They came from underground.
Twelve figures emerged from a tunnel mouth that shouldn't have existed — a vertical shaft in the eastern foothills of the Cinderlands, concealed by rockfall and scrub brush, invisible from the surface until the first pale hand pushed aside the stones and the first luminous eye blinked in the daylight.
The border patrol that found them — a six-man unit from the Eastern Frontier Division — nearly fired on them. Not because the figures were hostile. Because they didn't look like anything the patrol had been trained to expect.
