."
"Then tomorrow you go in and give him nothing new to decide with." Rebekah's voice had gone quieter, less certain than she usually let it sound. "There was a second door back there I didn't have time to check. Whatever's actually going on in this clan, I don't think one warehouse is going to be the whole of it."
"You want to go back."
"I want to know what's behind that door before whoever moved everything out decides to move it somewhere I can't find at all." She said it like a fact rather than a plan, something she'd already half decided regardless of what he thought about it. "Not tomorrow. Not while you're settling into a new unit and I need to be free to come find you if something goes wrong. But soon."
Ant didn't argue with her about it, not tonight. He pulled the blanket over them both instead, tired in a way that went past the physical. "Get some sleep. Whatever tomorrow turns out to be, we'll handle it better rested than exhausted and guessing."
He didn't sleep much. Neither, judging by her breathing, did she.