Chapter Twenty-Seven
White Ravens
Gage
Twelve weeks later.
The night air was warm against Gage’s cheeks.
In spring, the forest was all damp leaf litter, budding branches, and the obnoxious buzzing of insects. The air tasted mossy and humid, with the mineral tartness of creek water somewhere to his left.
The woods weren’t quiet, as if nature didn’t sleep. Gage moved through it slowly, trying not to overanalyze every sound.
He held his cane tight in his right hand.
Through its accelerometer and contact sensor, he could feel the vibrations in the ground, the life beneath the soil. It read the terrain through the tip, and the handle answered with subtle taps and buzzes, a private language only his palm understood.
High above him, something large made the branches sway.
Valor’s voice didn’t come from any one direction. It slid between the trees, split and rejoined in the air as if the wind itself was speaking.
“The forest is the one place where hearing trumps vision. Stop hunting the loudest thing,” Valor said, low and calm. “The forest will drown you in its choir of sounds if you let it. Pick one note and hold it.”
Gage kept his pace measured and patient.
He’d spent three months learning what stillness cost and what it bought.
He’d read briefings in Braille until the dots felt like his first language. Zorion trained him how to slow his breathing until his body turned to silence, and he’d learned to enter a room without announcing himself, becoming so still others forgot he was there.
He practiced listening past chaos and isolating a single breath in a crowded room. The Browns trained him how to disarm instead of kill— studying anatomy and which joints, bones, and pressure points to break that would eliminate a threat without ending their life.
In his unique studies of mastering patience, discipline, and restraint, he became something more efficient… and far more dangerous.
Adrian and his personal combat team had ingrained habits in him until his body reacted before his mind could second-guess his decision.
Tonight, his brothers weren’t giving him simulated targets. The Greens were showing him their world.
A screech owl called once, twice, before tiny claws skittered up bark. Frogs whistled and crickets chirped alongside the heavier croaking of bullfrogs deep in the brush, and Gage was able to decipher and isolate one sound.
The threat.
He let his environment speak. He didn’t argue or negotiate with it. Instead, he listened and obeyed.
To his right, a tree took the weight of something solid, then released it.
Valor spoke again from someplace closer. “The forest doesn’t care about your courage, Gage. It’s waiting on your respect and submission.”
Gage angled his head, measuring the echoes of height and distance, letting the smallest nuances tell him where things were.
He absorbed the way the insects’ chirps lowered under a canopy and flared above another, the way the wind struck an open clearing, changing its pitch, and how a heavy body made a branch complain with a low groan.
A second presence moved above him. Lighter and faster than Valor. A different kind of quiet.
Zorion.
Gage didn’t speed up. He didn’t try to chase him. Zorion had a signature. All he had to do was wait for it.
It came as a whisper that wasn’t wind, a retraction and release of taut string before the faintest hiss of steel shot through the air.
Gage jerked left and dipped his shoulder as an arrow tore past where his throat had been and sank into bark with a wet thud.
“Good. You heard the lie. Nature can’t make artificial sounds.”
Valor taught like the master he was, trained by the great Grandmasters of Imuma Aga Khan.
His tone held the authority of a warrior shaped by discipline, knowledge, and a code of honor that Gage may never understand.
Another hissing sound pierced the wind from a different angle.
He felt the air pressure change a heartbeat before impact.
He planted his cane to anchor his balance and rolled forward as the arrow cut past his shoulder.
Heck yeah!
“Don’t celebrate,” Valor said. “You win a couple of clean dodges, and you think you’ve won the fight. But the forest despises arrogance…and so does the field.”
The branch above him flexed again. Zorion. A hawk’s tactic of repositioning when stalking its prey.
The third arrow came faster.
Gage picked the note Valor told him to hold, the string, the cut, the direction.
For half a second, he thought he had the trajectory. He wanted to catch one of those dang arrows instead of dodging it.
He’d heard Meridian could snatch a blade out of the air and look bored while doing it.
Gage reached, fingers opening toward the hiss. The arrow point nicked his knuckles before he yanked his hand back.
Valor’s voice was hard. “Cockiness in an assassin makes him forget he’s mortal, and the field has to remind him.”
Another arrow was fired lower, skimming through brush.
Gage tightened his hand around the pressure switch on his cane, and with a sharp, mechanical snap, it extended to a six-foot and met the arrow in the air.
The impact of steel clashing with titanium rang through the rod and up his forearm. The arrow spun away into the darkness, landing somewhere in the wet leaves.
Gage tapped the latch and collapsed the cane in controlled segments before he continued walking…listening.
Tree limbs swayed above him. Valor was moving, purposeful and strategic, like a big cat who didn’t need to rush. Zorion went in the opposite direction, never staying in one place long enough to be tracked.
The insect chorus changed, a shift so sudden it made the hairs on his forearms rise.
He slowed, ear almost to the ground.
A wolf howled long and melancholy in the distance a moment before Valor landed behind him.
He didn’t turn because he didn’t need to. Valor did as Gage expected and came at him with all his blunt, brutal force.
He raised his cane across his body and met him like a man answering the challenge. Valor’s forearm hit the cane and slid down it, testing for its weaknesses.
There were none.
Gage flipped his wrist, rolling the cane to absorb the force instead of trying to stop it.
Valor hooked his shoulder and tried to toss him, but he stepped inside and used his cane as a lever, turning his opponent’s momentum on himself.
“Not bad,” Valor said near his ear as he tried to take him off his feet.
Gage dropped his center, not fighting Valor’s strength—that was futile—and instead redirected it.
He planted his cane, giving him a third point of balance, and let Valor’s strength pass through him before he answered it with a strike of his own, driving the butt end into Valor’s ribs where muscle met bone.
Valor grunted, as if surprised, and came at him again.
Gage kept his mind centered, heart steady, and pulse relaxed.
He’d trained until calm was natural.
His auditory hypersensitivity made it easy to track Valor’s intentions. Every shift in his footing, catch in his breath, and scrape of fabric, gave away his next move a fraction before it arrived.
Gage read every tale and answered it with one of his own.
Valor caught his cane mid-swing, flexed his fingers like claws, and swiped at Gage’s chest, tearing the outer layer of his clothes before vanishing back into the brush.
One moment, he was mid-spar, and the next, there was only empty space where an apex beast had been.
Gage stayed still.
The wind changed direction, lifting leaves and the scent of something new. —It wasn’t Valor or Zorion—It was the unmistakable hint of animal musk, and it grew stronger as it got closer.
Gage lowered the tip of his cane to the ground.
Something moved near his left boot. It had a tail with fur as smooth as velvet.
In this region, the most common nocturnal animals were raccoons, opossums, coyotes, skunks, deer, and foxes.
The delicate footwork, light then quick, starting and stopping, curious chittering instead of snarls, told him it was a fox.
Gage dropped to one knee.
Stayed that way until the animal decided what it thought of him. He didn’t reach out and invade. Instead, he let it be what it was…respect.
The fox whipped his tail at him, let out a cute bark, then darted away.
Gage smiled.
“Well done,” Valor said beside him.
Zorion’s quieter presence settled on his other side.
“You’ve learned to let the unknown come to you. That technique will keep you alive in the field.”
Valor put his big hand on his shoulder.
“Your vision impairment can make you small…or it can make you the fiercest one in this program. That choice is yours.”
Gage stayed in that submissive posture, allowing Valor’s intelligence to sink into his spirit.
“The blind tiger snake is one of the deadliest, predatory snakes in the world,” Valor said. “And what’s so fascinating about them is they’re not born blind. It’s their treacherous environment that does it to them over time.”
Gage rose smoothly, cane in his hand.
“When their sight fails, it doesn’t stop their hunting, only the way they hunt, because then they have to rely on the parts of their surroundings that never lie—vibrations, scents, sounds. And they hit their target every time they strike.”
“Am I ready now?” Gage asked.
“Only you can decide that,” Zorion said. “But stop trying to catch arrows like Meridian. You don’t need his tricks. You have your own.”
Gage’s mouth twitched. “Noted.”
“Come,” Valor said. “We’re done here.”
Back at headquarters, the moment he entered the building, his assistants were there, ready to fulfil any needs or instructions he gave.
He only had one question.
“Where’s Scar?”