27. Keir
Keir
I blink.
East wall corner — read it, clear, two seconds — blink.
Upper east walkway — read it, clear, one second — blink.
South end of the east corridor where it meets the training yard: there.
First fire drake. He came out of the armory corridor twelve minutes ago and he's been moving since, which means whatever he set up in there didn't happen the way he wanted it to.
Good.
I blink to six feet behind him — far enough back that he won't feel the air move at my arrival, close enough to finish reading him before he shifts again.
He's heading east, toward the wall. Not panicking.
His movement is controlled and deliberate, the movement of a man working a second plan rather than making one up.
A second plan means there's a place along that eastern wall where he's been told to be.
I take him in fast. Height, build, the way he carries his weight when he's moving with purpose rather than for speed.
The right-hand grip Callan flagged, which I can't see from this angle but which I keep anyway.
And the burnt-metal heat he leaves in the air behind him, which I can follow even after he's gone, because in still air it hangs around about six minutes.
I blink out before he knows anyone was there.
Thirty seconds in the gap between the east corridor and the outer wall to sort what I have.
First: heading east on a fallback. Second — the one who works by scent — I had her ten minutes ago at the south face of the main building and lost her when she crossed the angle my blink range doesn't cover.
Third: still nowhere. The third is the part that needs answering fastest.
The bond with Raven is warm and alive. It has the quality it takes on when she's been hit and is going on through it — a slight sharp edge under the warmth, like a string tuned a shade high. Not distress. Pain being managed.
She's hurt.
I file it and keep moving.
? ? ?
Blink hounds don't fight fire drakes.
That isn't a preference. It's an honest measure of what I can do, made honestly, without dressing it up as something more flattering.
Fire drakes run hot in a way that reaches into what a blink hound is — the heat gets into the space I move through when I phase, and it drags, and the drag makes the crossing slower and the arrival less exact.
Up close with a fire drake I can still blink away from anything he starts.
But slower than I could against anything else.
In a fight where the whole of my advantage is speed and knowing precisely where I'll land, anything that takes from those two changes the sum considerably.
I also don't have the weight to take a fire drake's hit and keep working.
Those are facts. I've sat with them three weeks, since I knew this Purge would have fire drakes in it, and sitting with them hasn't altered them.
What it has given me is clarity about what my job actually is.
Not to fight, to track. Not to engage, to know.
Not to be the blade — to be the thing that makes the blade land in the right place.
Raven has the blade.
I have the map.
I find the second one again a little past the hour.
She's holding at the south face of the east building, tucked in behind the drainage outcrop that makes a natural blind spot from the courtyard. She isn't moving. She's set, and waiting, and from the angle of her head she's facing the eastern wall rather than the courtyard.
She's waiting for the first one to reach wherever they've agreed on.
I go to map the eastern wall.
This is the work hounds do better than anybody.
Ground covered fast, at a scale nothing else manages.
I take the eastern wall in twelve blinks, three seconds at each position, building the whole shape of it — where everyone is, what the ground looks like from every angle that matters.
Twelve blinks. Thirty-six seconds. Two hundred feet of wall and every approach that feeds it.
Three places along it would serve as somewhere to converge. The recessed maintenance door at the midpoint. The corner where the wall meets the north outbuilding, which makes a sheltered pocket. And the shadow the wall throws at this hour, running east to west along the ground.
The maintenance door: empty.
The outbuilding corner: a third-year who is definitely not a fire drake and who is doing the sensible thing, which is sitting the Purge out somewhere nobody will look. I blink past without disturbing what he's built.
The shadow line: the first one, arriving just about when I'd worked out he would. He takes the east end of the shadow and settles in. Checks what he can see from there — the south approach, the eastern way into the courtyard, the gap between the main building and the training yard boundary.
He's at the pinch.
The ground clicks together. The shadow line runs east from him.
The drainage blind spot, where the second one is holding, runs north.
Between them they make a corridor about forty feet wide that anyone crossing from the main courtyard toward the eastern training yard has to pass through.
Anyone going west to east across the central grounds has to go through it.
A dragoness coming back from the south approach, having finished her business down there, walks straight into it.
They know her route. They've watched her long enough to know where she goes next.
I blink to Orpheus.
He's waiting where I land, the way he always is — present, still, entirely unsurprised, as though he arrived slightly before I did.
I give him what I have in the shorthand we set up before the bell: hand positions for the first one, for the second, for the forty-foot corridor between them and how it sits against Raven's likeliest way back from the south.
He takes it in without interrupting. That's one of the things about Orpheus. He doesn't ask for more when what he has is enough, and he works out that it's enough very fast. By the time I've finished telling him, he's already put it wherever he puts things.
"She knows about the pinch," I say.
"She'll have mapped that wall in the first twenty minutes," Orpheus says. "She maps everything."
"Her shoulder."
He looks at me. "How bad?"
"The bond reads like a graze she's managing. Nothing that went through. But the left arm's down — she'll be leading right for the rest of it."
"She's trained to lead right for two years, specifically because she knew the left shoulder was where anyone would aim if they worked out she favors it." A pause. "She'll be fine."
"I know." I'm not the one who needed to hear it. He is.
He takes that too. There's a small change in how he's standing, which means something has moved in him — not visible to most people, visible to me after a year. "The corridor. I'll get to her."
"Confirm both of them are still where I put them before she comes back through. Even if she already has the ground, she needs to know they've held."
He nods. He goes. I blink back to the eastern wall.
? ? ?
The fight I don't step into happens at eighty minutes.
The alley between the north outbuilding and the west face of the kitchen block.
Two fourth-years. I don't know either of them by face, which means they're either older students I've never had cause to learn or students who've been careful about being seen.
The fight has nothing to do with Raven's war.
Nothing to do with fire drakes or anything I'm tracking.
This is the Purge doing what the Purge does once you give it permission — two people with something between them using the window to settle it.
The bigger one has a weapon, a flat-edged training blade, legal here because it tags without going through. The smaller one has her hands and her speed and whatever she's been taught, which is enough for about sixty seconds before the blade decides it.
I blink to where I can see. I watch. I don't intervene.
The bigger one wins it in ninety seconds. The smaller one goes into the kitchen block wall hard and stays down. The fall is bad — she takes it at an angle that could be a concussion and could be worse.
I blink to her. Pulse: there, strong, the rhythm of being unconscious and not the other thing. Breathing. Nothing opened that shouldn't be. Her pupils answer when I check them against the light.
She's going to have a terrible headache and a bruise the size of my hand. The medical staff will find her.
I blink away.
I don't engage. It isn't my fight. The Purge makes ordinary violence right alongside the particular violence it was built for this year, and stepping into the ordinary kind costs me ground and minutes I need for the other.
But I checked the pulse.
I'm not going to blink past somebody dying without checking.
The Purge is supposed to make them stronger. I've heard that from instructors and from the papers the institution keeps and from older students who talk about it as a rite of passage rather than a culling with rules around it. Stronger. Harder. More capable.
I think about the girl at the kitchen block wall, and I think: mostly it makes them harder. And I think about my first year running with the pack, about what made me fast and accurate and good at reading ground in a hurry, and I think: I wonder whether harder and stronger are the same thing.
I don't think they are.
I think you can go harder and weaker at once.
Harder on the outside and more brittle underneath, the way overtired animals go, the way a person goes who has been through too many things that wanted the response swallowed rather than felt.
I've seen that kind in pack work. I've seen what it makes of someone over years.
I don't think that's what Raven is building at Blackhaven.
I don't think the Purge, in her hands, is going to make what it usually makes.
This isn't the place to take that thought further. I blink back to my position on the eastern wall. I have work.
? ? ?
The third fire drake isn't at the pinch.
I clock it at eighty-seven minutes. I've been running both of them every three or four minutes — positions confirmed, watching for movement, counting toward the window when Raven comes back through the eastern approach.
First: holding in the shadow line, east end.
Second: holding at the drainage blind spot, south. Stable.
The third isn't in either place, which I expected. He was never part of the pinch. The transfer was the one watching from the tower and Orpheus put him down at minute twelve, and the third has been somewhere else this entire morning doing something nobody has been able to name.
He should still be on these grounds, doing whatever he was told to do if the day went sideways.
I run the grid.
Twenty blinks, forty seconds, the whole grounds section by section in the overlapping sweep my pack uses for a search.
I'm following heat — that burnt-metal trace fire drakes leave behind them, faint but there, the same thing Finlay named from the border samples and that I've spent six weeks learning to pick out from everything else that makes warmth in a stone building on a cold morning.
First: eastern wall shadow line. There.
Second: south building drainage. There.
Third—
South. And moving.
I follow it. Blink, catch it, blink, catch it.
The trace is fresher than the others, laid down in the last four minutes instead of the last twenty, which tells me he's been moving recently and moving quickly.
He isn't wandering. He's going somewhere, with the certainty of a man who was told exactly where.
I find him at eighty-nine minutes, near the south dormitory.
I put it together very fast. The third was never meant to fight. Whatever he's been doing all morning, this is what it was for.
The fallback, when you can't isolate the target, is the lever.
The sibling who isn't the target but who is close enough to her that threatening them buys you the reaction you want.
A fire drake in the south dormitory with one of her sisters cornered means the red flare goes up.
The red flare pulls Raven off her ground, moving fast, reacting instead of working from the advantage she's spent the whole morning building.
And the way back from the south dormitory runs through the pinch.
It's a good plan. It's actually a very good plan. It allows for the corridor failing. It uses the one thing about Raven that was never tactical — what she becomes when somebody she loves is in danger.
It requires me not to be tracking him.
It requires nobody to have given the sisters a signal of their own, and me not to be standing here watching him walk toward them.
I blink.
Fast.