The emergency absence procedures were clear enough that Julius Dravenholm’s signature on the message made the bureaucratic process shorter than it would have been otherwise.

What was unusual was that the message had arrived directly to the new recruit rather than to Vehn, which was not how the procedures were supposed to work, and Vehn noted this without commenting on it.

’Maybe the kid was so good with the bureaucratic stuff that the castle found him more reliable?’ Vehn thought with a new worry of losing his job soon.

"How many."

"Whoever can move now."

Vehn ran through the inventory he ran when calculating what the sector could release without losing the coverage it needed to function.

"Twelve," he said.

"Twelve," Ren agreed.

He went to gather them.

Outside, the new made tower kept drawing on the plain’s poor territory’s mana, and the territory kept being quiet in the way things were quiet when they were waiting without any particular urgency about it; when the mutants they were waiting for were certain to arrive at some point.

Ren noticed it on the way out, the combination of the empty territory and the message from the castle, and thought they were too coincidental to be coincidental. He had enough experience with things that lined up that neatly to know that thought was worth trusting.

♢♢♢♢

Carver’s owl had the wingspan of a Gold-rank beast, thirty meters, large enough that size had stopped being a consideration when carrying passengers and became instead a question about aerodynamically inconvenient cargo.

Ren had no cargo to speak of outside his internal space, so he sat on the back with the mild discomfort of the first few minutes on a flight beast that wasn’t his own, while his body negotiated the particular movement of something else’s rhythm. The ground passed below them at the speed of urgency without quite becoming the blur that maximum speed produced.

He split his attention between the landscape and the thread of thought the message had started, which had stayed active since the moment he’d read it.

A summons to the castle.

If the emergency was another section of the wall under pressure, the logical response was to route directly to the sector that needed it. The wall already had protocols for exactly that; people with relevant capability were integrated into whatever sector required them, coordination in site managed the rest from there.

There was no reason for the intermediate step of the castle unless what the castle needed to tell him wasn’t only about the wall.

Which meant the real emergency might not be the wall at all.

Or it was the wall in a form that required prior information the wall itself didn’t have, which was a different shape of problem.

Carver had been watching the horizon with the concentration of someone managing a flight beast at urgent transit speed. Without turning: "Do you know why they’re calling us?"

"Not yet," Ren said.

Carver gave the nod of someone accepting that answer as complete, having learned that "not yet" from Red Pathfinder came with a "figured it out" on the other side within a reasonable interval.

But the wait didn’t do Carver much good this time.

The castle separated the twelve soldiers from Ren with the efficiency of a protocol designed for exactly that kind of division; each person directed toward one of the various waiting rooms in the military coordination wing, and Red Pathfinder guided at the end toward a different direction that his escort didn’t describe.

Ren followed without asking, because the direction was readable enough for someone who knew the castle’s layout.

The private audience rooms.

The corridor had the silence those corridors had when they were being used for conversations that didn’t require witnesses, not only because there was anything secret, but also because some discussions ran more efficiently without the ambient texture of people moving through adjacent spaces.

♢♢♢♢

The group waiting inside was larger than he’d expected.

Selphira in the position she took when she had already assumed control of a meeting before the meeting officially started. Julius was standing against the wall with the posture of someone who had transferred the available information to everyone present and was waiting for them to finish processing it so the group could move to the next step.

Liora, who looked at Ren when he came in, had the expression she had when she was containing something she preferred not to contain but had decided containing it was the right call for this specific moment.

Lin with the calm of someone who had received a mission and was carrying it with that serenity she had for things already decided, where the decision itself had used up whatever uncertainty there was to spend.

Mayo, who raised a hand in greeting with the energy of someone doing it because that was their way of demonstrating what she called positive presence.

The six usual guards.

Ren read them automatically, the mana assessment running in the background the way it always did. Gold 3, all six. Not double tamers, which was a significant difference between them and combat tamers at equivalent rank like Victor or Selphira, but Gold 3 without exception, which was not nothing.

The earrings he had designed for Liora were still active in their usual positions, the runes doing what they had been made to do still perfectly.

The only beast in the room below Gold 2 was his own Mantis, which had just reached Gold 1 that week. Everything else was Gold 2 or higher, except Lin’s crane, which the thousand-day method had brought from Bronze to the practical equivalent of high Silver in terms of output, though Lin was a double tamer and the panther was high Gold as well, and Lin without either beast was still Lin, which was a category that didn’t need further qualification.

Selphira skipped the preamble.

"The corruption is moving away from us on all sides, pulling back toward the ruins," she said, in the voice she had when the information was enough and the context didn’t change what it meant. "Not toward the wall... The wall is quiet because the movement is outside, going the other direction." She paused. "We believe it’s reached some critical mass it needed for its next move and the ruins are where that move happens."

Ren processed it.

"Sirius," he said.

"Sirius," Selphira confirmed with a nod.

She didn’t add anything to that, because there was nothing to add that the name hadn’t already said.

The corrupted hearts from Orion’s collection came to Ren’s mind. The count that had pointed toward a seventh door, an undiscovered ruin. The timeline that had always been pointing somewhere, even when the specific destination wasn’t visible yet.

Julius moved into the position of someone shifting from listening to speaking.

"We can’t send the strongest team the way we did last time," he said. "If it’s a trap and we empty the defensive perimeter here, we could find the wall under attack while the main group is outside... The last expedition barely made it back in time; we don’t have better odds now."

Ren nodded. The logic was sound and it was the correct way to protect what mattered.

"But what you have here," Julius continued, "is a small, fast team that takes your orders well and has the mobility and experience to get people out of difficult situations in any terrain configuration... Including underground."

Ren looked at the group.

Liora with the spirit fire and the Bashe, capable of fusing and producing power comparable to his own for now, steady under pressure and experienced in exactly the kind of tight coordination that underground extraction required.

Lin: fast, lethal, double-bonded. The panther giving her offensive power, the crane giving her speed and options for extraction, and Lin herself giving both of them a direction in a pinch they followed without hesitation.

The six guards with Gold 3 beasts and years of coordinated work between them, the kind of coordination that didn’t need to be rebuilt in the field because it already existed.

Mayo with the Celestial Cloud Bird, useful for transport and for escape, and that particular capability she had of appearing exactly where something needed to be done and doing it before anyone asked.

A compact extraction team built for one purpose: get Ren, Liora, and Lin into the ruins and get Sirius out before Selphira’s instinct about the timing proved correct the hard way.

"We’re calling other soldiers from your sector," Julius said, "so we don’t ruin your facade by calling only you. The bureaucratic position changes will be processed slowly for them, which is much worse than usual... But quickly for your area as receivers. So no one in your section will notice anything immediately."

Ren understood the mechanics.

Then he opened his mouth still.

Selphira spoke before he could finish opening it.

"Luna doesn’t know," she said. Not as an apology... As a fact. "We spoke with Larissa. We all agreed."

Ren closed his mouth.

Julius added the context Selphira had left implicit.

"The situation concerns her father. If she knows you’re going and why, she’ll want to go too. And if she goes, there’s a real higher probability that at the critical moment she won’t retreat when it’s necessary to retreat. It’s better that she contributes her power to the defense."