Doc kept the pace just short of a run.

The Waste stretched flat ahead of them, pale and empty. Lux marked the trail in his vision — Wisp's and the creature's, both still heading north.

Behind him, Calen and Mav were starting to come apart.

He heard it before he saw it — the drag creeping into their steps. He glanced back. Calen was tiring, his face tight with the effort of keeping up. Mav was the same. His breath came harder now, and he'd fallen a few steps behind.

They'd been taking the stamina pills since the abandoned camp. Doc had watched the case empty by twos. The pills only did so much.

Lux. How are they holding?

Monitoring. A pause while he scanned them. Both are tiring. Calen more than Mav — he's pushing harder to keep up. They can keep going, but not at this pace. You'll want to give them a few minutes soon.

Doc didn't break stride yet. Ten minutes. He could —

Comms are back.

That stopped his train of thought cold. Say again.

Suit transceiver has signal. The interference that's been blacking us out since we entered the Waste is gone.

Doc slowed. Then stopped.

Calen nearly ran into his back, caught himself, and bent over with his hands on his knees, catching his breath. Mav stopped a few paces off and sat down in the snow.

"Rest," Doc said. "Both of you. Few minutes."

Neither argued.

Doc stepped a little apart and brought the radio up inside his helmet, keying the channel through the neural link.

"Bran. Come in."

Static. Then —

"Doc?" Bran's voice came through thin and crackling. "That you? I've been trying for 2 days now."

"It's me," Doc said. "Calen's with me. He's fine — tired, but fine."

"And the girls?"

"Still alive, far as I know. I'm working on it." Doc kept it short. "What's happening on your end?"

"It's been bad," Bran said. "The whole city went sideways after the attack. Watchmen and Guards everywhere. They locked down the outer approach the same night and it hasn't let up since. The Archmagister and the academy magisters have been out in the district themselves," Bran continued. "They're investigating. Watchmen and guards have been going house to house, questioning ordinary people."

Doc glanced back. Calen was still bent over, catching his breath. Mav had stretched out his legs in the snow.

"They question you?" Doc asked.

"Twice," Bran said. "Once by a Glasshold watchman. Another time by an imperial guard — or I think he was imperial."

"What about Garrik and Elara?" Doc asked

"They were taken in for questioning," Bran said. "The inn's been locked down. No one's allowed in or out."

Doc let that sit for a moment. That meant the city was holding the Thornwicks responsible. Maybe not officially, but enough to shut their business and isolate them while the search continued.

"What about Dain and the kids?" Doc asked. "Ren, Kipp, Maris."

"Dain brought them over right after the attack," Bran said. "We're at the depot. We've been staying there since the attack."

That was good. The kids were safer there.

"Good," Doc said. "Stay safe, Bran. I should be back soon."

"Take care of yourself," Bran said. "And watch out for Calen."

Doc closed the line.

---

---

The hall went quiet, and the thing that had been Hrodgar's killer stood in the cold and listened.

It was learning to like this part. The hush that came when a warm thing stopped being warm, when the noise it made — the breathing and the small frightened sounds — all went out at once.

It had not understood that at the wall. At the wall there had only been hunger, and the man on the parapet had been food. But each one it took left something behind — some shape of how that one had moved, how it had thought. The shapes were adding up into something that could want.

It wanted more.

There were six still warm in the hold. It could feel them the way the old hunter had felt his own men — points of heat scattered through the rock, faint and flickering. Three above. Three below, deep in the lower dark, close together and moving — and all three of them wrong somehow, their heat pressed down, dim, like something held it under.

It started with the three above, because they were moving.

The first it found in a side passage, pressed into a doorway with a blade held in both hands. The man heard it coming and did the brave thing, the wrong thing. It stepped out to meet it instead of running. It let him swing. It had learned, from the old hunter, what a committed strike looked like before it landed, and it simply was not where the blade went. Then it was close, and the man was not brave anymore, and then the man was not anything.

It ate. It always ate, each time it ate made it more. But that wasn't the part it had come to want. What it wanted now was the finding. That was the part it was beginning to enjoy.

The second one ran. It liked that better. The man broke from a storeroom and went for the stairs, and the creature let him get a good lead before it followed. The man's heat spiked as he ran — terror burning hot and bright on the creature's sense — and the creature understood, in its new dim way, that the fear made the heat stronger. That a frightened thing burned brighter than a calm one.

It caught him at the top of the stairs.

The third one had stopped moving. Hidden somewhere in the upper dark, gone still, hoping stillness would pass for gone. But the old hunter had taught it that trick — it had used the same one itself, lying broken on the hall floor until the axe came close.

It went looking. There was no hurry.

It found the man behind a stack of crates, both hands clamped over his mouth. The creature crouched in front of him and waited. The man stared back, and the heat pouring off him climbed higher and higher until he was the brightest thing in the hold.

Then it reached in.

That left the three below. It turned toward the lower stairs, toward the cold and the deep and the small cluster of dim heat moving through it. There was no hurry. They were slow, and faint, and far from any way out. They would keep.

It took one step toward them.

Then it stopped.

Something new had come into range.

Far off, past the wall, out on the open snow — a heat unlike any of the others. Dense where theirs were thin. Bright and deep, banked with power, and beside it a second signature that flickered in and out of the world the way nothing living should. The creature went very still, tasting it across the distance.

It knew this one.

Not the way it knew the hunter's tricks or the runner's fear. Older than that, closer to the bone. This was the heat that had opened its ribs in the pass. The one that had hurt it, the only thing that ever had, before it learned what it could become.

It had grown since then. It was stronger now. It knew more.

The cluster behind stone went out of its mind entirely. Small prey. This was the other thing — the thing worth crossing a hold for, worth the wanting it didn't have words for.

The creature turned from the lower stairs and started for the yard.

---

---

Doc crested the final rise and stopped, letting Calen and Mav catch up. The wind had dropped, leaving the Waste quiet except for their breathing.

Mav pointed toward a structure emerging from the snow ahead. "That's it. The old clan stronghold. Exchange was supposed to happen there."

Doc studied the gray walls rising from the mountainside.

"It's usually abandoned," Mav continued, voice tight. "But the boss—the guy who paid for the job—he's a clan merc. Set up shop there with a full band. If Wisp's anywhere in the Waste, he's in there."

Doc nodded once. "Lux. Scan."

Processing, Lux replied. Active scan initiated.

The helmet display populated with structural overlay—wall thickness, room distribution, heat signatures. Most were faint. Most were fading.

Analysis complete. Necrotic energy signature detected. Match probability: ninety-six percent. The creature is inside the walls. A pause. Thermal signatures throughout the structure are cooling. Three remain stable, deep in the lower levels.

Doc let out a slow breath. "It got here first."

Calen's face went pale. "The girls?"

"Three signatures below, still warm. Could be them." Doc looked at both of them. "Could be anyone. We don't know yet."

Calen swallowed and nodded.

They approached the gate. The massive timber doors stood open, one hanging crooked from a broken hinge. Doc drew his plasma gun and moved through first, Fish at his side, the blade still sheathed at his hip.

The yard opened before them.

Bodies.

Men in clan furs and leather, scattered across the frozen stone. Not many—a handful, cut down where they'd stood. One near the gate had been opened from shoulder to hip. Another lay in two pieces. Whatever had come through here hadn't lingered over them.

It had lingered somewhere else. Past the yard, the main doors to the hall stood open, and the dark beyond them was worse—Doc's display painted heat where blood still cooled, a wide spread of it, more than the yard had on offer. That was where it had taken its time.

Behind him, Mav made a choked sound. Calen turned away and retched into the snow.

Doc kept scanning. Some of these kills were recent—minutes, not hours. The creature had worked fast once it started, and it hadn't rushed. It had done this for more than hunger.

"It's getting better at this," Doc said quietly.

Calen wiped his mouth. "Better at what?"

"Taking what it needs." Doc moved further into the yard, stepping between the bodies, eyes on the overlay. "Lux. Where is it now?"

Tracking. Signature is—

Fish was at his side in an instant, and the world lurched as she phased him clear.

Doc came to, blinking hard against the disorientation. His helmet display flickered, stabilizing.

Where he'd been standing—a massive ice spike jutted from the frozen stone, thick as a tree trunk and wickedly sharp. It had erupted from the ground  angled precisely where his chest had been half a heartbeat earlier.

"Impact trajectory calculated," Lux reported. "Velocity and precision indicate deliberate targeting. You would have been impaled through the torso."

Doc looked up.

The creature stood on the wall.

Not the thing from the clearing. Not anymore.

It had changed.

It looked like a man.

Broad through the shoulders, standing straight in pale clothes. From across the yard, nothing marked it as anything else.

And its eyes weren't empty. Something looked back.

Ice gathered at the tips of its fingers, crystallizing into jagged claws. Frost spread across the stone beneath its feet in delicate, branching patterns.

The air around it had dropped several degrees. Doc's breath fogged thicker now, even through the helmet's environmental controls.

"Significant biomass integration confirmed," Lux said quietly. "Strength estimate revised upward. Adaptive intelligence: substantially enhanced. Mana manipulation detected. This is not the same threat profile from the clearing."

Doc holstered the plasma gun and drew the blade.

Azure light bloomed along its length, silver veins pulsing through it.

This was going to be a hard fight.

He glanced at the bodies scattered across the yard—clan warriors, torn apart where they'd stood.

Doc bent and grabbed a shield from the snow near one of the fallen—round, reinforced wood banded with iron. Heavy, but intact.

He straightened, turning back toward Calen and Mav.

"Find the girls," Doc said. His voice stayed level, clinical. "Get them out."

Calen stared at him. "Are you—are you going to fight that thing by yourself?"

Doc met his gaze.

"Yes."

Mav stepped forward, eyes wide. "Are you crazy?"

Doc adjusted his grip on the shield.

"Maybe."

He turned toward the creature on the wall and started forward.

Behind him, Calen grabbed Mav's arm. "Come on. He can handle it."

Mav hesitated—half a heartbeat—then nodded.

The two ran toward the hall entrance, disappearing into the shadows beyond.

Doc's helmet display tracked them until they were clear.

Then his full attention locked onto the creature.

It tilted its head. Watching him approach.

Ice gathered in its palm, coalescing into a jagged shard. The temperature dropped another degree.

Doc raised the shield.

The creature smiled.

Then it moved.