The change is immediate. That constant pressure against my scarification—the blood-wards’ endless surveillance—fades to nothing. The air tastes different. Cleaner. Still dead, still barren, but without the copper undertone that permeates everything inside the Vale’s influence.
I stop. Roll my shoulders. Feel the absence where the Matron’s awareness used to press.
“She can’t see us here.” Imara’s voice is quiet. Exhausted. “Not clearly. The wards don’t extend this far.”
“She’ll send hunters anyway.”
“I know. But this buys us time.”
She let us run. Of course she let us run—she wanted to see what we’d do with freedom.
Time. We have maybe hours before the remaining Harvest Guard catches up. With Grokh recovering, they’ll be slower to organize—but they’ll come. The Matron doesn’t tolerate rebellion. Doesn’t tolerate escape. Everything that belongs to her stays with her, or dies trying to leave.
I set Dena down. She sways on her feet but stays upright, her gaze fixed on my face with an expression I can’t interpret.
“Thank you.” The words come out small. Uncertain.
I don’t know how to respond. Thanks isn’t what people give me. I turn away instead, scanning the horizon for shelter.
There. A cave mouth half-hidden by a tumble of dead stone, deep enough to provide cover. Better than the shallow overhang we used before.
“There.” I point. “We rest. Regroup. Plan.”
Imara nods. Starts herding the survivors toward shelter.
I watch her work—calm, competent, treating each exhausted stock member with the same careful attention she gives Dena. She knows their names already. Learned them during our flight. Uses them naturally, as if these broken people matter, as if their individual identities are worth preserving.
I don’t know any of their names. Haven’t bothered to learn.
What does that say about me?
The cave is betterthan I expected. Deep, dry, with a narrow entrance that would force attackers to approach single file. I could hold this position for hours against anything short of the Matron herself.
The survivors collapse against the walls, finally allowing themselves to rest. Imara distributes what little food we managed to grab during the chaos—dried rations from a guard’s pack, water skins that are already running low. Not enough. Nowhere near enough. But it’s enough.
Dena curls up in a corner, asleep almost before she closes her eyes. The others follow within minutes, exhaustion claiming what adrenaline can no longer fight.
Imara doesn’t sleep.
She sits across from me near the cave’s entrance, keeping watch while the others rest. The light filtering through the narrow gap catches the fine scarification along her arms, those delicate channels that let her work magic I’ll never understand.
“She knew.” Imara’s voice drops to a thread. “The Matron. She knew about us.”
I’ve been turning this over since her words echoed across the pit. Haven’t found an explanation I like.
“She said she was proud of what we could produce.” My hands clench.
“Produce.” Imara’s mouth twists. “Not destroy. Not rebel. Produce.”
The emphasis lands. I process it. Don’t like where my thoughts go.
“Explain.” I keep my voice low. Don’t want to wake the survivors, don’t want witnesses for whatever Imara is about to tell me. “What does she want us to produce?”
Imara is quiet. When she speaks, her voice carries the clinical precision of a harvester delivering a blood report.
“I told you I could read blood better than most. That’s true. But it’s also incomplete.” She traces a scar on her forearm, following the channel’s path. “I was bred for it. My bloodline—the specific combination of traits the clan cultivated in my parents—gives me precision that other harvesters can’t match. That’s why the Matron promoted me. That’s why she’s kept me close.”
“I know about bloodline cultivation.” The Matron explained it to me once, during one of her rare educational moods. How the clan tracks magical potential through generations. How they pair specific bloodlines to achieve specific results. “What does that have to do with us?”
