Chapter 125 Beyond the Walls
KAEL
I sent Theron north that same afternoon.
Not because I thought he could fix it. Not because one man arriving at Aldric's post would recover three missing soldiers or explain symbols carved into hillside soil. But because Theron was the person I trusted to look at a situation without flinching and report back exactly what he saw without managing my reaction.
He left within the hour. Took four riders. No fanfare.
Nyx and I spent the rest of the day with Maret. Checking the remaining children. Eight of the eleven showed the thread. Two of those eight showed it at a depth close to Petra's. One boy. Seven years old. He had been born during the winter siege three years back and had never left the palace grounds.
He told us cheerfully that he sometimes heard music near the eastern wall when he was playing alone. Not real music. He knew it was not real. More like a feeling that had a sound to it. He had never mentioned it to anyone because it was not frightening and he did not want to be kept inside more than he already was.
We kept him inside anyway. Gently. With explanations appropriate to seven years.
His parents did not take it gently.
By evening we had a number. Thirty-one people inside the palace carrying the thread at detectable levels. Maret had worked through them systematically and I watched her face grow more controlled with each one she found, which was how I knew the actual number worried her more than she was showing.
"Thirty-one confirmed," she said when we sat down together after the last check. "But my methods only catch what has reached a certain density. Below that threshold I cannot reliably distinguish the thread from normal residue of proximity to the anomaly."
"Meaning the actual number is higher."
"Meaning the actual number is certainly higher. I am giving you the ones I am certain of. Not the total." She set down her notes. "I also want to say plainly that my ability to close the channel varies significantly by person and by depth. In Cassian I was reasonably confident. In Petra and the boy I closed what I could reach and I do not know what remains below that."
"Can they reacquire it. If we clear what you can reach, can the thread rebuild."
She was quiet for a moment. "I do not know. I have never worked with something like this before. Nobody has. We are building the understanding as we go."
Nyx had been standing at the window the whole time. She turned. "What we need is to understand how it transmits. We know proximity is a factor. We know grief accelerates it. But does it move between people. Can a person carrying the thread pass it to someone standing next to them who has never been near the field."
"I do not know that either."
"Then that is the next question." She moved away from the window. "Because if it is only proximity to the anomaly's territory then we contain it by controlling access. But if it passes between carriers then everyone Petra has touched in the last three years every study session, every meal, every child she played with in the corridors—"
She did not finish the sentence. Did not need to.
I stood. "Post a list of everyone who has had regular close contact with the confirmed carriers. Maret checks them all tomorrow. And nobody who is confirmed positive leaves the palace until we understand transmission."
"They will not like that," Nyx said.
"No."
"Elara has family in the outer city. Davan goes to the archive weekly. Several of the guards rotate out on schedule." She looked at me steadily. "If you confine them without full explanation they will find out why eventually and the fear that creates could be worse than the thread itself."
"Then we explain. All of it. Clearly." I looked at Maret. "Can you draft something simple. Something that describes what the thread is and what we know without making people feel like they are already lost."
"I can try. Though I want to be honest, telling people they have been slowly influenced without their knowledge and we do not yet understand the full mechanism is going to be frightening regardless of how it is worded."
"Yes. But it is less frightening than finding out we knew and said nothing."
She left to draft it.
Nyx and I stayed. The candles had burned low. Somewhere in the palace a door closed and the sound echoed longer than it should have.
"Sera would have hated this," Nyx said quietly. Not sad. Just true.
"She would have been three moves ahead of it."
"Yes. She would have identified the proximity factor before Petra told us about the dreams. She would have had Maret checking children two weeks ago." Nyx sat. "Sometimes I think I am thinking clearly and then I measure it against what she would have done and realize I am still catching up."
"We all are."
"Is that enough? Catching up slowly while it spreads faster?"
I did not answer because I did not have one that was honest and useful at the same time.
A knock at the door. Guard from the northern gate.
"Message from Commander Aldric's post. Rider just in." He held out the folded paper. "Theron sent it ahead. He is still two hours out."
I took it. Read it standing.
Brief. Theron wrote short when things were bad.
Three soldiers confirmed gone. No bodies. No trail beyond the hill camp. Symbols consistent with First Ones language—Aldric confirms the shapes match what we distributed in the field identification document last season. But Kael. The symbols are not new. Aldric has been noting unusual markings in the hills for eight months. He logged them as territorial graffiti. Unknown origin. He did not connect them to us because we had not told the outer posts what to look for.
Eight months.
Also. I checked the six soldiers remaining in camp at Aldric's request. Four are carrying the thread. Maret's description matches exactly what I found when I pressed their temples the way she demonstrated before I left. I am not a healer. I cannot confirm depth. But the sensation she described the faint pressure, the resistance when you push four of the six have it.
Aldric himself has it.
This is not new. This has been building in the territories for a long time and we have been looking at the palace as the problem.
Coming in at nightfall. Have more.
I handed the letter to Nyx without speaking. Watched her read it.
She set it down carefully on the table.
"Eight months," she said.
"In that territory. Other territories have other timelines we have not checked." I moved to the map on the wall. Twelve posts. Spread across three hundred miles of territory. All staffed. All occupied nightly by people sleeping within reach of hills and fields and wherever else the anomaly had been building its infrastructure in the ground.
"We have been thinking about this as a palace problem with a northern incident," Nyx said. "It is not."
"No."
"It is a territorial problem with a palace incident. The palace is just the piece we happened to look at first."
"Yes."
She stood beside me at the map. Looked at the twelve posts. The roads between them. The villages that sat near those roads. The people in those villages who had been living near unmarked hillsides for years without anyone checking them.
"How many people live in our territories," she said.
"Counting all settlements. Roughly forty thousand."
The number sat between us in the dim room.
"Then we need more than Maret," she said.
"Yes."
"We need a program. Training. Deployment. Systematic coverage." She looked at the map. "And we need it faster than we can build it."
The candles guttered. Outside, wind moved through the eastern field.
Forty thousand people.
And somewhere out there Theron was riding back through the dark carrying more news I was not going to like.