Anhara
The console went silent.
Not the screaming silence of system failure. A finishing sound. The hum of machinery settling into rest after six hours of labor.
I stared at the readings. All green. All stable. All done.
Torek’s legacy. Safe. After everything.
Kallum had the key. He was coming back to me. That was what mattered.
The gunfire started before I could breathe.
Not close. Not yet. The perimeter. But steady. Multiple weapons. Not the scattered shots of a probe.
Full assault.
I snatched the pulse rifle and took the stairs three at a time. My legs screamed with every step. Every muscle in my body had been running on nothing for hours, and now the nothing was running out.
Turnip had dragged himself to the kitchen wall. His back legs still weren’t working right, but his eyes were open. Alert. His tusks were red in the dawn light coming through the shattered windows.
“Hey, pig.” I dropped beside him. Checked the wound. The bleeding had slowed. Not stopped, but slowed. “How you doing?”
He made a sound. Low. Pained. But his eyes tracked me, and when I touched his snout, he pressed into my palm.
“I know. I know it hurts.” I glanced at the windows. The gunfire was getting closer. “We’re going to get out of here. You and me and the ghost boy. We’re going to be fine.”
I didn’t know if I believed it. But Turnip needed to hear it.
Another burst of gunfire. Closer now. Coming from the north ridge.
“Kallum.” I pressed the comm. “They’re hitting the perimeter. How many are left?”
“Too many.” His voice cut in and out. “More than we can take head-on. They’re not trying to breach. They’re holding position.”
“Holding for what?”
“I don’t know. Stay inside. I’m almost there.”
I moved to the window. Kept low. Searched the treeline.
They were out there. I could see the shapes moving between the burned stumps of what used to be Torek’s orchard. Professional spacing. Controlled movement. They’d learned.
But they weren’t advancing.
Why weren’t they advancing?
The smell hit me first.
Smoke. Not weapons discharge. Not the acrid bite of pulse fire.
Wood smoke. Old smoke. The kind of smoke that meant something was burning that shouldn’t be.
I ran to the east window.
The tool shed was on fire.
Flames licked up the sides, orange and hungry. I’d stored Torek’s extra equipment there. His spare parts. The feed for Turnip. It was already consumed, the roof collapsing inward.
The barn was catching too. I’d opened the grazer stalls two days ago, when the first scouts appeared. Let them scatter into the hills. They were prey animals. They knew how to run, how to hide. Better odds out there than trapped in a building.
I hoped they’d made it far enough.
Another flicker of light. The chicken coop.
My hens. The ones who gave me eggs every morning, who clucked and fussed when I came to feed them, who’d been the only voices on this farm besides Turnip for three years.
I couldn’t save them. Couldn’t carry them. But I could give them a chance.
“Kallum.” My voice cracked. “The coop is burning. I have to—”
“Go. Fast.”
I ran.
The heat hit me before I reached the door. Flames rose up the back wall, smoke pouring through gaps in the boards. I yanked the coop door open and the hens exploded outward, squawking and flapping, scattering into the smoke-filled dawn.
“Go,” I told them. Stupid. They couldn’t understand me. But I said it anyway. “Go. Find somewhere safe.”
They disappeared into the chaos. Maybe they’d survive. Maybe the foxes would get them. Maybe they’d burn anyway when the fire spread.
But I’d given them a chance. It was all I could do.
Back inside, the smoke was thicker. They weren’t trying to break through anymore. They weren’t trying to take the farmhouse.
They were burning it down around me.
“Kallum.” My voice was raw. “They’ve got fire. They’re burning everything.”
“I see it.” His breathing was worse now. I could hear him running. “Get to the north door. I’m coming around the back.”
“Turnip can’t walk.”
“Then carry him.”
“He weighs two hundred kilos!”
“Then drag him. Anhara. You have to move. Now.”
I looked at Turnip. He looked back at me.
“Okay,” I told him. “This is going to hurt. I’m sorry.”
I grabbed his front harness. The one Torek had made for him when he was small enough to need leading. It still fit, barely. Turnip had grown into it over the years.
I pulled.
He squealed. That hurt sound that cut through me every time. But he tried to help. His front legs scrambled at the floor, pushing, dragging his hindquarters behind him.
“Good pig. That’s good. Keep going.”
The smoke was thicker now. Coming through the walls. Through the cracks in the windows I’d boarded up after the last assault.
The farmhouse wasn’t burning yet. But it would be.
Everything was going to burn.
I dragged Turnip toward the north door. Every step was agony. His weight. My exhaustion. The smoke filling my lungs.
Kallum had the Regalia. Kallum was coming. I just had to get out.
The north door was still intact. The explosion from the last assault had taken out a section of wall, but the door itself had held. I reached for the handle.
“Anhara.”
Kallum’s voice. Not through the comm.
Behind me.
I spun.
He stood in the gap where the wall used to be. Blood covered the left side of his jacket. His face was gray beneath the natural gray of his skin, and his sigils looked flat. Wrong. But he was standing. He was here.
“I said north door,” he said. “You went for the right one.”
“You look terrible.”
“Nice of you to say.” He limped toward me. Knelt beside Turnip. Ran his hands over the boar’s side, gentler than I expected from those scarred fingers. “Can he move at all?”
“Front legs. His back is. I don’t know. Maybe paralysis. Maybe just pain.”
“We need something with wheels.”
“The cart.” I pointed. “In the barn. If it hasn’t burned yet.”
Kallum nodded. Started to rise. Swayed.
I caught him. His weight against me, solid and warm and wrong. He shouldn’t be this heavy. He shouldn’t be leaning on me this much.
“You’re worse than you’re saying.”
“I’m vertical.”
“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
His mouth twitched. Almost a smile. “The cart. Stay with Turnip.”
He was gone before I could argue. Slipping through the gap in the wall and into the smoke and the dawn light and the burning world.
I crouched beside Turnip and stroked his snout and waited.
The smoke got thicker.
The flames got closer.
And somewhere in the distance, I heard more gunfire.