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Jade said, studying it over my shoulder. "This is somebody planning repeat trips through terrain they don't want to memorize wrong."

"Mining," Halver said. "Has to be."

"Illegal mining," I said, "deep enough under a Crown garrison's own supply settlement that nobody topside noticed for however long this has been running."

"Or noticed and got paid to stay quiet about it," Alex said, and none of us had a way to argue that possibility off the table either.

Nykos crouched beside the beam, studying the nail itself rather than the paper it held. "This has been here for weeks, maybe longer. Rust pattern's consistent all the way around. Whoever pinned it didn't come back for it in a hurry."

"Which means either they didn't need it anymore," I said, "or they had enough copies that losing one didn't matter."

Nobody offered a better theory. I hadn't expected one.

I found myself second-guessing every decision within the first hour, and by the third, I'd stopped bothering to pretend the feeling would pass on its own.

Command had never frightened me before. Not because I was fearless, whatever the men under me sometimes assumed, but because I always had something to fall back on if my judgment failed. A shield to catch what a bad call let through. A barrier to buy time while a decision corrected itself. Even at my worst, even wrong, I'd never once had to trust my own reasoning without a safety net standing behind it.

Here, there was no net. Every choice I made, which fork to take, how far to let Halver range ahead, whether the sound behind us was worth stopping for, sat entirely on nothing but judgment that had never once been tested without a shield to catch the difference between a reasonable risk and a fatal one. I caught myself running the same fork decision through my head three separate times after we'd already committed to it, hunting for the version of events where I'd chosen wrong and simply hadn't found out yet.

I thought of Jade's collar more than once, and hated myself a little for how long it took me to actually let the thought land.

She'd worn something like this for years. Not exact powerlessness. A world that answered to everyone around her and refused to answer to her at all. A body that should have been fully hers, reduced instead to whatever someone else decided was safe to allow that day. I remembered the file, the assessments, the years of Masters testing exactly how far they could push a child before something broke, and understood for the first time in my life what all of that must have actually felt like from the inside rather than the careful, secondhand sympathy I'd offered from across a kitchen table.

I'd handed her a crystal once and called it a choice, and told myself that solved something, and maybe it had. But I'd never once had to feel what the silence itself actually cost, not really, not until a cavern wall full of Null crystal took the choice away from all of us at once and left me standing in exactly the kind of powerlessness I'd only ever managed from the outside, sympathetic and untouched. An hour of it had already worn a groove into me. She'd carried years.

I didn't say any of that aloud. Some realizations didn't survive being spoken, and this one felt too raw yet to risk on anyone else's reaction to it, least of all hers. The last thing she needed, bleeding and exhausted and refusing to admit either, was her commanding officer handing her his sudden guilt to manage on top of everything else.

But it changed something in how I moved through the rest of that tunnel, quiet and permanent in a way I doubted I could have explained even if I'd tried.

The next time Jade crouched over a blood smear near the trail's edge and said it was old, days rather than hours, I didn't ask her to prove it the way I might have a week ago. I simply adjusted our pace to match what she'd told me, the same automatic trust I gave Halver the instant he said a scent had gone cold. When she read the wear pattern on a second trail and called it heavier traffic than the first, I took the reading at face value and planned around it rather than treating her conclusion as a data point that still needed my approval before it counted as real.

A third time came less than an hour later, at a junction where two trails split without any obvious sign favoring one over the other. Jade crouched at the fork, fingers hovering just above the packed earth without touching it, and named the left branch as the one carrying recent boot traffic based on nothing I could see myself.

"Left," I said, already turning that way before she'd finished explaining why.

She stopped mid-sentence, visibly thrown by not needing to finish the justification at all.

She noticed. I watched her notice, a small flicker of surprise crossing her face the second time it happened, quickly smoothed over into something that looked almost like she didn't trust the shift either.

"You're not double-checking me," she said, quiet enough that it stayed between us.

"Should I be?"

"You usually do. Not unkindly. Just... thoroughly."

"You've been right every time today."

"I've been right most days."

"I know." I held her gaze for a moment, unwilling to explain the rest of it.

She studied me a beat longer, like she'd caught the edge of something without fully understanding it, and let it go without pushing further. I was grateful for that more than I let on.

We heard the voices twenty minutes later, faint at first, easy to mistake for the cavern's own settling sounds until the rhythm beneath them resolved into something unmistakably human. Words, indistinct at this range but unmistakably words, layered over a steady, percussive beat that could only be one thing.

Pickaxes. Someone down here, right now, still at whatever this operation actually was.

Halver went still first, one hand raised in the signal that meant stop and hold, and every one of us froze in place without needing a second warning. I felt my own pulse pick up, sharp and fast against my throat, with nothing I could reach for to steady it beyond the same breathing discipline I'd have taught any new recruit on their first real approach.