[ Kael ]
The garrison was wrong without them.
Not broken — wrong. The way a hand feels wrong when you take off a ring you've worn for years. The shape is the same. The function is the same. But the absence is specific, and the specificity makes it impossible to ignore.
Dren noticed, because Dren noticed everything he pretended not to notice.
"You're moping," he said, on the third evening, at the misfits' table, which currently held three misfits instead of five because Torvald had followed Marten's group and because the table's structural integrity was, if anything, improved by the reduced weight.
"I'm not moping."
"You're sitting at a table with a full cup that you haven't drunk from, staring at the desert like it owes you money. That's moping. I've moped. I know the signs."
"You've moped?"
"Once. Over the woman from the coast. I moped for three weeks. Garrett threatened to transfer me to a different garrison. I stopped moping and started drinking instead, which was worse for my liver but better for morale."
Garrett, from the other end of the table, said nothing. Garrett's nothing was agreement.
Sera was on patrol. The extended southern sweep — two miles further out than the standard range, per Aldren's orders. She had been running the extended sweep for the past week, coming back with reports that were consistent in their content and increasingly concerning in their tone.
Same tracks. Same pattern. Newer.
"Aldren's worried," I said.
Dren's face changed. The switch — from jovial to serious, from Dren-the-performer to Dren-the-soldier — happened in less than a second. It always surprised me. The man lived so deeply inside his comedy that you forgot there was something else underneath, and then the something else appeared and you remembered that Dren had survived four years on a border and that survival required more than jokes.
"What's he saying?"
"He's not saying. He's doing. Extended patrols. Double watches on the southern wall. He had me sit in on a debrief yesterday — not officially, but he left the door open and I walked in and he didn't tell me to leave."
"What was the debrief?"
"Sera's report. The tracks are military. Boot pattern matches Khorath standard infantry. The spacing suggests formations. Not scouting — staging."
The word sat between us. Staging. The military term for the specific phase of preparation that came after planning and before execution. You planned in tents. You staged in the field. And you staged in the field because the field was where you intended to fight.
"Has he sent word north?" Dren asked.
"Three weeks ago. Dispatch to regional command. Standard channel."
"Three weeks. Response time?"
"Six weeks minimum. If the dispatch makes it. If someone reads it. If someone decides it matters."
Dren was quiet. Dren quiet was itself a form of alarm — the conversational equivalent of a dog's ears going flat.
"The brats come back in three days," he said.
"Two."
"Two days. Then they're home. Then—" He looked at the desert. The flat, dark, infinite expanse beyond the walls. "Then we see what we see."
Garrett drank from his cup. Set it down. Looked at both of us with the steady, patient, completely unsurprised expression of a man who had served on this border for thirty years and who had always known, in the way that old soldiers always knew, that the quiet was temporary.
"The General used to say," Garrett said, "'a quiet border is a thinking border. And a thinking border has already decided what to do next.'"
We sat with that. The stars came out. The desert was dark. The table held.
Two more days. Then the kids came home.
And whatever was thinking out there in the dark kept thinking.