Chapter 122: Smoke
I run, searching for a high place.
Twenty meters out from the mouth of the fissure, I see a tall rock to the right. I scramble up it and scan the horizon toward Lost Ark.
Nothing.
The city is too far, and the natural stone ridge we just crawled out of sits directly between us and the tower. Whatever I hear, I can’t see.
"Shit! Damn it..."
I climb down.
"Oliver. How many miles did we ride from Lost Ark to the base of the tower?"
Oliver thinks for a second. "Ten. Twelve, maybe. A little more."
"That’s what I thought."
I look at Rhayne. At Lola. Both of them are standing there waiting on my decision, and I can see the four days of cave sitting on them. Lola’s eyes are half-closed, Lullaby’s case riding heavier on her back than it should. Rhayne’s Cloaked Cape is still tuned to the color of the rocks behind her and her hands have a faint tremor she hasn’t noticed yet.
Ten miles at a run, carrying them, is not on the menu.
"Fast march. Steady pace. Fifteen-minute breaks to top off OXI and drink water. By my math, we do it in three to four hours if nobody breaks."
Nobody argues. Lola complains in her own way.
"Four hours is longer than yesterday and yesterday was already too long."
"I know, little bear. I’ll make it up to you."
"How?"
"Surprise."
I don’t actually know what I’ll give her. I just need her to keep moving.
She huffs and starts walking.
We move in tight formation. Me at the front, Oliver at the rear, the girls in the middle. The desert is too quiet. No monsters in sight. No sound except our own footsteps and the wind.
I don’t like the silence. Monsters don’t vanish on their own schedule.
"Something’s wrong in Lost Ark," I say low to Oliver.
"I’ve been smelling trouble for half an hour," he answers.
"Same."
One hour of marching. Then another. Lola is dragging her left foot slightly. Rhayne is too quiet, and her stomach growls loud enough to hear over the wind. She doesn’t even react to the sound.
I stop.
"Five minutes. Everyone sits."
Lola drops straight into the sand. Rhayne folds down beside her. Oliver stays on his feet, scanning the horizon.
I stay standing too, but I’m looking at the ground we’ve been walking across.
And that’s when I see them. Thirty feet to our right.
Tracks.
Not ours.
A lot of them.
Some the size of a hand. Others the size of a shield. Shellcat prints, Ripper claws, thick drag marks from things that haul their bellies across the sand. All moving in the same direction.
Toward Lost Ark.
And fresh. The wind hasn’t swept them yet.
I crouch and touch one of the larger prints. The sand is still loose at the edges. A few hours old. Maybe less.
The whole picture drops into place at once.
A second Red Tide. Too fast. Boris said fifteen to twenty days between waves. This one came in what—five? Four?
Then the rest of the logic stacks itself up without me asking.
The ’Maple Seeds’ falling from the tower. The explosion at the top. The pods hatching into monsters. The tower is a factory. Every opening releases a new generation, and every generation matures over days before being launched at the city as a Red Tide.
The twenty-day interval isn’t random. It’s gestation.
So why did this one come early?
Oh. Of course...
Chaos Theory.
My presence at the tower. Me solving the rune puzzle. The tower reacted to me. The Maple Seeds launched ahead of schedule because my interference forced the acceleration.
I caused this.
The question I can’t stop for—what the tower actually is—hangs in the air unanswered.
"On your feet. We’re moving faster."
"You said five minutes," Lola grumbles.
"Changed. Up."
She hears something in my tone that she hasn’t heard all morning. She gets up without arguing.
We pick up the pace. Legs burning. Rhayne is breathing deeper now. Lola is taking the air in small controlled sips. Nobody talks. Nobody complains.
Two hours later, the horizon changes.
Smoke. High, thick, rising from the point where Lost Ark should be. Wrong color. Greenish at the base, violet at the edges. The residue of high-tier spells burning air and matter together.
As we get closer, the smell arrives. Blood. Spent OXI. Burning meat.
We run the last five hundred meters.
The walls of Lost Ark come into view. What’s left of them.
Whole sections of the eastern curtain have caved in. Craters still steaming where spells landed. Monster carcasses scattered across the sand—Drenodors, Wivers, Rippers, things I don’t recognize. Black thorn bolts jutting from the bodies in broken forests of obsidian shafts, some of them still vibrating. And between the monster corpses, human corpses. A lot of them.
The main gate is open.
Not by design. Forced.
I run in.
Lost Ark has been hit with a force the first Red Tide didn’t come close to matching. Collapsed buildings. Bonfires burning at street corners where bodies are being stacked for cremation.
The wounded laid out in rows across the central plaza, groaning, some silent. A young voice is crying somewhere far off and nobody is going to comfort her because everyone is too busy counting the dead.
I scan the plaza for Boris.
I don’t find him.
"Boris!"
Nobody answers. The soldiers who hear me just raise their eyes for a second and go back to the work of stacking corpses.
I turn to Oliver. His face has gone white.
"Boss. This was my fault."
"No. It was mine."
Oliver doesn’t argue with that. He can see the same pattern I can see, and we both know who moved the dominoes.
I scan the rows of the wounded on the plaza. Faces I don’t recognize. Faces I half-recognize. A woman missing her left arm below the elbow, conscious, watching the smoke. A man staring at nothing with both his eyes still in his head.
None of them are Boris.
I move toward the bodies stacked by the bonfire.
And I start searching for him among the living, praying I don’t find him among the dead.