[Volume 2: The Sun’s Expedition]

The sun rose over the Oasis of Grain the same way it had every morning since Alistair was old enough to tell one sunrise from another. He noticed the color of this one, not because the color was different, but because he could see it again.

That was still new enough to feel like a trick someone was about to take back.

Due was already at the long table when Alistair walked in. The morning dispatch lay open in front of him, the seal broken cleanly, the corners weighted down with a cup on one side and a knife on the other. He did not look up.

"You are early," said Due.

"You are earlier," Alistair replied.

"I have not been sleeping well, and I doubt that will be changing anytime soon."

"Neither have I, so it seems like we are going to have a long career together."

Due slid the dispatch across the table without being asked.

The first half was routine. Movement of registered factions through the central provinces, a storm advisory off the western coast, and a grain-ledger correction long overdue from the Sovereign Record. None of it would have made anyone reach for a knife.

However, the second half would.

Alistair read the line twice. The Shadow of Former Glory was no longer reported at his last known position. The dispatch did not say where the Shadow had gone, only that the position was vacated, and that the next continental cycle would update accordingly, in the calm administrative voice the Sovereign Record used for everything from missing grain shipments to unsealed Glory-tier figures.

Below that line, a smaller item. The Sunborne were active again across three provinces, not the way they had been active in spring as a rumor that surfaced and dropped back under. The pattern suggested coordination.

’He moved,’ thought Alistair. ’And the Sunborne moved with him.’

He did not say it aloud.

Due was watching him without seeming to be watching him, which was the way Due watched everything that mattered.

"You saw it," said Alistair.

"I read it three times, and the third time I read it I started counting the seasons since I last had a quiet morning," Due replied. "I am at sixteen, in case you were curious."

"And what do you think?"

"I think nothing in the rest of the page is going to feel important for a while, and I think this house is going to feel smaller before the day is done."

Alistair set the dispatch down. The cup pinned one corner, the knife pinned the other.

Elara came in a few minutes later. She had not slept either by the look of her, however, she did not say so. She poured tea from the iron stove and sat on the bench against the wall. She did not ask for the dispatch, since she would read it when Due was finished with it, which was the order of things in this house now.

Silas came in last. He did not sit. Instead, he went to the cupboard, took a heel of dry bread, leaned against the door frame, and ate it slowly without speaking.

That was Sun Harvest at full strength on its first registered morning, four people in a room that had been built for twenty.

"I am walking the perimeter," said Alistair.

"You did that last night," Due replied.

"I am doing it again, since the page on this table just made the night air feel different."

Due did not argue. He had stopped arguing about perimeters somewhere around the fortieth Chapter of their acquaintance, if Alistair was counting honestly, which he sometimes was.

* * *

The mark was where they had left it. It sat low on a flat slab of pale stone at the eastern edge of the territory Sun Harvest now held under formal registration. The slab had been there longer than anyone in the Oasis could remember, the kind of slab that should have weathered down to a stump by now. The carving on its face had not weathered at all.

Alistair stood in front of it for a long time without moving.

He had checked the mark three times since they had found it at the closing of the registration ritual. Each time, the Equalizer’s scan came back empty. Empty the way readings always come back empty when the thing being read is inert, the kind of empty that meant whoever had cut the stone was no longer in any relationship with what they had cut.

Regardless, he ran the scan again.

The scan did not come back empty.

Alistair’s eyes widened. The reading was faint, the faintest the Equalizer could return without rounding down to silence, however, it was not nothing.

’Active,’ he thought.

He took a step back without intending to. Seeing this, he forced himself still, since moving too quickly was what someone on the other end of a listening device would want to see.

The mark did not respond. It did not pulse, it did not warm, it did not do any of the obvious things a thing could do to announce it was paying attention. It sat in the morning light exactly the way it had looked the previous evening, and the Equalizer’s reading held.

Alistair held the scan longer than he ordinarily would, since he wanted the chance to discover it was a miscalibration. He had been miscalibrating in small odd ways since the Domain Mode incident at the founding, in ways the Equalizer no longer corrected on its own.

The reading held, and Alistair was honestly unsettled.

It was not a miscalibration. He ran the scan again from a slightly different angle, and the reading was still there, faint and low and steady.

The faintness was the part that mattered, since it told him the carving was not radiating its own signature, which is what an active object usually does when left charged. The faintness was the signature of something turned the other direction.

’It is not just sitting here,’ he thought. ’It is listening.’

Alistair clicked his tongue and stayed where he was a moment longer. Following that, he turned and walked back toward the base without hurrying, by the same path he had come.

By the time he reached the door he had decided three things. He was bringing the others to the mark before the morning was much older, he was not touching it, and whoever had cut the stone was not finished with whatever they had been doing.

The door of the base was already open when he came up the path. Due was standing inside the doorway with his arms crossed, watching him approach with the look of a man who already knew the answer.

"Tell me it was nothing," said Due.

"It was not nothing, and whoever cut that stone is still on the other end of it."

Due’s jaw tightened. He did not sigh, and he did not adjust his collar. Instead, he just closed his eyes for the length of one held breath and opened them again, and Alistair understood, for the first time on this very long morning, that the small thing he had felt at the slab was a thing that was going to grow before the sun was fully up.