The note was on the doorstep when Alistair went to draw the bolt for the night.

There was no bird, no runner, and no scan-disturbance at the perimeter. Someone had walked up to the base door through open territory without being read, and that should not have been possible.

He knelt slowly. The note was folded once, plain paper, no seal, and no handwriting on the outside.

After a moment, he picked it up and brought it inside, closing the door without bolting it. Bolting it now would tell anyone watching that he had read it before he had read it.

Due looked up from the table, his hands stopping over a stack of registration drafts. Elara was already at the window, blade unbuckled but kept close.

Silas stood in the corner, where he always stood.

"What is it?" asked Due, his usual lazy tone gone.

"A note left on the step. It is unsigned, which is the first problem."

The room stilled, and even Due, who almost always had something stupid to say in a silence like this, kept his mouth shut.

Alistair set the note on the table and unfolded it. The handwriting was small and careful, the kind that belonged to someone trained to write reports.

Sun Harvest. There are six of them. They are coming to disrupt the ritual, not the registration. They will arrive within hours.

Alistair’s eyes widened, and he read it twice, his grip tightening until the edges creased.

"Six men, sent at us," said Silas.

"Is it him, the one we don’t name?" Elara asked.

Hearing this, Alistair shook his head. The handwriting was wrong, and the unsigned line was wrong altogether. Whoever wrote it knew Sun Harvest was about to be hit, and had wanted them to know without revealing themselves.

"It is not him, his hand looks nothing like this."

"Then who would warn us?" Due asked, frowning.

"I do not know, and we do not have time to figure it out. Hours, not days, so we move now."

"It is the timing Caldren likes," Elara said quietly, her arms crossed in the shape they went into when she recognized her father’s hand. "Three days before the ritual is the window he used on the merchant faction."

"Six is his number for cells, too," Due added, adjusting his collar. He was already standing. "If they are within hours, the perimeter will not hold them, and we meet them outside instead."

Silas was at the door before Alistair finished, his Absence already deeper than usual. "I will scout the western approach, since the eastern goes through the settlements, and they want the ritual disrupted, not the region inflamed."

"Go now."

He went.

"Elara, with me on the ridge. Due, an obligation field, forty meters out, caught before they engage."

"How thick?"

"As thick as you can pull, without compounding past tonight."

Due nodded. "The ceiling is fine, since I have been managing low since last week."

Elara was at her sword before Alistair told her she would need it.

***

The western perimeter opened onto the Oasis of Grain’s flat fields, ground that hides nothing in daylight and everything in the dark.

Due took his position forty meters out, Alistair the ridge’s high ground, Elara the lower, ten meters off his right shoulder.

Silas surfaced on the ridge five minutes later, paler already.

"Six men, running quietly and trained. Two with Characteristics suppressed, four without. Two hundred meters out, closing slow."

"Their objective?"

"Three are carrying inscribed materials, disruption-grade, designed to corrupt registration paperwork already written. They are not coming to kill, only to ruin the document before sunrise."

Alistair clicked his tongue.

’Of course,’ he thought. ’He cannot stop the ritual, so he will make sure the document it produces is corrupted before the Echelon ever reads it.’

"Take the two with Characteristics first, quiet, before the others know."

Silas was gone again.

The first sign of approach was a flicker in Due’s obligation field, a thread tightening at its eastern edge.

"Four bodies in the field, the other two are not in it yet."

At that moment, Silas’s two went down somewhere out in the dark, the way Silas’s targets always went down.

Seeing this, the four remaining moved instantly. They had not seen the Characteristics fall, however they had felt the pattern break, and they split into two pairs and broke from cover at speed.

Alistair drew his Rune Sword.

The first attacker reached him at a full sprint, a man with a short dark blade and the body language of someone who had been killing for a decade. He swung at Alistair’s neck, but the Equalizer matched him before the swing finished.

Alistair stepped inside the arc and drove his sword across the man’s wrist. The hand opened, the blade fell, and his second motion took the man through the shoulder.

The second was already there, a woman with two short blades. She came at his right side, the side his miscalibration cost him a half-beat on, and her first blade caught him along the forearm before his sword came across.

Blood ran hot down to his elbow, and Alistair clicked his tongue, frustration plain.

She pressed, two strikes, three, four, each one moving his weight a fraction further off-center. He gave ground for two strikes, then stopped entirely. He stepped into her on the fifth, closed the gap her style depended on, and drove his elbow into her sternum. She staggered, and his Rune Sword came up under her guard and ended it.

Across the ridge, Elara’s first attacker hit Due’s obligation field, and the field caught his left leg in a thread that locked his knee mid-stride. He went down sideways, and Elara’s blade was at his throat before he could roll.

The fourth was already clearing the field.

Due’s voice cut across the ridge, strained. "I cannot hold that one, since he is reading the threads, and he has trained against obligations before."

Alistair was already moving.

The fourth attacker was the largest of the six, heavy build, two-handed Rune-grade blade. He cleared Due’s field with a precision that suggested training against Due’s Characteristic specifically, which was Caldren’s hand more clearly than anything else.

The first exchange was bone-jarring. Alistair caught the blade on his sword, the impact running down through his shoulder, and the man pressed instantly into a second strike from a different angle.

Alistair went sideways off the ridge, landed half on his feet, and rolled into a crouch with his sword up.

The man followed without hurry, Edgeform Class B at minimum. Regardless, he was alone now, and Alistair was not.

Silas surfaced behind the man without warning, and the Dark Interval moved through him for one second, only one, and that was enough. The man’s coordination broke for half a step, and it was all Alistair needed. He came up under the blade and drove his Rune Sword through the man’s side under the rib.

The man fell, and the ridge went quiet.

Silas was on his knees in the grass, paler than Alistair had ever seen him, and Elara was at his side with a flask before anyone told her to be. Due came up the slope slowly, his own face drained. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"All six are down."

"Six down," confirmed Alistair. He pulled the leather case from inside the largest attacker’s coat. Disruption-grade, and he did not open it.

"He is not here, the man himself."

"He does not have to be, since his people are."

Alistair looked back at the territory, where the candle was still burning in the eastern window. Nobody knew this had happened, and nobody, by morning, would know.

He folded the case into his coat alongside the unsigned note.

"We do not tell anyone, not before sunrise."

"Not before sunrise," Due agreed.

Silas, from the ground, spoke quietly. "Whoever sent that note saved the ritual tonight."

"We owe them," replied Alistair. "However, we still do not know who they are, and that is the second problem."

The candle in the eastern window flickered once on its own, and went out.