She’d been building this for years. Preparing for winters, for lean times, for the possibility that the supply runs might stop coming. A survivor’s instinct, planning for disasters that hadn’t happened yet.
I took a package of dried meat and some hard bread. Enough for dinner, not more. I wasn’t going to abuse the privilege.
Back at theTuretsala, I ate alone in the dim cockpit, watching the farmhouse through the viewport. A light came on in the kitchen window. Then another in what might have been a bedroom.
She was settling in for the night. Another evening alone in the house she’d shared with Torek.
I thought about what she’d said.This is Torek’s legacy.Not just a hiding place for the Regalia. Not just a strategic location to be secured and abandoned. This was her life. The fieldsshe’d planted. The animals she’d raised. The buildings she’d maintained through years of isolation and backbreaking work.
Whatever happened next, I needed to remember that. The Regalia mattered. The mission mattered. But so did this woman and the home she’d built from nothing.
I thought about Torek. The way he’d looked when I was young, all hard edges and patient silences. The way he’d broken me down and built me back up into something that could survive. Three years of training, and then the Sovereign had found me, and I’d become someone else entirely.
I’d never come back. Never visited. Never even sent word that I was alive.
And now he was dead, and I was sitting in a field outside his home, and someone he’d cared enough to teach was sleeping thirty meters away, and I couldn’t do anything but wait.
The stars came out, one by one. The temperature dropped. I pulled a thermal blanket from the emergency kit and wrapped it around my shoulders.
Tomorrow, I’d try again. Find another way to be useful without pushing. Build trust in increments so small she wouldn’t notice until it was already there.
Ghost warfare. Just a different kind.
I closed my eyes and let the silence take me.
ANHARA
Iwoke before dawn, the way I always did.
The house was cold. I’d let the fire die overnight, too tired to bank it properly. Now I lay under the quilts and listened to the silence and tried to convince myself that nothing had changed.
A stranger was still sitting in my field. I’d fed him. Let him help with the harvester. Started to think of him as something other than a threat.
Stupid. Dangerous. Exactly the kind of softness that got people killed.
But the harvester was fixed. And the pump was holding. And he hadn’t pushed, hadn’t demanded, hadn’t done any of the things I’d expected when a Vinduthi assassin landed in my life.
Assassin. I knew what Torek had been. What sort of people he’d trained. And now, all of the past had caught up to me.
I pushed back the quilts and swung my feet to the cold floor.
Turnip raised his head from his spot by the door, watching me with those dark eyes. He’d slept there every night since Torek died. Guarding. Waiting. Ready.
“I know,” I told him. “I don’t understand it either.”
I dressed in the dark, pulling on work clothes by feel. The cold bit at my fingers as I braided my hair back from my face. Outside the window, the first gray light swept across the fields.
The Vinduthi’s ship sat where it had been for three days now. Dark. Silent. Patient.
He was still there. Still waiting.
I went to the kitchen and started the fire. Put water on to boil. Moved through the motions of morning the way I had for three years, trying to pretend this was just another day.
It wasn’t.
The kettle whistled. I poured tea into Torek’s old cup, the ceramic warm against my palms. Stood at the window and watched the sun rise over the fields I’d planted, the fences I’d mended, the life I’d built from nothing.
If the Conclave was really coming, none of it would matter. They’d burn through this place without slowing down. Take what they wanted. Kill anyone who got in their way.
