The QH operators on the northeast line died between two fires.
The barricade in front. The forest behind. Whoever was out there in the dark kept shooting, and their aim was better than anything River's fighters had managed. Bolts came out of the tree line in pairs, hitting operators in the back, in the legs, dropping them mid-charge. The QH third wave, which had been driving through the barricade's center with enough force to crack it open, stuttered. Operators turned. Some faced the barricade. Some faced the trees. None of them could face both.
River fired Kira's crossbow into the confusion. Hit a man's shoulder. Reloaded. Fired. Hit nothing. Reloaded.
Beside her, Pell was still shooting. His face hadn't changed. Whatever had replaced the panic was still running him, mechanical and precise, and she wondered if that was what shock looked like from the outside.
The QH line fractured.
Not all at once. The ones closest to the barricade kept pushing. They had nowhere else to go. But the ones further back, the reserves who'd been feeding the third wave, broke formation. They scattered into the trees, trying to get away from the crossbow bolts that came from directions they hadn't planned for.
Marcus's voice, from behind: "They're breaking! Hold the line! Don't pursue!"
Cal heard it. She could hear him relaying the order down the left flank. "Hold! Hold position!"
The barricade held.
The last QH operators at the center fell back through the gap they'd made in the log wall. One of them didn't make it. He tripped over the body of the man River had stabbed and went down on his hands and three defenders hit him from different angles and he stopped moving.
River stood behind the barricade with blood on her hands and blood on Kira's crossbow and the taste of copper still in her mouth. She was breathing in a way that didn't feel like breathing, shallow rapid pulls that weren't getting enough air, and she made herself stop. Made herself take one full breath. Hold it. Let it go.
The tree line went quiet.
Not silence. The quiet that comes after something loud, when the ears are still ringing and the forest is full of wounded people trying to crawl and the barricade is full of wounded people trying not to scream.
"Report," she called. Her voice sounded wrong. Too high. She cleared her throat. "Report."
"Left flank holding." Cal. Alive. "Two wounded. Nobody down."
"Right flank." Dae's voice, strained. "Goss is unconscious. We lost Marden. And the woman from the outer settlement, the one with the—" He stopped. "She's dead."
Three dead on the northeast barricade. Kira. Marden. The woman whose name Dae couldn't finish saying.
River looked at the bodies. At the defenders who were sitting against the logs with their heads down, gasping, bleeding, holding weapons they were too exhausted to lift. At Pell, who had set down his crossbow and was staring at his hands.
"Pell," she said. "Look at me."
He looked at her.
"You did good. Stay here. Reload."
He picked up the crossbow. He reloaded. His hands moved the way hands move when the brain has stopped giving input and the muscles are running on the last instruction they received.
She turned to find Marcus.
---
He was on the ground.
Not on his crate. On the ground beside it, sitting with his back against the wood, his blanket pooled around his waist. Kai was kneeling next to him. Marcus's face was the color of wet ash.
"I'm fine," Marcus said.
"You fell off the crate," Kai said.
"I sat down fast. There's a difference." Marcus looked at River. His eyes were still clear, still reading, still the eyes of the intelligence officer who could see the battlefield from a cot. "The northeast axis is broken. Your mystery friends in the forest finished what the barricade started. But the south—"
The sound from the south answered him.
Not a distant crash this time. Close. Inside the compound. Wood giving way, a structure failing, followed by voices — Maria's, sharp and hard, and other voices that didn't belong to anyone River knew.
"The southern gate," River said.
"Go," Marcus said. "Kai stays with me. Take everyone you can spare from the northeast. The QH won't regroup on this axis for at least twenty minutes."
River looked at the barricade. At the exhausted defenders.
"Cal!" she called. "Dae! Everyone who can move, on me. South. Now."
---
The southern gate was open.
Not open — broken. The timber frame had been hit with something heavy, repeatedly, until the cross-brace split and the doors folded inward. QH operators were inside the compound. River counted eight, maybe ten, moving between buildings in pairs, coordinated, clearing structures the way trained fighters clear buildings.
Maria's group was pinned against the depot's eastern wall. Six defenders behind stacked crates, trading crossbow bolts with the operators who'd taken cover behind the meal hall's stone foundation. One of Maria's fighters was on the ground, not moving. Another was sitting against the wall with a bolt in her upper arm, still shooting with the other hand.
River came around the residential building at a run. Cal was three steps behind her. Dae and four others followed.
She didn't give an order. She raised Kira's crossbow and shot at the nearest QH operator.
Missed. The bolt hit the meal hall wall.
The operator turned. He saw her. He raised his weapon.
Cal's bolt hit him in the chest.
The man sat down. He sat down the same way the operator at the barricade had sat down, as if his legs had simply stopped accepting instructions, and he pressed both hands against the bolt in his sternum and he looked at it.
The compound became a killing floor.
Close range. Building to building. Bolts flying across spaces that were designed for children to play in and meals to be shared and community meetings to happen. A QH operator came around the corner of the medical facility and River shot him at five meters and didn't miss this time and she reloaded before his body finished falling.
The smell. Nine years of cooking and soap and children and sawdust, and now blood. The compound smelled like blood. Wood smoke from a fire that had started somewhere, one of the residential buildings, flames licking at the roof edge. Blood on the packed earth paths between buildings.
Maria broke from cover. She led her group in a push toward the southern gate, trying to close the breach, and the QH operators caught between Maria's group and River's group had nowhere to go.
It took four minutes.
Four minutes of fighting in the spaces between buildings, of bolts and blades and the sounds that people make when metal goes into them. A QH operator grabbed one of Maria's fighters by the throat and Cal hit the operator from behind with something River didn't see and the operator went down and Cal hit him again and then stood there breathing hard over a body that wasn't moving.
The last three operators broke for the gate. Two made it through. The third tripped on the broken timber and Dae put a bolt in his back.
Maria was at the gate. She was bleeding from a cut above her eye that ran blood down the left side of her face. She put her shoulder against the broken door and pushed it closed. It wouldn't hold. The cross-brace was split.
"Brace it," she said. "Anything heavy. Now."
People moved. Crates, logs, the heavy table from the meal hall. They stacked it against the broken gate and it held, barely, the kind of barricade that would stop a person but not a force.
The fire on the residential building was spreading.
River turned. The medical facility.
She ran.
---
The medical facility was intact. Dr. Cade was inside, crouched behind an overturned table with two evacuee patients and a crossbow he clearly didn't know how to use. The compound stores were on the back shelf, undisturbed.
"Marcus," River said. "He collapsed. Northeast barricade."
Cade set down the crossbow. He grabbed his bag. He went.
River stood in the medical facility. She could hear the fire crackling in the residential building. She could hear people shouting, organizing, trying to put it out. She could hear the forest around the compound, the wrong kind of quiet — not peaceful, just waiting.
She went outside.
The fire was dying. Two buildings over from the medical facility, a corner room on the ground floor. The crew Maria organized had it contained with bucket chains from the water system. The damage was structural but limited.
Thea Marsh's quarters. The corner room on the ground floor.
The room where Thea had been packing a bag.
River looked at the burning building. Noted it. Kept moving.
---
They found the mystery shooters at dawn.
Or rather, the mystery shooters found them. Seven people came out of the northeastern tree line with their hands visible, crossbows slung across their backs, moving with the careful posture of armed strangers approaching a compound full of twitchy defenders.
The one in front was a woman in her fifties. Short, weather-tanned, a scar that ran from her left ear to her jaw. She stopped twenty meters from the barricade.
"We're from the waystation," she called. "Mira sent us."
Mira. The woman at the outer settlement perimeter who'd recognized River's hands.
Maria came to the barricade. She looked at the woman. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again.
"Tomas," she said.
"Tomas didn't make it," the woman said. "I'm Sera. We were part of the four-person supply team. The QH took Tomas and Beck at the southern ford, two months ago. Lina and I escaped into the deep forest. We've been out there since, watching the QH stage, picking up what survivors we could."
Seven people. Lina and Sera from the missing supply team, plus five others — three from the outer settlement who'd refused to evacuate, two network runners who'd been caught between routes when the QH closed the perimeter.
Seven people with crossbows who'd spent two months learning the QH positions from the outside.
"You broke their line," River said.
Sera looked at her. At the blood on her hands, on her clothes, on the crossbow she was still carrying.
"We hit them from behind when we heard the assault begin. Figured if they were committing everything to the compound, their rear positions would be empty." Sera looked at the barricade. At the bodies. At the fire damage in the compound behind it. "Looks like they committed everything."
"Almost everything," Maria said.
---
River sat on the ground behind the northeast barricade.
She sat because her legs wouldn't hold her anymore. The fuel that had been running her body for the past five hours was gone and what replaced it was a heaviness in every muscle, every joint, every part of her that had been clenched and firing and not allowed to stop.
The dead were laid out along the barricade's inner wall. Five defenders. Kira. Marden. The woman from the outer settlement. A man named Collis who'd been at the southern gate. A teenager, not much older than Pell, who'd been fighting beside Maria when the QH breached the compound.
Five dead out of forty-six.
Twelve wounded, four seriously. Goss unconscious, the bolt removed from his leg by Cade. A woman with a punctured lung who Cade said might not make it to evening. Marcus on his cot with Kai beside him, conscious but gray, the exertion of calling tactical orders for two hours having cost him something that Cade's compounds couldn't easily repair.
The compound was damaged. One residential building partially burned. The southern gate broken. The archive building untouched, its vault intact, its twelve binders of evidence still on their shelves.
The QH northeast axis was broken. Sera's count, from what her people had seen: at least twenty QH operators dead or too wounded to fight. The remainder had scattered into the forest.
The southern axis had pulled back after losing the compound breach. Eight to ten operators, Maria estimated. Still out there. Still capable.
The eastern and northern axes had never fully engaged. They'd made probing attacks during the main assault and withdrawn when the northeast collapsed. Still intact. Still waiting.
River sat on the ground and she looked at the five bodies and she thought about Kira showing her how to reload a crossbow and about the teenager whose name she didn't know and about Collis who she'd never spoken to.
Cal sat down beside her. He didn't say anything. He put his back against the barricade and he sat there and his presence was the only thing that felt solid.
Darro appeared at the edge of the barricade. She'd been in the tree line for the past hour, running the perimeter with Sera's people, assessing the QH positions.
Her face was wrong.
River saw it. The set of her jaw. The way she was moving, fast, the way Darro moved when the information required it.
"The western axis," Darro said.
Her stomach dropped.
"Thirty-two operators. They never engaged the compound." Darro looked at her. "They went west. Into the forest. Following the evacuation column."
A hundred and forty-three people. Children. Families. Nessa leading. Fenno protecting. Renn carrying the satchel.
The plan had worked. They'd broken the Hand. The northeast axis had collapsed, the southern breach was repaired, the compound still stood.
But the Hand had never been five fingers.
It had been four fingers and a blade, and the blade had gone west, and it was following a hundred and forty-three people through the dark forest, and River was sitting on the ground with dead friends beside her and no fighters left to send.
Darro waited.
River stood up.
