Chapter 17: Caden Makes His Offer

Day Thirteen arrived with fog.

Not the dramatic cinematic kind that rolled through valleys and caught the light—just a flat, gray, nothing fog that sat on the forest like wet cotton and made everything twenty meters away look like a suggestion. Kai noticed it when he woke up and went back to sleep, because fog didn't require a response, and he was still learning the difference between things that required responses and things that simply were.

He was awake for real by 0620, which he knew because his wrist display told him and also because Maren was already gone from her sleep position and the fire had been fed, which meant she had been up for at least an hour. He found her at the camp's eastern edge with her terrain map unfolded across her knees, marking something in the corner with the stub of a pencil she'd been rationing since Day One.