The argument with Maya was still live in his skull, a hot wire he couldn't stop touching, when Kael clapped him on the shoulder and said something about moving out that Aaron didn't fully catch. He fell into step anyway, slotting himself into the middle of the column where a cautious scavenger would logically position himself—not at the back where he'd look like a coward, not at the front where competence would be expected.
Maya had already taken point without being asked.
He watched her for the first thirty seconds and understood immediately why nobody had argued the assignment.
She didn't walk so much as flow through the undergrowth. Her leading foot tested ground before committing weight, finding the stable patches of compressed soil between the root networks without any visible hesitation. A low branch swung toward her face; she'd already ducked before it registered as a threat. She angled her shoulder to slip through a gap in two interlocked saplings that Aaron would have shoved through with both forearms, and the entire motion cost her zero momentum. The recurve bow stayed perfectly clear of every obstacle as if the forest had been mapped and filed and the route pre-calculated.
She's running a pathfinding algorithm. A really good one.
Aaron caught his right boot on an exposed root and went down on one knee with a convincing grunt of surprise. His right palm hit the ground first—he'd angled the fall to make it look uncontrolled—and the half-healed scab across his palm tore open against a piece of embedded gravel. The pain was immediate and entirely unperformative. He hissed through his teeth, genuine.
"You good?" Rourke, behind him, reached out a steadying hand.
"Fine." Aaron took it, let himself be hauled up with slightly more difficulty than required, and brushed mud off his knee with his left hand because his right was now leaking. He pressed it against his thigh. The cold had already worked into his left arm during the earlier incident at the node, a deep ache that lived somewhere between the muscle and the bone, and the combined effect of both injuries made the performance of exhaustion effortless. He didn't need to act tired. He just needed to not act less tired than he was.
The column moved on.
Maya paused at a tangle of deadfall that would have cost them four minutes of detour and simply stepped through a gap Aaron genuinely hadn't seen until she was already on the other side of it, holding a branch back with two fingers so Lara could follow. She didn't look back to check if the rest of them had managed. She was already scanning the next twenty meters.
She's been doing this for three days alone. Three days tracking node instability in sector terrain that nearly killed five of us in forty minutes.
He filed that. Added it to the calibration.
The trick to performing incompetence around competent people wasn't to perform constant failure. That read as pathological, and pathological drew scrutiny. The trick was to perform selective incompetence—the kind that mapped onto a coherent internal logic. A scavenger who'd survived this long would be good at some things. Carrying weight. Staying quiet. Not panicking. He let those show. He let the stumbles and the wincing and the slightly-too-slow reaction times tell the story of someone who'd made it this far on stubbornness and luck rather than skill.
Maya, he suspected, was building a different model.
The thought arrived without fanfare and settled in his gut like a swallowed stone. She hadn't let the ambient mana resonance conversation end so much as she'd paused it. Filed it. He recognized the behavior because it was his own. She wasn't done. She was collecting more data points before she said anything else.
Which means every stumble is a data point. Every wince. Every time I reach for something with the wrong hand.
The forest thinned without warning.
He heard it before he saw it—a low, continuous rushing that cut under the ambient insect noise and the distant subsonic vibration still bleeding off the western skyline. The ground angled downward, the packed soil giving way to loose shale and then to larger, river-smoothed stones that shifted under his boots with a sound like broken crockery.
Maya stopped at the bank.
The stream was maybe eight meters across, but across was the wrong word for it. The water moved with the particular violence of snowmelt—opaque, grey-brown, carrying small debris in its current and breaking white around a series of rounded boulders that offered the only visible path to the far bank. The rocks were wet. The gaps between them were irregular. The current between them looked capable of taking a leg out from under someone who stepped wrong.
Lara appeared at Aaron's left shoulder and said nothing. Kael and Rourke spread out along the bank, looking for something better. There was nothing better.
Maya stood at the edge, reading the water, and the rest of them waited.
The stream didn't care about anyone's survival odds.
Aaron stood at the near bank and watched the water move—fast, dark, knees-deep at the center channel, and full of the kind of wet rocks that existed specifically to punish overconfidence. The current had carved a shallow ford maybe eight meters across, but the stones beneath the surface caught the moonlight in irregular patches, each one a different gradient of treachery.
Maya was already three steps in, her weight distribution shifting with each placement like she was reading a map only she could see. Left foot on the flat-topped granite. Pause. Right foot angling to the downstream edge of a half-submerged slab where the current would push rather than pull. Her arms stayed low and relaxed at her sides rather than out for balance—she wasn't fighting the water, she was filing a motion with it.
She's done this exact crossing before, Aaron thought. Or she's done a thousand crossings and her body has solved the general case.
He didn't know which was more dangerous to him.
Kael went second, copying her foot placements with reasonable success and only one sideways lurch that he corrected with a grunt and a windmilling arm. Rourke followed, broader and lower to the ground, slower, methodical. Lara picked her way across last before Aaron, her slung right arm held tight against her chest to keep the weight distribution from throwing her sideways, her jaw set against whatever the cold water was doing to her forearm.
Then it was Aaron's turn.
He stepped in.
The cold hit his boots immediately, seeping through the worn leather at the toe seam, and the first rock shifted a half-centimeter under his heel—not unstable, just alive in the way wet stone always was. His brain ran the crossing in about 0.4 seconds: the flat granite slab Maya had used, the angled approach to the channel stones, the slight leftward arc to avoid the deeper cut near the far bank's root system.
He took the flat granite. Standard. No performance required yet.
Second step, he let his right foot land slightly heel-first on a moss-patched stone instead of the ball-forward placement that would have given him grip. The sole skated a centimeter. He corrected it—visibly, with a small arm-jerk—but cleanly enough that it read as a near-miss rather than a stumble.
Kael, already on the far bank, watched with the polite anxiety of someone who didn't want to have to wade back in.
Third step put him at the channel, where the water was fast enough to push against his shins with real weight. The current wanted his left knee. He let it have a little more purchase than it needed, his center of gravity drifting upstream to compensate—and then, carefully, he let the compensation go fractionally too far.
His left foot came down on the downstream slope of a rounded cobble.
His right arm went out. His left arm went out. His torso pitched forward and to the right in what was, objectively, a very convincing imitation of someone who had just lost the argument with physics.
Maya's hand closed around his forearm before he'd completed the first degree of the fall.
Not grabbed—closed. Fingers wrapping in sequence, thumb locking last, the whole grip establishing itself in a single fluid motion that had no wasted movement in it whatsoever. The pull was controlled, directional, angled to redirect his momentum toward the far bank rather than simply stopping it.
And Aaron felt it.
Not the grip itself—the grip was fine, firm, professional. What he felt was the precise moment his own body responded to the catch, the instinctive bracing pattern that fired through his forearm and shoulder and lat before his conscious mind could countermand it: weight-shift, stabilize, prepare to absorb. The full mechanical signature of someone who had trained to fall safely and was now, automatically, preparing not to need saving.
He killed it in the next half-second. Let the tension bleed out, went loose and relieved, let his feet scramble ungracefully for purchase on the riverbed as Maya walked him the last two steps to the bank.
He didn't look at her face.
He stepped up onto the mud of the far bank, water streaming from his boots, and pulled his arm back with the slightly too-quick motion of someone embarrassed rather than someone recalibrating.
"Thanks," he said. It came out appropriately rough. "Rocks are—yeah."
He bent to check his boot lace, which didn't need checking, and used the three seconds it bought him to get his expression sorted.
When he straightened, Maya had already turned back to face the tree line ahead, her bow hand resting at her hip.
She didn't say anything.
That was worse than if she had.