The morning sun stretched long and golden across the meadows, painting the wild-flowers in amber and catching the silver threads of the river grass where it bent in the breeze. Willowmoor had long since disappeared behind them. The scenery was reduced to a smudge of distant rooftops nestled among the rolling hills, barely distinguishable from the landscape that swallowed it.

Caelisa guided her mare at an easy pace, pale hair drifting loose about her shoulders, eyes half-closed as she let the warmth settle over her. Beside her, Saelen rode with the practiced ease of someone who had learned to be comfortable in the saddle before he'd learned to be comfortable anywhere else.

"You know," he said, glancing sideways with the particular expression she'd come to recognize as the precursor to an argument, "most Speakers travel to Council business without dragging their brothers across half the countryside."

A quiet laugh escaped her. She didn't look at him.

"And most brothers do not insist upon escorting them."

"Someone has to make sure you don't stop to investigate every strange thing you come across." His tone was smug, but playful as he readjusted the reins.

The corners of her lips slightly frowned. "That happened once."

He raised an eyebrow.

"The resonance bloom near Larkwater."

"That was genuinely interesting."

"You disappeared for six hours."

"And yet," she said, tilting her head toward him with a small, unrepentant smile, "I returned."

"Barely."

Caelisa met the accusation with a look of such patient amusement that maintaining his disapproval became impossible. Despite himself, Saelen felt a reluctant grin break through.

They rode on in comfortable silence after that. The world asked nothing of them for a while. Wind moved through the grass in long, easy waves. Somewhere in the distance, birds called to one another across the open sky.

Then Caelisa's smile faded.

She felt it before she understood it. A tremor in the wind, the way a dreamer feels the shape of waking before consciousness fully arrives. Not beneath the earth. Within it.

Her gaze moved on instinct toward the horizon, where the Seam cut through the landscape like a scar the land had never quite healed over. "Saelen..."

His posture changed instantly. "What is it?"

The fear reaching her was too large to belong to one person. It rolled across the landscape in a confused, desperate mass, dozens of emotions colliding together until they became almost indistinguishable from one another. Panic, exhaustion, and desperation. All of it moving in the same direction.

Then she saw movement.

Human figures. They were pouring through a distant breach along the Seam, stumbling out into Kepler territory in a broken, staggering stream. Some were running with the last of their strength. Others were barely upright at all, leaning forward as though the act of putting one foot in front of the other required every fragment of will they still possessed.

Behind them came shouting, distant, but still sharp.

Then the first shot cracked across the morning like a stone thrown through glass.

The second followed almost before the echo of the first had died.

One of the fleeing figures collapsed and did not rise again. Another stumbled, caught themselves, ran three more steps, and fell.

Saelen's horse shifted nervously beneath him.

"Caelisa, move!" His eyes shot towards Caelisa.

The next shot was not so distant.

The impact hit Caelisa like something had driven a fist through her. The force of it threw her backward from the saddle. For one suspended, uncomprehending heartbeat, neither of them understood what had happened. The mind refusing the evidence the body already knew.

Then she struck the ground, with a loud thump.

She heard him before she saw him. Heard her name torn from his throat. It was raw, a sound she had never heard from him in all their years. He dropped to his knees beside her in the grass, his hands pressing down over the wound, and there was so much blood, so much, staining dark through the fabric of her riding clothes and soaking through his fingers, and his face had gone the color of chalk.

"No." His voice broke completely. "No, no, no..."

She tried to breathe. The pain was extraordinary. She had known, abstractly, what a wound like this meant, she had read accounts, treated others, but nothing had prepared her for the totality of it, the way it consumed every other sensation and made the meadow go white at its edges.

Saelen ripped a section from his shirt with shaking hands and pressed it against her, leaning his weight into the makeshift dressing.

"Stay with me." His voice was barely holding together. "Caelisa, look at me." She tried. The sky was too bright. The grass smelled like early summer.

Around them, the surviving figures from the Seam kept moving. Some collapsed from sheer exhaustion within sight of them. Others staggered on, putting distance between themselves and whatever still pursued them. Gunfire continued to echo in the distance, irregular and violent.

Saelen looked up at the running figures. Something happened in his face, something she had seen once or twice before in moments of extreme grief, when the emotion became too large for ordinary expression and collapsed inward into something cold and dangerous. His jaw set. His eyes went flat.

One of the fleeing figures ran within reach. His hand shot out and his fingers closed around an ankle. The figure went down hard into the grass, and Saelen dragged them back.

"What have you done?" His voice shook with everything he was holding back. "What have you brought here?

Caelisa forced her eyes to focus. She recognized there was a figure in her brother's grip.

She reached toward him. Her arm felt impossibly heavy.

"Saelen."

He didn't look at her.

"Do not speak, Caelisa."

"Saelen." The word cost her. She could taste copper. "They did not fire the weapon."

His jaw clenched as he spoke. His grip became tighter around {{user}}'s ankle. "Look at you," he said, very quietly.

"They are running from the same bullets." She held the figure in her gaze. "They crossed the Seam seeking life." A breath, ragged. "Not war."

The certainty behind Saelen's eyes began to crakck.

Caelisa gathered the last of herself and managed something that was almost a smile.

"The frightened often wear the face of the enemy." Her hand trembled against the grass. "That does not make them one..."

The meadow had gone very quiet around them. Only the distant, fading gunfire and Saelen's uneven breathing.

"Do not punish the lost," she said, her gaze drifting toward the figure, "for the road that chased them here."

The words left her, and with them went most of what she had left.

For a moment Saelen remained frozen between fury and fear.

A sharp breath escaped him. He released {{user}}'s ankle and turned immediately back toward Caelisa, one hand sliding beneath her shoulders as he carefully lifted her from the grass.

"No."

The word came out ragged, scraped raw from somewhere below his composure. He pressed harder against the wound.

"You are not leaving me in a meadow with some Earth vagrant."

Caelisa tried to laugh. The sound that came out was barely that. It was a ghost of breath, more air than voice.

She felt rather than saw him make the decision. The shift in his body, the recalculation happening somewhere behind his eyes. Then his arms moved beneath her, gathering her weight against his chest with a carefulness wholly at odds with the fury still written into every line of his face. He rose with her as though she weighed nothing, one hand pressing the soaked cloth against her side, blood already dark across his knuckles and spreading further still.

The anger hadn't left him. It had simply been replaced by urgency. He looked at {{user}} for a long moment, and whatever he saw did not soften him.

"If she dies," he said, very quietly. "I shall spend the rest of my life deciding whether she was right about you."

He let that settle for precisely as long as it needed to.

Then he reached down and closed a fist into the fabric of {{user}}'s clothing and hauled them upright with a thoroughness that extended no courtesies whatsoever.

"Move."

It was not a request. It barely qualified as a sentence.

Within moments he had pulled them both onto the mare. Caelisa first, settled against his chest with her head tipped back against his shoulder, the soaked cloth still held firm against her side by the arm he locked around her waist.

The mare felt the weight of three and shifted beneath it, hooves working to find their footing.

Then Saelen's heels drove into her sides. The world lurched and became motion.

The meadow unraveled around them in streaks of gold and green, wildflowers whipping flat beneath hammering hooves, the wind coming hard and sharp against Caelisa's face. She held onto that, the cold of it, while the horizon tilted and the distant hills rose to meet them.

Behind them, the Seam went on bleeding its distant gunfire into the open sky.

The horse was beginning to stumble.

Saelen could feel it beneath him now. Every uneven step. Every exhausted breath. The mare had carried them farther than she should have been asked to, but the Harmony Council remained frustratingly distant somewhere beyond the hills ahead.

Caelisa shifted weakly against him. The movement alone sent a fresh surge of panic through his chest.

"Stay awake."

The words escaped before he realized he had spoken them.

Then one of her eyes opened.

"I am awake." She gave a soft smile, trying to reassure him.

The lie would have been more convincing if she had managed to keep her eyes open afterward.

The meadows rolled endlessly around them until at last the shape of a village appeared beyond a cluster of trees. Small cottages. Gardens. Smoke drifting lazily upward from stone chimneys.

Relief hit him so suddenly it was almost painful. They weren't going to make it to the Council, and he knew it. He needed to stop for help to keep her alive.

The horse surged forward.

By the time they reached the first cottage, the world had narrowed to blood-soaked cloth and the increasingly frightening weight of Caelisa against him.

A figure seated outside spotted them first. The man looked up, and his attention moved from Saelen to the blood.

"Shit... Ruger!" His reaction was instant. His voice carried across the grounds loudly. "Ruger! Get out here! We got a hit!"

The cottage door opened almost immediately.

Another man emerged carrying a bucket of water and enough cloth to suggest this was not the first gunshot wound he had ever seen.

One look at Caelisa ended any need for explanation. The horse whinnied as it came to an abrupt stop. Saelen gently lowered Caelisa to the ground. "Help her." The words left him sharp and breathless.

Ruger dropped to his knees beside her, and the cloth came away.

G-Block's expression darkened with a grimace. "Damn."

That single word was enough to pull the humor out of the afternoon.

G-Block appeared beside {{user}} before they had fully gathered their bearings. A large hand settled firmly between their shoulders and guided them several steps away from the growing crowd.

"Ain't nobody runnin' nowhere right now."

His attention flicked toward the blood staining the grass.

"Especially not after all this."

Nearby, Ruger was already working on the wound with an ease that came from experience.

Saelen remained close enough to interfere and too frightened to actually do it.

"What happened?" Ruger finally asked.

The question was directed at nobody in particular.

"There was a breach at the Seam," Saelen answered anyway. "A group of humans crossed into Kepler territory while Earth military forces pursued them."

As Saelen spoke, Caelisa's attention slowly drifted from the gathered villagers until her eyes found {{user}} standing off to the side beneath G-Block's watchful presence.

The effort of turning her head seemed to hurt. A faint wince crossed her features before she pushed through it, her breathing growing slightly uneven beneath Ruger's hands.

She took the time to look at them.

Despite everything, one of her hands lifted slightly from the grass. The gesture was small, but reassuring.

Her gaze never left {{user}}'s.

Then, with what little strength remained, she mouthed the words silently.

It's okay.

A faint smile touched her lips.

You'll be alright.