THE FREQUENCY NOBODY HEARS
"There are abilities we theorize and abilities we document. Harmonic stabilization belongs to the first category and has stubbornly refused to join the second. The mathematics say it should exist. A resonance signature capable of organizing chaotic energy into coherent patterns. Thirty years of research, zero confirmed cases. And yet the mathematics insist. I have learned not to argue with mathematics. It is always right. It is simply sometimes early."
--- Dr. Helena Morse, Theoretical Resonance Studies, Academy Archives, September 3rd, 2025
The terminal chimed at 0347. Kael was awake before the sound finished, his body rolling sideways and his feet finding cold floor in a single motion that owed everything to fourteen years of Mira Valdris waking her children at unpredictable hours and nothing to conscious thought. The screen painted pale blue light across the wall beside his bunk. He read the message with one hand braced against the mattress, the other already reaching for the training uniform folded on his footlocker.
VALDRIS, KAEL
REPORT TO ADMINISTRATIVE BUILDING, ROOM 4-17
0500 HOURS
DRESS: TRAINING UNIFORM
AUTHORIZATION: LT. CMDR. VANCE, V.
He read it three times. Room 4-17. Vance. Less than twelve hours since the resonance chamber assessment, and already she was pulling him from sleep for private conversation.
This was about the harmonic ability. It had to be.
The barracks breathed around him. Felix muttered something incoherent and turned over, one arm trailing off the edge of his bunk, red hair catching the terminal glow like cooling embers. Jiro slept the way he existed, solidly, without excess, his massive frame barely shifting beneath regulation sheets. Sana's breathing kept steady time even in unconsciousness, measured as a physician's pulse count. Two bunks away, Aldara lay with pale hair spread across her pillow, and the thought arrived before Kael could prevent it.
She watched them for Vasquez. She had said otherwise. Saying otherwise and being otherwise were not the same thing.
He could wake Lyra. That was their protocol, established through fourteen years of hiding what they were. Face everything together. Divide nothing. Share every burden until the weight became survivable through halving.
The message was addressed to him alone.
Kael checked the time again. 0352. He dressed in darkness, muscle memory guiding each motion the way Mira had trained him to move through their apartment without triggering her combat-trained awareness. Shirt. Trousers. Boots laced by feel. His fingers knew the work better than his eyes ever would, and within three minutes he stood fully dressed beside his bunk, listening to the breathing of five people who did not know he was leaving.
The wrongness of it settled in his stomach like cold water. First secret kept from Lyra since they were children. First door he would walk through without her knowing.
He slipped through the barracks door and let it close behind him.
The Academy at 0400 wore a different face than the one it showed during operations. Emergency lighting painted the corridors in amber, turning institutional hallways into something ancient, corridors that remembered what these buildings had been before the Resource Wars repurposed every structure within fifty kilometers of a Tower into military infrastructure. In this light, the place was almost beautiful. The stone walls glowed warm. The silence had texture, weight, the quality of a space holding its breath between one purpose and the next. Kael walked the main pathways, not service corridors. The Academy's security systems tracked individual energy signatures. Every step was being recorded, analyzed, filed. He let them record. The boy walking these halls was a candidate following a summons. Nothing more.
The air outside smelled different at this hour. Cold stone and the metallic sweetness of recycled ventilation giving way to something rawer as he crossed the connecting walkway between buildings. Autumn carrying the bite of northern altitude, thin and clean, laced with a trace of ozone from the Tower's constant pulse. The Tower itself was barely visible against the predawn sky, a shimmer more felt than seen, a pressure against the inner ear that Kael had stopped trying to ignore weeks before his arrival.
The administrative building rose ahead. Glass and steel and the silence of a place designed for decisions, not action. He climbed the entrance steps and pressed his identification chip to the security reader.
The door clicked open.
"Candidate Valdris." A uniformed officer at the security station, eyes never leaving monitoring screens. "Room 4-17. Fourth floor, corridor B. Elevator to your right."
"Thank you."
The elevator arrived within seconds. Kael stepped inside, pressed four, and used the brief transit to center himself. Breathing exercises Mira had drilled into him before he could write his own name. Inhale four counts. Hold four. Exhale six. His heart rate dropped. His thoughts organized themselves into order, not chaos that used him. Whatever Vance knew, she did not know everything. He would not let her see everything now.
The doors opened onto corridor B.
Room 4-17 was smaller than he expected. A private office, not an interrogation chamber. Desk, two chairs, a window overlooking the eastern training grounds where dawn had not yet touched the grass. The personal touches were sparse but pointed. A framed commendation on the wall. A potted succulent on the windowsill, its soil dark with recent watering. A coffee mug bearing the insignia of a military unit Kael did not recognize, steam still curling from whatever was inside it. The room smelled like old paper and cooling coffee and a sharpness underneath, like the ionized air after a resonance discharge. Like the room itself remembered the energy signatures of everyone who had sat in that chair and received news that rearranged their futures.
Lieutenant Commander Vance sat behind the desk, tablet in hand. Her steel-colored eyes lifted to meet his as he entered, and she studied him as a surgeon studies an imaging scan before deciding where to cut.
"Candidate Valdris. Close the door."
He closed it. The latch clicked, and the sound carried more weight than metal meeting metal should carry. Thresholds. His mother had taught him about thresholds. Some doors, once walked through, did not lead back to the room you had left.
"Sit."
The chair across from her sat lower than hers. Deliberate positioning, forcing the occupant to look upward at authority. Kael recognized the technique, catalogued it, and sat without resistance. Fighting minor manipulations only signaled awareness of manipulation, and signaling awareness was its own kind of vulnerability.
Vance studied him for several seconds. Nothing in her expression moved.
"You are wondering why I summoned you," she said.
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander."
"I am wondering why you are not more nervous." She set down her tablet. The motion was precise, the device placed at an exact angle to the desk edge. "Most candidates called to a private meeting with their commanding officer less than twenty-four hours into their Academy career would show stress indicators. Elevated breathing. Fidgeting. Attempts to anticipate and deflect." Her eyes narrowed by a fraction. "You are doing none of those things."
"I was trained to control my responses under pressure."
"By your mother."
"Yes."
"Commander Mira Valdris. The survivor of Jakarta." Vance leaned back. "I have read her file extensively. Seventeen hours against a shimmer zone breach. Three survivors out of thirty-seven. The official report describes her actions as 'exceptional under defiant circumstances.'"
Kael said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not be either obvious or revealing.
"The unofficial reports are more interesting." Vance's voice was thoughtful, pressing in like a physician probing a wound. Gentle pressure, watching for the flinch. "They suggest Commander Valdris did more than survive Jakarta. They suggest she adapted. That the shimmer exposure changed her in ways no one expected, gave her capabilities that were not present before the engagement."
"I would not know about unofficial reports."
"No. You would not." Vance retrieved her tablet, scrolling through data Kael could not see. "You would know about your own capabilities. The ones you demonstrated yesterday in the resonance chamber."
Here it was. The reason. The threshold.
"I demonstrated baseline resonance interaction," Kael said, measuring each word like a mason measuring stone. Placing them with no excess material. "The same assessment all candidates undergo."
"You demonstrated harmonic stabilization." Vance's voice sharpened, and the sharpening was pointed. A blade shown so the person sitting across from it understood what it could do. "Do you know what that is, Candidate Valdris?"
"I am not familiar with the term."
"Then let me educate you."
She turned the tablet toward him. The screen displayed a graph covered in wave patterns, frequencies rendered as colored oscillations against a dark background. Beautiful, in the way mathematics could be beautiful. Patterns so elegant they looked designed. Terrifying, for the same reason.
"This is the resonance field signature of the chamber during your assessment. The initial pattern is chaotic, fluctuating, typical of ambient Verathos energy."
Wild oscillations. No structure. Noise without meaning.
"Now." She scrolled forward. "Thirty seconds in."
The waves had changed. Still complex, still powerful, but organized. Patterns within patterns, frequencies nested like the harmonics of a struck bell, each reinforcing the others instead of fighting them. Order where chaos had been, and the order was elegant in a way that made Kael's chest tighten because he recognized it. Not from study. From a depth. The way you recognized your own handwriting, or the sound of your own breathing in a silent room.
"They are aligned," he said.
"They are harmonized." Vance's eyes never left his face. "The chaotic frequencies organized themselves into coherent patterns, amplifying each other instead of interfering. That does not happen naturally. It does not happen through any known resonance technique." She paused. "It happened because of you."
"I do not understand how."
"Neither do I. That is what concerns me."
She set down the tablet with the careful deliberation of someone placing a loaded weapon on a table between two people who both understood what it was.
"What concerns me more is the implication." Vance stood and moved to the window. Dawn was beginning to touch the eastern grounds, grey light seeping across training fields still wet with dew. "Harmonic stabilization is something beyond an interesting anomaly. It is, in theory, the ability to organize and synchronize external resonance fields. Other people's resonance fields."
The silence left behind was a specific kind of silence. The kind that forms when the temperature in a room changes by several degrees and every living thing in it becomes still.
"You are suggesting I can affect other Awakened," Kael said.
"I am suggesting the data shows your presence organized chaotic Verathos into coherent patterns. If that effect extends to the Verathos flowing through other people's channels, then yes." Vance turned back to him. "You would have the ability to synchronize, stabilize, and potentially amplify or suppress the abilities of every Awakened in your proximity."
The words hung in the office the way smoke hangs in still air. Present and thickening.
"That would make you extraordinarily valuable to anyone who knew about it," Vance continued. "And extraordinarily dangerous to anyone who could not control it."
"Director Vasquez knows."
"Director Vasquez suspects. She does not have this data." Vance tapped the tablet. "I do. And I intend to keep it that way."
The calculation arrived before the emotion caught up. Trust offered. Protection implied. But protection from what, and at what price, and why would an instructor with career ambitions invest political capital in shielding a first-year candidate from the Director of the institution they both served?
"Why?" he asked.
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Vance returned to her chair. "Because I have seen what happens when the military system gets hold of a capability it does not understand. They do not study it. They weaponize it. And the person carrying the capability becomes the weapon." She folded her hands on the desk. "I will not allow that to happen under my command."
"What are you offering?"
"Training. Private sessions, outside the regular curriculum. I will help you understand what this ability is, how to control it, how to conceal it when necessary. In return, you will trust my judgment about when and how this information becomes known."
"And my squad?"
"Your squad will be told what they need to know, when they need to know it. Not before."
Another secret. Another door that did not lead back.
"I need time to consider."
"You do not have time." Vance's voice was not unkind, but it bore the burden of someone who had watched time run out before. "Vasquez is running her own analysis of yesterday's data. She will find the same patterns I found. The difference is what she will do with them."
She reached into her desk drawer and withdrew a small device. Flat, metallic, roughly the size and shape of a military identification chip. She placed it on the desk between them.
"A harmonic monitor. Passive sensor. It records your resonance output patterns and transmits them to my private terminal. Nobody else has access."
"You want to monitor me."
"I want to protect you. Monitoring is how I do that." She met his eyes with a directness that reminded him, uncomfortably, of his mother. "I protect what falls under my authority, Candidate Valdris. You are under my authority. The question is whether you will make that protection easy or difficult."
Kael looked at the device. Small enough to fit in a pocket. Innocuous enough to escape notice. A leash, disguised as a shield.
He picked it up.
"Easy," he said.
Vance almost smiled. It changed the geography of her face entirely.
"Good. Now get to morning assembly. You have forty-three minutes."
Kael stood, pocketed the monitor, and crossed to the door. The device rested against his thigh, warm from his hand, pulsing once in a rhythm that matched the Tower's distant heartbeat.
"Candidate Valdris."
He turned.
"The harmonic ability is rare. The last confirmed case was over a decade ago, and that individual disappeared. Do not give anyone a reason to make you disappear."
He nodded and walked through the door. Behind him, the office was already becoming a room he could not return to. The Kael who had entered it was not the one who left.
The corridor stretched ahead, amber-lit and empty. Somewhere in the building below, the Academy's systems recorded one candidate walking faster than the institutional average, carrying a device in his pocket that pulsed in time with structures older than every war that had ever touched this ground.
Morning assembly formed in the central courtyard under a sky the color of unpolished steel.
Three hundred and forty-two first-year candidates stood in squad formations across the paved square, breath visible in the early autumn air, uniforms still creased from the previous night's pressing. The Tower rose in the distance beyond the Academy walls, its pulse a low vibration in the soles of Kael's boots. He took his place in Squad Thirteen's formation, and the harmonic monitor shifted against his thigh, a new weight among familiar ones.
"You were not in your bunk this morning," Lyra spoke without turning her head, her voice pitched beneath the ambient noise of assembly.
"I went for a walk."
"At 0400."
"I could not sleep."
She said nothing more. But the silence between them carried a texture it had not carried before, a roughness where there had been something smooth, and Kael registered it the way he registered the Tower's pulse. Through channels that had nothing to do with the five senses anyone could name.
"Attention."
Instructor Mercer stood on the elevated platform at the courtyard's northern edge, his voice carrying without amplification. Former Continental military. Career instructor. That particular man who could make silence uncomfortable simply by letting it last two seconds longer than expected.
"Today's operational exercise will pit Squad Thirteen against Squad Seven in a field-scale tactical engagement." A murmur rippled through the assembled candidates. "The Resonance Pursuit."
The display behind Mercer illuminated. A topographical map of the eastern training sector appeared, rendered in the blue-white holographic projection that Academy systems preferred. Rolling hills giving way to a shallow ravine, which fed into an urban simulation zone of prefabricated structures designed to approximate the close-quarters environments of a Zone Three engagement. Five points pulsed gold across the terrain.
"Five resonance beacons have been placed across the training sector. Each beacon emits a unique Verathos frequency. To deactivate a beacon, a squad must synchronize three of its members' energy signatures with the beacon's output. Individual effort will not work. This is a coordination exercise."
Mercer let the implication settle.
"First squad to secure three of five beacons wins. Direct interference is permitted. Sabotage is expected. The losing squad runs the exercise again tonight with scrambled beacon frequencies." He paused. "Any questions."
It was not a question.
Kael studied the map. Five beacons across roughly two kilometers of varied terrain. The ravine bisected the approach to three of them, creating a natural chokepoint. The urban simulation zone held two more, its tight corridors favoring smaller units and ambush tactics. The topography rewarded speed and squad coordination in equal measure. It punished isolation.
"Squad Thirteen." Zara Okafor's voice cut through the assembly noise like a blade through paper. She stood at the head of Squad Seven, hands clasped behind her back, her close-cropped hair and angular features giving her the appearance of someone who had been sharpened, not grown. "Do try to make it interesting."
Felix leaned toward Kael. "She's absolutely terrifying."
"She is absolutely good," Aldara corrected, her pale eyes tracking Zara's squad with measured rigor, noting variables. "Squad Seven has the highest coordination scores in our intake year. Zara Okafor holds the individual spatial-combat and close-quarters record for the entire American Compact junior division. Her spatial manipulation lets her control the geometry of any engagement."
"That's what I said." Felix's grin was the kind that arrived to cover something less comfortable underneath. "Terrifying."
"She is posturing," Sana said. Her dark eyes tracked Squad Seven's movements as they huddled for their own strategy session. "Trying to shake our confidence before the exercise begins. Standard psychological warfare."
"Is it working?" Felix's hands sparked once. He shoved them into his pockets. "Because it feels like it's working. She looked at me specifically. Did anyone else see that? She looked directly at me. Why would she look at me? What does she know about my lightning? Does everyone here have files on everyone else? Is that a thing?"
"Felix."
"Right. Breathing. Diaphragm. Got it." He did not, in fact, breathe from his diaphragm. "Yesterday I almost lost control, today we're fighting people who've trained together for eighteen months, and the terrifying girl from Squad Seven is studying us like a problem set." He inhaled. "This is fine. We're fine. Are we fine?"
"We are fine," Jiro said. The two words bore the burden of a geological formation. They did not invite further discussion.
"Then we will have to be better than fine." Lyra's gaze reflected the holographic map. Flames did not flicker at her fingertips. She had learned that control in the first week. But the air around her hands shimmered, slightly, the way air shimmers above sun-heated stone. "How do we approach this?"
"Four minutes," Aldara said. "Use them."
They gathered in a tight circle, voices low, aware that Squad Seven was watching them the same way they had been watching Squad Seven. Kael had already built the map inside his head. Terrain, distances, squad capabilities, potential engagement points. The planning came naturally, the same way breathing came naturally, except that breathing required no justification and planning always did.
"Three teams of two," he said. "Speed team takes the nearest beacon in the open ground. Assault team pushes the ravine for the two beyond the chokepoint. Scout team maps the urban zone and identifies the remaining two."
"Team assignments?" Aldara asked.
"Lyra and Felix, assault. Your combined fire and lightning creates area denial nobody wants to push through. Jiro and Sana, urban zone. Jiro's defense protects Sana while she maps the beacon frequencies. Aldara, you are with me on the speed run."
"Why me?" No challenge in the question. Genuine tactical curiosity.
"Because your pattern-sight can detect beacon frequencies at range. We find it faster, we secure it faster, we free up resources for the other teams."
Aldara considered this for half a second. "Acceptable."
Felix watched the exchange with an expression Kael could not categorize. A blend of admiration and the faint bewilderment of a person who had encountered a species of intelligence he did not possess and found it, against all reason, fascinating, not intimidating.
Beneath the planning, beneath the strategy and the teamwork and the focused determination, a thought moved through Kael like a fish through dark water: What if I cannot do it again? The Gauntlet had been instinct. Desperate, uncontrolled, an ability he could not explain reaching out to save someone he barely knew. What if it had been a fluke? What if the harmonics were not a gift but an accident, and accidents did not repeat on command? He imagined failing. Imagined his squad watching him reach for an ability that was not there. Imagined the look on Vance's face. On Lyra's. The word ordinary pressed against his skull like a thumbprint. He breathed it away. But it left a mark.
"Oi." Felix raised a hand. "Quick question. When you say 'direct interference permitted,' does that mean Squad Seven's going to be trying to physically stop us?"
"It means," Jiro rumbled, "that we should be trying to physically stop them."
Felix's eyebrows rose. "Did Jiro just suggest violence? Someone mark the date."
"I suggested strategy." Jiro's expression did not change. "Violence is how most people describe strategy they did not anticipate."
"What about resonance application?" Felix leaned forward, both hands flat on the table. "Because my resonance application yesterday almost blew up the chamber. Should I be worried about the part where I'm on the assault team? With fire? Near beacons we're supposed to deactivate and not destroy?"
"You will support Lyra," Sana said. "Stay close. If something requires force beyond physical capability, you provide the boost. Controlled."
"Controlled." Felix's laugh was strained. "I'll control the uncontrollable energy that lives in my nervous system. No problem."
"It is not uncontrollable," Lyra said. Her voice carried unexpected gentleness. "It is untrained. There is a difference. You will get there."
Felix blinked at her, surprised by the encouragement.
"Two minutes," Aldara warned.
"Formation?" Lyra asked.
"Flexible," Sana said. "We do not know what we will face, so we cannot commit to fixed positions. General principle: each pair operates independently until coordination is needed. If you encounter Squad Seven directly, non-lethal interference. But we do not let them stop us."
Sana laughed. The sound was unexpected and warm, and it cut through the pre-exercise tension the way her healing cut through damaged tissue. Efficiently. With care. Leaving the world better than what it had replaced.
Felix exhaled. "Right. Three teams. Run fast. Don't explode. Beat the terrifying girl. Simple."
"Simple," Jiro agreed, and the way he said it suggested that he found simplicity a perfectly adequate description of what was about to happen, regardless of how Felix's nervous system categorized it.
"Move to starting positions," Mercer announced. "Exercise begins in five minutes."
The eastern training sector smelled like wet grass and cold stone and the particular metallic tang that clung to any ground within a kilometer of an active Tower. Morning dew still darkened the earth, and the sky had brightened enough to turn the terrain from grey shapes into green and brown particulars. Rolling hills. Scattered equipment pylons from previous exercises. The ravine, cutting east to west like a wound in the landscape, deep enough to hide a standing person and narrow enough that two people could touch both walls in concert.
Kael and Aldara broke northeast at the starting signal, moving at the sustained pace that Mira had called a tactical advance and that everyone else called running too fast for too long. The first beacon sat on elevated ground roughly four hundred meters from the starting line, visible as a faint gold shimmer in the morning light. A cylinder of crystallized Verathos mounted on a regulation tripod, pulsing with a frequency that reached Kael before the light did.
"Three distinct signatures," Aldara reported, her stride steady despite the pace. Her breathing was controlled. Whatever else Director Vasquez had trained her niece to be, she had trained her to run. "The beacon requires three inputs to deactivate. We need a third."
"We will not need a third." Kael slowed as they crested the hill. The beacon sat in a depression below the ridgeline, its gold light painting the wet grass around it. "I can bridge the gap."
"Explain."
"When Lyra and Jiro train, I can feel the point where their frequencies align. The center of their coordination. I think I can find that center between your frequency and mine and hold it steady enough for the beacon to read as three inputs."
Aldara studied him. The look lasted approximately one-point-three seconds. Then she nodded.
"Do it."
They knelt beside the beacon. The crystal hummed at a frequency that vibrated in Kael's teeth and behind his eyes, a sensation that was not quite sound and not quite pressure and was entirely unlike anything the Academy's standard curriculum had prepared him for. The ozone scent thickened. The air tasted the way the air tasted before a storm broke, electric and thin and carrying the promise of something about to happen.
Kael placed his hand on the beacon's base and closed his eyes.
The resonance field bloomed in his perception. Not sight. A depth. The way a person knows the shape of a room in darkness, sensing where the walls stand without touching them. Aldara's frequency was clean and precise, a pattern of sharp edges and geometric consistency that matched her personality with an accuracy that would have been amusing under less urgent circumstances. His own frequency was different, broader, more fluid, tending toward patterns that absorbed and reorganized, not defined and contained.
He reached for the distance between them. The harmonic center. The point where two frequencies met and produced a third frequency that was neither but contained both.
The center held.
Three signatures registered on the beacon's crystal. Gold light flared, then collapsed into steady white. A tone sounded, clean and high, audible across the training sector.
"Beacon one. Secured." Aldara's voice was carefully neutral. "Time elapsed, four minutes twelve seconds."
"Good."
"Kael." She was looking at him with an expression he could not immediately categorize. "What you did is not a standard resonance technique."
"No."
"The Academy curriculum does not cover it."
"No."
"How long have you been able to do that?"
"I do not know. I did not know I could until I tried."
Aldara filed this information somewhere behind that unwavering stare, in the same place she filed everything, between the clean edges of the patterns she could not stop seeing. She did not press further. That restraint, Kael thought, was worth more than the dozen questions she had chosen not to ask.
They moved south toward the ravine.
The ravine fight was already underway when they arrived.
Lyra and Felix had reached the second beacon forty meters deep in the cut, where the stone walls rose to head height and the morning light had not yet reached the bottom. The air smelled of wet stone and iron deposits and the ancient patience of earth that had been splitting along these seams for ten thousand years. Squad Seven's forward element, three candidates whose names Kael did not yet know, had reached the same beacon from the opposite approach.
The engagement was messy, loud, and educational.
Lyra moved the way fire moves. Not standing still, never standing still. Her left foot shifted and her hips torqued and her hands swept outward, and flame uncoiled from her palms in a whip-crack arc that painted the ravine walls in momentary gold. The heat arrived before the light did, blistering the damp moss on the stone face beside Kael's shoulder. She followed the first pulse with a second, lower, skimming the gravel bed to force the opposing team's ankles into motion. A third burst climbed the far wall like something alive, something that remembered being caged and had opinions about it.
Felix's lightning answered her fire like a brother answering a sister's war cry. Bolts arced between the wet stone walls with a sound like tearing canvas, each fork splitting and re-splitting as it found the mineral veins in the ravine substrate and rode them, jumped from iron to quartz to iron again, filling the narrow space with the taste of ozone and the smell of scorched sediment. His teeth were bared. His red hair stood at angles that had nothing to do with wind.
"Contact," Lyra reported over the squad communication channel. Her voice was steady. Her fire was not. It flickered at the edges with the barely contained excess that was her signature, the power that did not fit the container she had built for it. "Three opponents. Holding position behind the rock shelf. They are waiting for reinforcement."
"Their reinforcement or ours?" Felix asked. A bolt of lightning punched into the rock shelf and scattered gravel in a cone that forced the opposing team further back. Felix grinned. Then winced. Then grinned again, the way someone grins when the cost of what they are doing has not yet outweighed the satisfaction.
"Ours," Kael said, sliding down the ravine wall in a controlled descent that left dirt under his fingernails and stone dust on his uniform. "Aldara and I have beacon one. We need two more. Can you hold here?"
"We can hold here until the sun burns out," Lyra said. "Getting to the beacon is the problem. Three-person synchronization, and the two of us do not have a third."
"You have me."
Kael moved forward through the ravine, keeping low, using the natural contours of the stone as cover. The wet ground soaked through his trousers at the knees. Behind him, Aldara followed in the precise, economical way she did everything, each foot placement considered and chosen.
He reached Lyra's position. The beacon sat ten meters ahead, its gold pulse visible through the smoke and residual discharge of the exchange. Squad Seven's team held the rock shelf beyond it, close enough to contest any approach but not close enough to secure the beacon themselves.
"Cover," Kael said.