In the darkness they say they’re cynical

That no one hears or sees

But theirs is an idealist’s dream

Because the truth is that they hear you

And see you reach out

There’s too much happening to care about

-“Bystander’s murmur,” a popular Rivenstader punk song by Delta Hounds, YT 238

245 YT, Late Winter: Just outside Kurikuneku

In the tangle of cables, tubes and wires – from the great vacuum tubes that snaked overhead and came in and out of walls, filling the generator chambers with a great humming to the little fraying wires that made no noise at all – it was nearly impossible for Kurza to find anything at all. She started her sweep from the building’s main entrance, checking the map – glowing on her wrist – for the quickest and most comprehensive route between there and the emergency exit at the opposite end of the building. According to the automated error reports, the fault was somewhere in one of the vacuum tubes near the emergency exit – something had redirected it temporarily, a physical obstruction of some kind, and had temporarily shut down the power to a part of the city proper. The power outage was very brief, but it was impactful – the rioting in Kurikuneku’s lower districts was still intense even all these days later, as people driven to sufficient anger in the heat of the summer did not calm down so easily even when the heat faded and gave way to light, dusty snow. She brushed it – the snow – off the tips of her hair as she entered the building.

Her boss had been so upset – probably not because he personally cared about politics, but rather because his boss had gotten upset with him. And on and on up the chain, probably until you got to God himself. Kurza didn’t much care – she’d become a power worker despite her mother’s protests precisely because it got her so far away from the bustle of the city itself – all the people with their pettiness and their anger and so, so much noise.

Especially with all the rioting, the bodies in the streets – she’d seen pictures, she’d heard horror stories of the clashes – Kurza was thankful to have her little slice of something that might as well have been heaven, nestled in the crags and the mountains. As for her coworker, Doxta – her sole companion in this work – he seemed far more concerned with the affairs of the world than she.

Kurza had gotten past her sweep of the first room, switching the power through both backups and then the main to ensure that all sources were working properly again. They were – whatever had caused both the main and auxiliary to fail earlier, the fault was no longer there. Or at least the system had learned to move past it – but just like the automatic fault detection in the error reports she’d received, Kurza had her doubts. She had little trust in machines, not despite but because of how much she worked with them every day. Trust a machine to diagnose its own faults? To her, that was completely foolhardy, a sure way to sacrifice her own safety.

Kurza liked to say sometimes this job was everything to her, but it wasn’t worth her life.

Just as she stood at the door to the next room, she realized Doxta wasn’t beside her. Kurza paused, took a deep breath, glanced at the ground and then the ceiling, and turned to look toward the door. Doxta was still standing by the gate, his head bowed in prayer or meditation. Kurza rolled her neck once across her right shoulder and then her left, and then she flipped her flashlight – turned off, of course – in her hand and walked over to him.

“Come on,” Kurza said. “You can’t just stand out there forever. We have a job to do.”

“Yeah,” I know that,” Doxta said angrily. “Give me a few moments.”

“Do you think the Emperor himself is going to come help us get this obstruction cleared?” Kurza rolled her eyes. “Come on. We have a job to do. What are you standing there praying for?”

“Safety,” Doxta muttered. “And I was trying to focus, but you broke my concentration, so let’s just go.”

“Great. Fine.” Kurza flashed a wide, toothy grin and flipped her flashlight back to forward grip, her hand resting on the switch just in case the lights went out and she had to rely on the device.

They went through room after room, checking all the individual power switches and every coupling. They pried apart tangles in wires to make sure that there were no frays or crossings, reinforced the thicker cables where there was the potential of any leakage whatsoever.

They were just past the control room for the lower business district – the Depths as it was called in the power workers’ private slang – when Kurza and Doxta started noticing the banging noises, and the scratching in the walls and ceilings.

Kurza killed the facility lights flicked on her flashlight, ran it across the corners of the walls one at a time, peering into the darkness with her trusty beam of light the only bulwark against encroaching shadow. The hum of the generators was still enough in this room that Kurza had to raise her voice for Doxta to hear – but the sound of it was so constant that any critters in this place would have long since grown accustomed to it. Normally it kept creatures away – at least the more skittish mammals, the kinds of prey animals one might expect to get caught in pipes and tubes and in the little nooks and crannies of warm buildings. In the corners and in the little gaps in the walls that no one could be bothered to repair, Kurza saw nothing at all.

“Well, that’s nice,” she said. “Whatever it is, it’s doing a decent job of hiding. And it’s probably what caused the disruption.”

“Are you sure about this?” Doxta held his hands close to his body, fists half-clenched. “This seems really… sketchy. Dangerous, even?”

Kurza rolled her eyes as she made her way up to one of the gaps, leaned in and shined her flashlight into the walls. She thought she caught the brief flash of movement – a shadow on the wall. A hand? Was there a raccoon hiding in the walls of this building?”

“I think it might be a raccoon,” she said aloud, pulling her head out of the gap. “We’ll have to track it down. If we don’t find it, it might rip stuff apart. Or it’ll just steal our food, but those creatures aren’t the most predictable.”

“A raccoon?” Doxta laughed, nervous. “Come on. Kurza. Let’s not do this. The place is working fine. Raccoon’s not going to rip apart wires just for fun. Besides, it’s…”

As he trailed off, Kurza raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“It could be dangerous,” Doxta said in a hushed whisper. “I mean, you’ve been reading the list, right?”

Kurza shook her head.

“Oh, come on, seriously.” Doxta groaned. “I know you aren’t exactly the most social person ever, but you haven’t even been reading the list? Sometimes it’s important. How do you stay in touch with the other power workers?”

“Regular check-ins,” Kurza said. “I am quite thorough in my reports, including inter-facility reports, and I expect exactly the same of my colleagues. How could it be any different?”

“You know,” Doxta said, “Sometimes the workers… we might need to talk about things among ourselves, not just straight to the boss.”

She walked up to the door to the next room, held her hand poised over the knob. “And I guess, then, you’re going to take off now because the sun is going down? Without finishing this?”

“I just might,” Doxta said. “If you keep freaking me out like this.”

Kurza turned the knob halfway. “You’re too superstitious, Doxta. What is it that goes on in this list anyway? I haven’t read it a single time even after you added me to the notifications.” She held up the wrist around which was wrapped her device, currently showing a map of the facility. With color-coded lighting for the presence of power issues.

“We’ve been talking about trying to convince the boss to hire more people per facility,” Doxta said. “You know how they only have two of us on this building because that way, even though I’m supposed to be off as soon as sunset starts, I feel guilty about it and stick around a little bit longer to help you out so that you aren’t all alone in the building? Like right now?” When Kurza turned toward him, he had his arms crossed, a slightly petulant expression on his face – Kurza was almost impressed. Doxta generally wasn’t the most assertive person, by any means. To see him apparently taking a stand – about anything – was honestly a little strange.

But still.

Kurza shook her head. “It’s fine, actually. I don’t mind being alone in the building. If they hired more people, it would cut down on my peace and quiet.”

“It would make the job easier,” Doxta countered.

“No complaints from me,” Kurza said, opening the door a crack. Light shone in from the other room, until she flicked on the switches in this one, turning off her flashlight. Doxta blinked from the sudden brightness. “Like I said. I like the quiet.”

“Kurza.” Doxta tapped his foot on the ground, frowned, cast his eyes down. “You know, they’re blaming us for the power outage in the city. They’re going to take it out on you however they can – if the boss seems like he’s making extra sure to berate you for little mistakes? To put you down whenever possible? If he says anything about how he’d consider letting you go, getting rid of you, because somebody else could do the job better? That’s why.”

“Well, then, isn’t it in my best interest if no one else gets hired? It’s obvious that they can’t easily replace me. I don’t want to train my replacement.” She stepped into the next room, one foot crossing the threshold.

“That’s not – no.” Doxta sighed and shook his head. “You wouldn’t be ‘training your replacement’, you would be keeping the city safe. Do you not understand the consequences of what happened last time? There is a war on, Kurza, and there is rioting in the city. Has been for more than a season – a season! And when one of the city’s power facilities suddenly goes down for an hour without a clear reason why, people are going to start asking questions. They’re going to start pointing fingers.” Kurza turned on her heel and looked back toward Doxta – he was pointing his finger directly toward her.

Kurza sighed. “Look, I get it. It’s fine, I can take care of this. Go home, Doxta. Say hi to your family for me. I’ll let you know when I find this darn raccoon.”

“Just be careful,” Doxta said. “I’m not sure it’s a raccoon, but even if it is, those things can be dangerous. You don’t want rabies, do you?”

“I’ll wear gloves,” Kurza said.

“And try reading the list sometime, I’m serious. You don’t want to be out of the loop on this stuff.”

“I don’t want to get involved in fomenting any rebellions, either.”

“It’s not –“ Doxta sighed, shook his head again, backed away slowly from the door. “Whatever. Have a good day, Kurza. I mean it.”

“Same to you,” she said, flashing a quick smile. “I mean it.” And she did. But at the same time, she was more than a little glad that Doxta was out of her hair for now. This was her issue to deal with now, and she could be alone in her thoughts, with her facility and her flashlight while she searched for that damn stupid raccoon that had caused so many problems for Kurikuneku, and for her personally.

Doxta was gone before Kurza had turned again, and the hum of the facility – oddly inviting the further she walked into the next room – surrounded her, filling not only her ears but her bones. She hummed along with it, vibrating to the tune of the building, the tune of the world, and flipped her shut-off flashlight idly in her hand again. She ran her fingers along the wall to her left side, smiled as she worked her way toward the next gap in the wall.

Technically speaking, the holes should have been repaired a long time ago. But Kurza couldn’t deny their convenience, and she knew that if they were repaired, she’d have to resort to actually using the screwdriver in the bag that hung at her side. Besides, having these open holes helped add additional venting. The whole facility was warm – the kind of artificial warmth that came from standing too close to a furnace, the kind that dried out your skin and made your eyes want to water only for the tears to get dried up in turn. But over the years, Kurza had come to love the feeling.

It was home.

She passed the screwed-on panel that was technically how she was supposed to open up the walls to check inside, and went to the hole near the corner. Kurza quickly found her insulated gloves – that particular hole in the wall had been made months ago by an electrical anomaly, and though Kurza was quite confident in her ability to handle such situations, she wasn’t so foolhardy as to take chances with her own health. She killed the light, flicked on her flashlight, and leaned into the hole, listening to the hum of the electricity close to her, how as she came close it finally became audible under the louder rattling hum of the vacuum tubes overhead.

She shined her light down the hollow of the wall.

Throughout the building there were chambers set apart from the rest of the building, closed chambers that were normally used to house supplies. Kurza rarely accessed them – some had large stores of non-perishable foods, which she’d never found herself needing. But she still noted each one’s location on the map, as preparation for an eventuality – what if she found herself stranded in the building for weeks at a time?

Opposite one of those entrances, she saw a figure’s shadow cast. Only…

She checked over her shoulder, just in case Doxta wasn’t completely gone yet. But he had always been a bit flighty, a bit more scared of the unknown things that lurked in dark places, and when he said he was done for the day and going home, he clearly had meant it. He was nowhere to be seen, nor heard.

Kurza glanced back down the hallway.

There was no mistaking it from this angle – the shadow cast was not that of a raccoon at all. It was a human being. Kurza’s eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared, and she quickly flicked the flashlight off. When she stepped away from the gap in the wall she took quiet steps, careful to roll from her heel to the ball of her foot. Slowly and quietly she shifted her flashlight from one hand to the other, and reached into the toolbag at her belt. She drew out the screwdriver. Her hand ran across her pocket, checking for the familiar handle of the folding knife against the side of her hand. She stopped by the panel in the wall, directly across from where her hidden chamber lay. The panel was secured to the wall by four screws. If she turned her head just right, she could see beyond the panel a little bit – and confirm only that there was no light shining from beyond there. That would help, at least. She set to work.

Before opening the panel and climbing into the back, she had to disguise the sound of her screwdriver somehow. Kurza glanced around the room, half-expecting to see the shadow of movement. Then she reached into her coat and pressed a button on the small tape player she’d stashed there. She kept the earphones resting around her neck at first, flicking up the wheel that controlled the sound level until it was at its maximum. The resounding of drums and the steadily pulsing string-noise – if she listened close - made it feel as though the room itself might be shaking. Kurza grinned and bobbed her head to the rhythm – then she detached the earphones from around her neck and hung them lower, clipped onto her coat.

She still had to be careful, but this was better than nothing. It would cover up the scratching sounds as the screws came slowly loose from their panel.

Next Kurza shifted her knife from one pocket to the other, and pushed her flashlight – back end first – into the same pocket. She did not expect an armed opponent – if she was lucky, it was just some sneak-thief opportunist who would quickly acquiesce and would never bother her again. But it always paid to be careful, and Kurza didn’t much care if the thief got hurt a little bit by her overcaution.

It took only a couple of minutes to get all the screws on the panel loose. On the second two, she worked the screwdriver with one hand while holding up the panel with the other, so that it would not suddenly fall and make a noise. Finally, she stepped to the side and slowly lifted the panel from the hole in the wall it covered. It was just large enough for Kurza to crawl in easily.

She set the panel on the floor and entered the wall.

Once, long ago, this facility had been a house of some kind – retrofitted by the previous century’s Gaurl workers into a power facility to feed the budding city of Kurikuneku. This one, Kurza was proud to say, was the first of the major power facilities that was still running. That meant, of course, that the technology which kept the place running was – beneath all the decades of upgrades – the most archaic. The layout of the building, as well, was far more influenced by what the place had once been than was true of some of the other facilities.

Thousands of years ago, Kurza had learned (more from her explorations of the building than from anything she’d read), the servants of the wealthy used to travel through their homes’ walls, so as not to be seen by their masters more often than necessary, and so that they could be wherever they were called at any time. And, of course, to spy on guests. The advantages of having loyal servants hidden in the walls of one’s own home could not be overstated for the paranoid and ultra-wealthy of pre-Gaurl Anatolia. Despite the war and the apocalypse and the unknown years of decay and the deliberate retrofitting that had occurred since, the basic shell of those secret passages was still intact.

Many of the panels were small and narrow, built for a smaller human frame. Kurza counted herself lucky that she wasn’t taller as she crawled into the passage, raising her flashlight and screwdriver.

It was a short shot across the passage to reach her storage chamber.

She flicked on her flashlight.

As soon as she saw the people sitting in the chamber, she knew that they were Adma. Their Invictan armor might indicate a soldier to the unthinking, but the armor was cobbled together and ill-fitting, and besides, what would a true Invictan soldier be doing holed up in a power worker’s storage room in a facility like this? Kura paid little enough attention to the news but she did hear when the government made official announcements regarding the thread of terrorism, and she took that threat quite seriously.

And the soldiers were armed, too.

Kurza had one major advantage, however – they had not expected her, and they were caught off-guard. They must have thought she’d moved on, that they didn’t run a serious risk of being discovered, and they’d relaxed. Their guns were set on the ground beside them, not clutched in nervous, clammy fingertips.

She crossed the distance between herself and the front one in a second. Her screwdriver point went to the man’s throat as she wrapped her arms desperately around him, and the flashlight beam turned to shine in the faces of the others. There were six in total, if she counted the one she’d just grabbed on to – all had begun to reach for their guns when Kurza shouted, “Stop right there!”

She dragged her human shield back with her, holding tight against the man’s thrashing. He was strong, but she’d been working this facility for years and while she might lack the agile might of a soldier, she had raw mass on her side – the man was larger and heavier than her, yes, but she’d already gained control of his motion, turned his own weight against him for the time being. He tried to right himself, but first he’d have to break her grip on his throat and upper chest. He fought valiantly, to be sure, but not enough. Finally Kurza dug her screwdriver slightly into the side of the man’s neck and whispered, “Stop.”

Then she turned to the others. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Did you shut down the power? Did you do this?”

“Ranotia!” one of them stage-whispered. “Kill her!”

The man in Kurza’s grip – Ranotia – started again to thrash against Kurza, hands slapping against her arms, searching for a gap in her guard. She jabbed her screwdriver deeper, gritting her teeth till they ground against one another. Ranotia stopped struggling to escape, his muscles all flexed as she dragged him back – shielding most of her body from the others.

“I asked you a question,” she said, shifting the flashlight beam between the already-pinprick-narrow eyes of the other Adma, keeping her grip on the screwdriver where it was buried – half its length – into Ranotia’s neck. Hot blood ran out of the man’s lips and over her fingertips. He coughed, and his whole body convulsed, making her cough with him. Regaining her breath, Kurza asked again: “Did you cause the power outage?”

“Oh my God,” muttered the next closest one. “Oh my God. You just… look, we didn’t intend to cause any power outage. We just wanted to get out of town.”

The others nodded quickly, their hands poised near their guns but not going any closer.

“Oh my God, Ranotia,” muttered the closer man. “Is he alive?”

“Oh, come on,” Kurza said. “I only stabbed him a little. Do you want me to really do him in or would you like to walk away from this?”

“You’re going to let us go?”

Kurza tilted her head slightly at that. Behind her, somewhere beyond the secret passage and the panel, she heard motion. Footsteps – boots – against the metal floors. Doxta was coming back.

“I’m going to turn you over to the authorities,” Kurza said. “You’re terrorists. But I’ll make sure your friend gets medical attention – you don’t want him to die, do you?”

“He’s – you –“

“Speak, terrorist!” Kurza snapped, and she heard a gurgle from Ranotia’s throat. Footsteps coming nearer, a door opening. She could almost picture Doxta’s terror when he saw the scene – he’d pale and run, probably all the way home. “Or don’t you have the stomach for violence when you’re not the one suffering?”

“I’m – I’m a doctor, I’m not a terrorist.” The man sounded sincere enough, albeit desperate enough to lie all the same. “I fix people’s wounds, I don’t – I don’t kill people.”

“You fix the wounds of killers,” Kurza said. “So then you won’t be tried for murder, I’m sure. Perhaps you’ll get off with a light sentence. Once the police arrive.”

The man shook his head. He was looking at something over Kurza’s shoulder. “It’s too late,” he said. “They aren’t going to arrive.” Ranotia’s blood ran thick over Kurza’s fingers. It was only when she started to turn that she realized she could no longer feel a pulse from his neck. And then when she saw what was behind her – in the room where suddenly lights had come on bright – she dropped the body in shock.

It was not Doxta. It was another Adma, this one with her gun leveled at Kurza, a cloud of smoke surrounding her, eyes wide with fear and surprise.

It had been so many years since Kurza had been in a scrap, but she remembered well the feeling of being punched. It echoed through her body, that old memory – amplified a dozen times over. The impact was sudden and unexpectedly impactful. The breath left her lungs in a rattling, gasping sigh. As Ranotia’s body hit the floor – blood bushing unevenly from the screwdriver wound – Kurza tried stupidly to throw her flashlight at the Adma with the gun. The device made it about five paces and struck the wall. The beam flashed over her own face, and her vision went red – redder than it should have. So much pain, so bright – the lights were so bright and everything was so cold. She felt the impacts of five more punches spaced almost evenly along her back. Kurza stumbled, slowly reached out a hand to feel for the wall. Everything was red, the outline of her hand was red, the walls were red and impossible to tell from one another.

For a moment, the light-shock faded, and she saw that the walls were steel again – and red, spattered red all over. There was more red on those walls than Kurza had seen since she’d left her mother’s brick house in the countryside, the old place nestled in crags and rocks.

Kurza’s knees buckled under her and she laughed. Just before her lung finished collapsing she managed to draw in a moment’s breath, just enough to say what came to her mind: “Good thing you took those vacation days, huh, Doxta? Have fun.” Before her ailing brain realized that the impacts were not punches but bullet wounds, she was already dead – and her head struck the floor a second later.

Kotire crawled into the passageway, her steps guided by the beam of a fallen, bloody flashlight that lay just under the passage entrance.

Ranotia lay on the floor, pulsing rivers of blood from a perfect circular hole in his neck. His eyes were glass, empty of mist, and cooling fast. Kotire bent down and tried to close his eyelids, but her fingertips trembled so that she instead touched his eyeball - felt the cool, unnerving surface. Kotire pulled back her hand and glanced up at the rest of the Adma there - Henryk, a few others whose faces and names she didn't know. She took in a deep breath, glanced back toward the entrance to the tunnel she'd crawled through.

"I think the other one is gone," Henryk said as Kotire stared back into the darkness. "There were two of them, but the other went home." His voice was strangely steady, only moments after Ranotia's death, moments after the Invictan maintenance worker's death, after the gunshots had scarcely finished echoing in the small chamber. But the danger was past - or at least, he felt that the danger was past.

"I know," Kotire said. "I saw him leave on my way in. I don't think he'll be back for a while. But when he does come back... we're going to have to leave. What are you all doing here, anyway? You should be far from this city."

"The rendezvous was ambushed," Henryk said. "We're the only ones who survived - this is just where we managed to hide. The place was empty enough at the time and easy to defend."

Again Kotire's fingers shook too much, and she couldn't get Ranotia's eyelids shut. The cooling eyes stared up at her accusingly while blood pulsed from his neck. Kotire tried not to look at the other body - the Invictan one. It wasn't her problem - the maintenance worker had stepped her feet into something that didn't concern her, and she'd faced the natural consequences of her inability to understand her own situation.

She shouldn't have stepped in.

"And yet this place isn't crawling with troops," Kotire said. "And the maintenance worker here -" she gestured toward the corpse with the side of her head - "didn't seem to know there was anyone hiding here until it was too late for her. And him." She glanced down at Ranotia. "Why is that?"

Henryk shrugged. "The soldiers that ambushed us... maybe they lied to their superiors, said that we were all dead already. I'm sure that they wouldn't want to admit failure, if they were supposed to take us all out there. They could have chased us into the building and assumed we were a lost cause after we repelled their attack. And the maintenance worker wouldn't necessarily know that a battle had taken place near here."

“It’s too convenient.” Kotire’s eyes narrowed, and she gestured at the body of the unfortunate maintenance worker – still cooling rapidly, the pulses of blood from her several wounds coming slower and slower as there was less and less blood, and the rhythmic pump of her stopped heart was less and less remembered by her body. “Maybe she didn’t know. But the army?”

“Why wouldn’t they tell her to be on the lookout if they knew?” Henryk asked.

Kotire raised an eyebrow, her head down, but eyes up, looking at Henryk like he was a foolish child who’d just asked a particularly obvious question of his teacher. “Everything we’ve seen,” Kotire said. “Does it seem like the rulers of Gaurlante give a damn about their citizens? It’s strategic. Sacrifice this one –“ she kicked the corpse, a little rage still in her when her eyes darted toward Ranotia’s fear-streaked face – “and let us think we’re safe, watch us hole up in here till we have nowhere else to go, then surround us and kill us all at once. It’s a perfectly fine strategy, if I’m being honest. Hard not to admire them.”

“But –“

“Ranotia could have told you that, if one of you chuckleheads had been in front instead of him.” It was hard to overstate the pain in Henryk’s eyes when he heard Kotire say that, but it was true and Kotire’s blood was still boiling, and she didn’t have the patience to be delicate with people who’d just allowed the one person she would really have trusted to make decisions for her to end up bleeding from his neck on the floor with no way to save him. Not as cold as Kurza beside him, but still – getting colder every second. Even in the deepest part of the winter, the only heat in this place came from the machines, and they were cooled constantly by fans and ducts. A corpse could practically preserve itself if it were outside.

“He was making a plan,” one of the others offered up quickly. Kotire glanced in that one’s direction, saw her uniform but couldn’t be bothered to learn her name. A plan was forming in Kotire’s mind already, independent of whatever madcap ideas Ranotia had dreamed up to get his people out of this fix, and Kotire had very little faith that any of these people would survive. A part of her hoped that Henryk would make it through, but even he was nothing to her if he couldn’t prove himself useful, and so far – ever since that day in Devraj’s bar, when the others had left her – well, she was not impressed. She had little enough faith in them as it was – and now Henryk was the only one still standing of that group.

Kotire had to give him one thing though – he was not stupid. He could sense the tension in the air, thick enough to cut through with a blade, and he tried – awkwardly, but still he tried – to do exactly that. “Have you been well, Kotire?” he asked. “The – I mean, your condition. We spoke about this before we entered the city, but it’s been a while, and – I hope nothing major has changed, nothing… catastrophic?”

Kotire gave a shrug. “Hallucinations at night,” she said. “Weird dreams. I’m fine. I can still tell the truth from the dreams, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Henryk nodded slowly, the kind of nod that says someone’s trying to assure themselves of something, rather than confirming or giving an affirmative response. Before Kotire’s eyes the motion became absurd – like a word repeated too many times, so much that it loses its original meaning – and Henryk seemed utterly absurd there, bobbing his head like a madman who thinks he’s impressed his doctors. Kotire suppressed the urge to scream in frustration and pound on the wall.

“What plan?” she asked.

“Huh?” Henryk appeared caught off guard, and the other one next to him – Kotire saw her nametag again but didn’t even register the name, much less stop to consider the obvious fact that this was scavenged armor and the name probably belonged to a dead Invictan, not to the Adma fighter herself – the other one was looking at Kotire as though she were a vengeful spirit come to bring pain as much as Kurza before her had been.

“You said Ranotia had plans,” Kotire said. “Did he draw up a map? Did he write anything down? Did he tell you anything? What was he planning to do to get you out of this situation?”

Henryk nodded. “Well, we can’t leave the area just yet – we can’t just trek across Gaurlante in the winter, we’d never make it. But he did write some things down on a map. It’s in another part of the building.”

“Let’s get the map and go.” Kotire slung her gun over her shoulder and approached the group quickly. “We can’t stay here. We’ll find another place to hide, somewhere nearby, but this place? They’ll come here first. At least we can buy ourselves some more time by finding another place.”

“Where else is there?” Henryk spread his hands.

A quick exhalation, huffed from Kotire’s lungs. She sighed. “There are other power plants, aren’t there? And there are six of us.” She glanced quickly down at the seventh – he was still just as dead as he’d been minutes ago. “We can take one of them – hole up there for a while. We’ll watch this hill, so we’ll know when they check this place. And while we’re there, we’ll try to contact another cell for a rendezvous.”

Henryk shook his head. “The Invictan armies are already on the march… most other cells are in the Wanderer’s Vale now, and the ones that aren’t? I doubt they’d be willing to come so close to Kurikuneku. It’d be suicide. Even if we could survive the trek in the winter, do you think they’ll take well to us wandering through the heart of their territory at this time of year? We’ll be shot from the sky.”

“Then we’ll move under cover. Besides, if they’re marching to the Vale, that’s good for us. Fewer of them around here.” Kotire scoffed. “There’s no way that they would expect that kind of counterattack from the Valers. There’s no way the Valers could deliver that kind of counterattack. They’re looking for us, but it’s not like we have the entire army after us.” She allowed herself a slight smile. “I say we have some chance of surviving this. But first – we have to move.” She kept her eyes fixed on Henryk’s so that she wouldn’t have to look at anybody else. “Get that map, and whatever supplies you all can carry. We’re going now.”