The knife was still wet with jackal blood when Maya turned to look at him.
Not the dramatic pivot of someone making a point. Just a slow rotation of her head, the way a compass needle finds north—inevitable, patient, already certain of where it would end up. The firelight from Kael's hastily struck flint didn't reach this far, so her face existed in gradients of shadow and the grey-blue luminescence bleeding off the corrupted western sky. That horizontal seam of light above the ruins of Seattle pulsed once, a slow cardiac rhythm belonging to something enormous and indifferent, and it threw just enough illumination to show Aaron that her expression hadn't changed since she'd said your story doesn't add up.
She was still waiting.
Kael and Rourke were twenty meters back, dragging the jackal carcasses off the trail with the focused, pragmatic energy of men who'd learned not to waste adrenaline on questions. Lara sat on a flat stone near the stream's edge, her canvas-slung arm braced against her knee, watching Aaron with a different quality of attention—worried, not predatory. The distance between the two women felt structural, like a load-bearing wall.
Aaron's right palm throbbed. The torn scab had crusted over again during the fight, but the cold was working at it, and he could feel the slow, specific sting of a wound deciding whether to stay closed. He let the sensation anchor him. Pain was useful data. Pain kept the performance honest.
The Null Phone sat in his vest pocket like a coal.
He'd felt it during the crossing—that faint, persistent warmth that had no business radiating from a device with a dead battery and a white, unresponsive screen. He felt it now. Not hot enough to burn, just present enough to remind him it was there, like a colleague tapping a pen against a desk. Patient. Waiting for him to stop stalling.
Okay, he thought. Options.
Denial was off the table. He'd seen her clock the knife throw. She'd watched his hand, not the blade—that was the tell. Anyone watching the blade was watching the spectacle. Watching the hand meant she was cataloguing technique, and technique told her the release was wrong, that the hesitation was manufactured, that the man standing in front of her had done this before and was pretending he hadn't.
Aggression would only confirm the calculation. Deflection had a shelf life, and he'd already burned through most of it in the river.
Which left the oldest play in the manual. Give her something real enough to taste, hollow enough to digest.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, and let his shoulders drop by a precise, calibrated increment—not the collapse of someone caught, but the release of someone who'd decided to stop carrying something heavy. He watched her register it. The micro-shift in her posture was almost imperceptible: weight redistributed fractionally toward her front foot. Interest, not triumph. She wanted the truth, not a surrender.
Good. He could work with that.
"All right." He kept his voice low, flat, the conversational register of a man conceding a minor point at a budget meeting. "I have a bit of system lore."
She said nothing. The seam of light above Seattle pulsed again.
"Pre-Collapse," he continued, "there were data-mining forums. Tech communities, mostly. People who'd gotten early access to system documentation—field reports, anomaly logs, the kind of dry technical manuals that nobody reads unless they're very bored or very paranoid." He paused, let the shrug happen. Casual. Practiced. A man slightly embarrassed by a niche hobby, not a man managing a classified file. "I was both. You spend enough time in those threads, you start picking up vocabulary. Terminology. The way the system categorizes things."
The word ambient mana resonance sat between them like a body neither of them had acknowledged yet.
He watched her process it. Her chin hadn't moved. Her breathing pattern was unchanged—steady, measured, the respiration of someone who ran long distances and had learned to treat oxygen as a resource. But there was a stillness in her that hadn't been there a moment ago, the particular stillness of a mind sorting incoming information against an existing model, checking for inconsistencies, finding fewer than expected.
That's the trick, he thought. Half-truths have texture. Lies are too smooth.
He let the silence stretch for exactly two seconds—long enough to feel honest, short enough to avoid looking like he was waiting to be believed—and then he looked back toward the treeline where the jackals had come from, as though the conversation was already behind him and the next threat was the only thing worth thinking about.
The words hung in the air between them, his explanation complete, awaiting her reaction.
The lie landed in the space between them like a stone dropped in still water.
Maya didn't move. She was still crouched at the edge of the stream bank, one knee pressed into the mud, the other boot planted on a root. The position looked casual. It wasn't. Aaron had been watching her long enough to know that Maya didn't have casual positions—she had tactical ones that merely resembled casual.
She was reading him. He could feel it the way you feel a draft from a window you can't find.
"Data-mining forums," she said.
"Pre-Collapse. There were whole communities dedicated to—"
"I heard you the first time."
She stood. Not quickly, not dramatically. Just a smooth, unhurried extension of her legs that put her at full height, and suddenly the three feet of air between them felt like considerably less. Her eyes—dark, very still—moved across his face in a pattern that wasn't casual curiosity. It was inventory. She was cataloguing something, filing it away, deciding what to do with it later.
She doesn't believe a word of it.
He'd known she wouldn't. The story was plausible enough to work on Kael, maybe even on Rourke if the man was tired enough. But Maya tracked things for a living. Tracks in mud. Tracks in behavior. The inconsistencies in his story probably lit up for her the same way a broken branch flagged a trail.
The question was what she was going to do about it.
She turned away from him, facing the dark treeline on the far bank. Her hand moved to the strap of her pack—not adjusting it, just touching it, the way some people touch a doorframe before they step through. A small, private ritual.
"You know," she said, her voice dropping to something that wouldn't carry more than two meters, "I've been in the field long enough to know that when someone explains too much, they're usually explaining around something."
Aaron said nothing. Silence was technically a denial.
"I'm not interested in what you're hiding." She glanced back at him, and there was nothing warm in it, but nothing hostile either. Purely operational. "I'm interested in what it's worth."
There it is.
The Null Phone pressed against his ribs through the vest, still faintly warm. He kept his weight even across both feet.
"Worth," he repeated.
"I'm going to be very direct with you, Blackwell, because I find it saves time." She turned fully now, facing him, arms loose at her sides. The posture of someone who had already run the calculation and arrived at a number. "Whatever you know—forums, manuals, whatever story you want to dress it up in—it's more than the rest of this group put together. You knew what that node was doing before it collapsed. You knew where to position yourself." A pause, precisely weighted. "I noticed."
The stream murmured between the rocks below. Somewhere upstream, something splashed once and went quiet.
"So here's what I'm offering," she continued. "You keep your story. I don't say a word to Lara, or Kael, or anyone else about the knife, the terminology, any of it. Your cover stays intact." She let that sit for exactly one second. "In exchange, you help me find something."
Aaron waited.
"Silverthread Moss." She said it the way you say a name you've been carrying for a long time. "It's a medicinal herb cluster—rare, specific growing conditions, extremely specific. I've been tracking a viable location for three weeks. I need it for a synthesis I can't complete without it." The operational flatness in her voice didn't waver, but something behind it did—a hairline tension in the way she held her jaw, the faint compression at the corners of her mouth. This mattered to her. She was working hard not to show how much. "The problem is the terrain around the known location is complicated. Hazardous in ways that match the kind of patterns you seem to know something about."
Spawn nexus. Has to be.
The thought arrived fully formed and immediately started generating implications he didn't have time to chase right now.
"You want me to use my 'lore,'" he said carefully, "to navigate whatever's sitting on top of your herb cluster."
"I want you to make the route viable." She held his gaze without blinking. "I don't need you to explain how you know what you know. I don't need the story to be consistent. I just need the knowledge to be functional." A breath, measured and deliberate. "Those are my terms."
She didn't add anything. Didn't soften it or harden it. Just let it exist in the cold night air between them, a transaction laid out on an invisible table, waiting for him to decide whether to sit down.
The stream kept moving. The darkness beyond the treeline stayed dark.
Maya's expression gave him nothing—a mask of cool expectation, the bargain fully assembled, the next move entirely his.