Chapter 14: The River Crossing — Maren Shows Her Hand

The river announced itself twenty minutes before it arrived.

Kai heard it first—a low-frequency shift in the ambient sound of the forest, the kind of change that wasn't a sound so much as an absence of other sounds. Birds going quiet. The particular stillness that precedes something that doesn't care about birds.

He was seventy meters downslope from camp, checking the secondary water filter he'd rigged from a section of hollow branch and layered sediment, when the sound—or the not-sound—reached him. He held still for three seconds the way he held still in the warehouse when a section of shelving had started vibrating and he needed to locate the source before moving. Methodical. No wasted motion.