Page 12 of Warrior’s Mate

Kaiven hesitated. It was slight, but she saw it.

"Activity on the trade lanes," he said.

"What kind?"

"Piracy. Trafficking. Border disputes. Nothing unusual by itself."

"But?"

"But several things are happening at once."

Maelis looked toward the southern fields. Two farm transports moved in opposite directions, passing each other with barely a meter to spare. Above them, a flock of white field birds lifted from the grain.

"And now communications are strange."

"Yes."

For the first time that day, neither of them joked. They spent the next two hours checking relay nodes along the proposed evacuation routes, moving from one ordinary piece of infrastructure to the next while the unease between them accumulated without anything concrete to justify it.

Nothing failed while they were standing beside it, which was almost worse than finding a broken relay they could point to and repair. The canal repeater passed every diagnostic. So did the school bridge transponder, the north farm relay, and the old maintenance beacon near the orchard ridge.

At the final station, Maelis crouched beside an access panel while Kaiven compared signal logs.

"You know," she said, "for someone who distrusts civilian systems, you've spent most of the afternoon crawling through them."

"I don't distrust civilian systems."

"You called our map useless."

"It was useless."

"Our map. Not our systems."

"Correct."

She looked up at him.

"That's annoyingly reasonable."

"I'm developing a reputation."

"Don't worry. I'll protect you."

He laughed quietly. Then the access panel flashed red. Maelis frowned.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing."

The red light vanished. A second later Kaiven's wrist display chimed, followed by hers and then the relay panel, three separate systems producing three different tones within the same breath. Kaiven's expression went still.

"What?"

He turned his wrist so she could see.

PRIORITY FAMILY MESSAGE — DELIVERY FAILURE.

The sender name was Daratu, Sera. His mother, Maelis assumed.