Page 16 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

Her face changes. The tight jaw, the too-old stance—it loosens and she nods.

The rehab enclosures sit behind the garage. Three pens I built my second day here with wire Garrett cut to size without asking what it's for. The hawk gets fed first because she's the worst patient, impatient and furious about the splinted wing. I hand Lily the tongs and show her the angle so the hawk takes the mouse without startling. She nails it on the first try. The owl takes his from the drop chute without fuss. Finn's son presses his face against the mesh of the fox kit's pen and goes still for the first time since the alarm pulled him out of sleep.

The animals don't care about fuel cans or men in the dark. They eat. They settle. The kids settle with them.

I look at the empty field past the enclosures. Room for a flight cage. Ground pens. A place these kids could come that has nothing to do with fences and perimeter cameras.

The morning passes. I help Jess with the children and watch Garrett walk the perimeter with Jax, the two of them covering ground in slow sweeps, checking the fence line and the tree break for any sign of a second approach.

Later that night I walk through the front door and across the lot, past the sand-covered pour line and the gravel Jax raked over the worst of the stain, past the garage where Tom's workbench holds his labeled supplies and the pegboard hangs above it with hooks for every tool.

I reach the gate and stop.

The southern road runs straight from the compound toward the coast highway and bends out of sight at the tree line, and beyond the bend it connects to the mountain passes that climb south through the range to the Bloodstone valley.

I face the road. My hands hang in my pockets. The air smells like damp gravel and the last of the gasoline.

I check my phone for the first time since the alarm. One text from Tom, sent when they reached camp.

Behave.

I stand at the gate of a compound I helped defend last night and wait for the sound of engines from the south.

Chapter 8

Steel

I check my phone one last time before the horn sounds. One bar, flickering. I type a single word and send it.

Behave.

The signal holds just long enough for the message to show delivered. I put the phone away.

Varak throws the first strike before the echo of the horn fades.

A right cross aimed at Knox's jaw, fast for a man his size, faster than I expected. Knox turns his head and takes the edge of it on his cheek instead of the hinge. The sound cracks across the stone ring and six hundred orcs draw a breath and hold it.

Knox doesn't swing back. He steps left, angles his shoulders, and lets Varak come.

He fights the way he leads. Absorbs the hit, reads the pattern, lets the other man tire himself out.

Varak doesn't wait. He closes the distance and drives a left hook into Knox's ribs that bends him at the waist. The crack carries across the stone, bone meeting bone, knuckle against his ribs. Knox's breath shoves out of him, his mouth opening, his teeth red from a lip that split on a punch I didn't see land. He straightens. His left arm guards his side and his face shows nothing, and Varak reads the guard and throws another body shot to the same spot.

The second hit sends Knox's head sideways. His whole body seizes and he turns it into a pivot, but Varak catches it. He presses in, throwing combinations that back Knox up step by step, and one of them catches the side of Knox's skull hard enough to stagger him toward the ring's edge.

Finn stands across from me. His knuckles go white on the leather cut in his hands, and every tendon in his forearms pulls taut under the skin. He watches his brother get hit and he doesn't move.

Varak overextends.

Another right cross, full rotation, everything behind it. Knox drops under it. He catches Varak's wrist on the way past, redirects the momentum, hooks his arm behind Varak's elbow and drives him into the ground.

Varak hits the ground face-first. Knox drives a knee into the center of his spine, pins the trapped arm behind his back, and raises his right fist above his exposed throat.

The mountains go quiet.

Knox holds.

His fist stays raised. Varak's throat stays exposed. Blood from Knox's lip drips onto Varak's shoulder, steady, every two seconds.