The first sound was wrong.
Not the crack of branches or the thud of boots that River expected. A whistle. Low, two-note, repeated three times from somewhere in the tree line sixty meters out. A coordination signal. The QH telling their people the clock was running.
River was behind the barricade with a crossbow she'd fired exactly four times in practice. The stock was smooth from someone else's hands. She fitted a bolt and kept her eyes on the tree line.
Beside her, a Sanctuary fighter named Goss was breathing through his mouth. Short, fast breaths. He'd been trained for perimeter duty, not for this. None of them had been trained for this.
"First wave is testing," Marcus called from behind. He was on his crate, fifteen meters back, wrapped in his blanket, voice pitched to carry without shouting. "Small groups. Four to six. They'll hit the center, pull back, hit the flanks. Don't chase. Don't waste bolts. Let them come to you."
The tree line moved.
Shapes between the trunks. Fast. Low. The QH came out of the dark in groups of four, spread wide, using the broken ground Dae had identified. They covered the sixty meters in seconds and then they were at the barricade's forward edge and the night stopped being quiet.
Crossbow bolts flew. Most missed. River heard them hit trees, hit earth, hit nothing. One found a target. A sound she'd never heard before, a wet impact followed by a human voice making a noise that wasn't a word.
The QH hit the barricade's center and bounced. They hadn't committed. Marcus was right. They were testing, probing for weak points, counting the defenders. Two groups of four, in and out in under a minute. They pulled back into the trees and left one of their own on the ground in front of the barricade, trying to crawl, a bolt through his thigh.
He made it ten meters before he stopped moving.
Goss was shaking beside her. His bolt was loaded but he hadn't fired.
"Breathe," River said. "Slow down. Breathe."
She didn't know if she was talking to him or to herself.
---
"Second wave is pressure," Marcus called. "This one's real. Hold the center. Do NOT let them flank left."
They came out of the trees in a line.
Not four. Not eight. Twenty or more, moving in staggered formation, each operator covering the one ahead. Professional. The kind of movement that came from drilling the same approach hundreds of times.
The barricade erupted. Every crossbow on the northeast line fired. Bolts cut through the dark. Some hit. Most didn't. The QH kept coming.
River fired.
The bolt went left. Wide. She'd pulled on the release, the nervous jerk of someone whose hands knew that pulling the trigger meant sending a piece of sharpened metal into another person's body.
She reloaded. Hands moving through the sequence Nessa had shown her. Slot the bolt. Draw the string. Lock. Shoulder. Aim.
She fired again.
The bolt hit a tree trunk a foot from the nearest operator.
"Ash and dust," she said.
She reloaded.
The QH reached the barricade. The first one came over the forward log wall and someone hit him with a hand axe. The sound it made. River would remember the sound it made for a long time.
The fighting at the barricade wasn't clean. It was bodies in the dark, grunting and swearing and swinging whatever they had at whatever was in front of them. A Sanctuary fighter took a knife across the forearm and kept swinging. Another one got hit in the shoulder with something and went down behind the log wall and didn't get back up.
Cal was twenty meters to her left. She could hear him, his voice cutting through the noise. Not words. Commands. Move. Down. Here. The kind of syllables that fighters use when there's no time for sentences.
She fired again. This time the bolt hit. She saw the impact, saw the operator stumble, grab at his side, keep moving for three more steps before his legs stopped working.
She'd hit someone.
She reloaded.
She fired.
The second wave pushed against the center of the barricade for four minutes. It felt like forty. Bodies pressed against the logs, weapons swinging, the smell of blood and sweat and the copper taste in her mouth that meant she'd bitten the inside of her cheek.
Then they pulled back.
Not defeated. Repositioning. The second wave retreated into the trees with their wounded and left the defenders gasping and bleeding and counting.
"Report," River called.
"Two down on the left." Dae's voice, from the flank position. "Goss took a cut to the leg. Kira's not getting up."
Kira. A woman River had spoken to once, yesterday, about crossbow technique.
"Center holding," another voice called. "Barely."
"Right flank clear," Cal said. "I'm down to six bolts."
River looked at the line. At the people crouched behind logs and earth mounds. At Goss, who was sitting against the barricade with blood running from a cut on his thigh, reloading his crossbow with hands that weren't shaking anymore because the shaking had been replaced by something else.
She looked at Marcus.
Marcus was on his crate. His face was blank. The operational mask. He was reading the tree line the way he used to read it from the other side.
"They'll commit the third wave fast," he said. "The second wave cost them more than they expected. If the other axes are on schedule, they'll push the third before the center recovers."
"How long," River said.
"Minutes. You need to be on that line."
She looked at the command position, at Marcus, at the gap between being the person who gave orders and the person who held the barricade.
She picked up a crossbow from the ground. Kira's. It was already loaded.
She went to the line.
---
The south hit while she was moving.
Not a whistle this time. A crash. Something heavy against the southern gate, the timber structure that had been designed to hold against raiders, not against a coordinated assault force.
Maria's voice, sharp and immediate, from somewhere behind the compound: "Southern approach! Six fighters to me! Now!"
Six fighters. Out of forty-six total. Pulled from the eastern and western positions, leaving gaps.
The Hand was closing.
River reached the center barricade and dropped behind the logs. She was between two Sanctuary fighters she didn't know. To her left, a man in his thirties with blood on his hands that wasn't his. To her right, a teenager, maybe sixteen, holding a crossbow like it was the only thing keeping him on this side of panic.
"Hold," River said. "Hold the center. They're going to push hard. Don't run."
The teenager looked at her. His mouth was open. He was breathing too fast.
"What's your name," she said.
"Pell."
"Pell. Point the crossbow at the tree line. When you see someone coming, pull the trigger. Then reload. That's the whole job."
Pell pointed the crossbow at the tree line. His hands were white on the stock.
The tree line moved.
---
The third wave was everything Marcus had said and worse.
They came in force. Thirty, maybe forty operators, the reserves committed along with the survivors of the first two waves, hitting the northeast barricade with the full weight of the primary axis.
The barricade shook. Bodies hit the log wall. Bolts flew in both directions now, the QH shooting back with short-range weapons, bolts and thrown blades coming over the barricade into the defenders' positions. Something hit the earth a foot from River's knee and buried itself to the shaft.
She fired Kira's crossbow. Hit someone. Reloaded. Fired. Missed. Reloaded.
The man to her left took a bolt through the hand. He screamed. He pulled the bolt out with his other hand and kept fighting because there was nothing else to do.
Pell fired. Missed. Reloaded like his hands were reading a manual his brain had already left behind. He fired again. River didn't see if he hit.
The barricade buckled at the center. A section of log wall gave way under the weight of bodies pushing against it and three QH operators came through the gap. The man with the pierced hand went down. Someone else stepped into the gap. Someone else went down.
River dropped the crossbow. She pulled the knife from her belt. The knife her grandmother had given her.
A QH operator came through the gap three meters from her. He was bigger than her, armored in salvage plate, a blade in each hand. He saw her and he adjusted his trajectory and he came straight at her.
She moved. Not with skill. With muscle memory drilled into her by a grandmother who'd known exactly what the world would demand. Low, angled, out of the direct line. The operator's blade cut air where her head had been.
She stabbed.
The knife went into the gap between his armor and his arm. She felt it go in. She felt resistance, then give, then warmth on her hand.
The operator grabbed her wrist. Squeezed. Pain shot up her arm. She twisted the knife and pulled and something tore and the warmth became a flood.
He let go of her wrist. He looked at the blood on his arm with the expression of someone who hadn't expected this to happen. He sat down. He didn't fall. He just sat down on the ground behind the barricade and pressed his hand against the wound and looked at her.
She stepped back.
Her hand was red.
She picked up the crossbow.
She reloaded.
---
"Southern gate is holding!" Maria's voice, distant, from the back of the compound. "But they're pushing! I need—"
The rest was lost in the noise. The northeast barricade was coming apart. The third wave wasn't pulling back. They'd committed everything and they were pushing through the gaps and the defenders were fighting hand to hand in the spaces between the logs.
Cal was somewhere on the left flank. She could hear him. Still fighting. Still moving.
Dae was on the right, holding the flank position with three fighters, keeping the QH from wrapping around the barricade's end.
Marcus was calling from behind, his voice getting lost in the noise. "They're overcommitting! The flanks are thin! Hit the flanks!"
She heard him. She couldn't respond. She was loading and firing and loading and firing and the crossbow was getting harder to draw because her arms were burning and her hands were slippery with blood that was someone else's and her body was running on something that wasn't energy, some reserve fuel that she didn't know she had.
Pell was still beside her. Still firing. His face was blank. The panic had gone somewhere else and left behind a machine that loaded and aimed and pulled.
An operator came over the wall directly in front of her. She shot him at three meters. The bolt went through his shoulder and he fell backward over the logs and she heard him hit the ground on the other side.
She reloaded.
Then she heard it.
A sound from behind the QH line. A thud. A body falling, but not at the barricade. Further out. In the trees.
She looked.
An operator at the edge of the tree line went down. Face forward, arms out, dropping the way people drop when they're hit from behind. Something in his back. A bolt. Coming from the wrong direction.
Another one. An operator turning, looking behind him, and then going down with something in his thigh. From behind. From the forest beyond the QH line.
The QH operators at the barricade heard it too. The ones still in the trees started looking back. Looking over their shoulders. The coordinated pressure on the barricade stuttered.
Another one went down in the trees. Then another.
Someone was in the forest behind the QH. Someone with crossbows, shooting into the QH line from outside the perimeter.
"Who the hell is that," Dae called from the right flank.
River stared into the dark trees where the QH operators were now caught between the barricade in front of them and something behind them.
She didn't know.
She had no idea who was out there in the forest, shooting Overseer operatives in the back, turning the QH's own assault formation into a kill box.
But whoever they were, they were changing everything.
