The morning sun beat down without mercy, turning the sand into a shimmering gold expanse that stretched endlessly in every direction.

I started walking toward the Guardian truck alone, boots crunching loudly in the unnatural silence. The others hadn’t noticed yet.

"Bram." Sherry fell in beside me, matching my pace. Her hair was still messy from sleep, but her eyes were sharp and alert. Soldiers didn’t sleep this late unless something had gone very wrong inside.

The armored truck loomed larger as we approached. It was a beast, three times the size of our vehicles, heavy plating scarred and dusty, its dark windows reflecting our distorted images back at us like warped ghosts.

"I’m not looking very good," Sherry muttered, catching her own reflection.

I pressed my ear against the warming metal.

A faint wet scratching from within. Irregular. Desperate. The specific sound of something that had forgotten what doors were for and was trying anyway.

"Hear that?" I said.

"Yes," Sherry said.

We stepped back.

"General Sinn," I called. "You need to see this."

He was standing with the students near the other vehicles. At my voice, he turned and walked over, the entire remaining team trailing behind him like iron filings to a magnet. Because that was what people did when a leader moved toward something.

Sinn pressed his own ear to the truck, listening. His scarred face remained impassive, but I saw the subtle tightening of his jaw. He tried the door handle.

"No locks," he said. Then looked at me. "Are we safe?"

"They can’t open those doors," I said. "They’ve lost the cognition for it."

Sinn sat down in the sand beside the tire. He just sat there.

He had known those men. That was clear in how he was processing it, the specific weight of someone doing an internal count of faces and coming up with the number. These were not abstract casualties. He had probably served with some of them for years.

The walls had lied to them. Not maliciously, perhaps. But completely. The reality of the plain had been kept on the other side of a barrier for so long that even the soldiers sent outside it had no real framework for what it was.

We stood around him and nobody spoke. Then a punch broke the silence.

I turned. Owen was on the ground and Oddo was standing over him, throwing punches with the specific controlled fury of someone who has been holding something since the night before and has decided this is the moment.

"Guys—" Harmione started.

Nobody moved to intervene immediately. Code stood a few steps back, smiling faintly, as if watching violence was an interesting art form.

I stepped in fast, grabbing Oddo’s powerful arms from behind. He was stronger than he looked, corded muscle shifting like steel cables under my grip. He kept swinging even while restrained, landing two more brutal hits on Owen’s face before Owen managed to roll sideways and scramble out of range.

"Bro," I called to Code.

Code just smiled wider, clearly entertained.

Owen pushed himself up, blood on his split lip, those glowing red eyes cold. He lined up a shot and discharged.

It missed by a distance that didn’t look like a miss. The charge hit Sinn’s lead car clean on the engine housing. The car’s electronics died with a sound I felt more than heard.

Sinn rose slowly from the sand.

"What the hell is wrong with you." His voice wasn’t a question, it was thunder.

"He did it!" Oddo snarled, words shaking with rage. "Last night. The Guardians. He’s responsible. I saw him open the fucking door—"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Owen said calmly, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. The same flat smile.

"I saw him—"

"Enough." Sinn’s command cut through like a blade. "People died last night. Good men. Everyone here is grieving. We do not turn on each other. We are soldiers. We were sent on a mission, and we are going to complete it. I need every one of you functional. Understood?"

The fury in Oddo’s face found somewhere to go that wasn’t Owen’s face. Not gone. Filed.

"Understood," we said.

I had seen Owen take Speed down last night. One deliberate discharge, one body on the ground, one retreat without looking back.

Oddo had seen something too. Whether Sinn believed it or not was a separate question. Whether it was intentional was a question I hadn’t answered yet but was not going to stop carrying.

"We leave the truck," Sinn said, gesturing at the Guardian vehicle and the sounds still coming from inside it. "We move now."

We went back to the cars.

Mercury’s engine turned over. The car ahead us started.

Sinn’s car did not. He was already out, walking toward us, before we had processed the silence where his engine should have been.

Mercury lowered the window.

"Problem," Sinn said.

We got out.

"This car won’t start." He gestured at his dead vehicle.

Harmione was already solving it out loud.

"Two cars can carry everyone—"

"That’s not the issue," Sinn said. He had clearly thought about the redistribution before he called it a problem.

"Challenge is that car had the only pre-loaded infected-free route to the Fallen City in its computer." He paused. "And the truck had the infected detectors."

I looked at Owen, split lip, mild expression.

The discharge that had killed Sinn’s navigation system had hit with the accuracy of someone who wasn’t missing. It had hit exactly what it needed to hit to make the next part of the mission significantly more dangerous.

Was it a miss, I thought.

I still couldn’t tell.

"So what do we do?" Harmione asked.

Sinn looked at her. Then at the plain stretching ahead of us, flat and indifferent in every direction.

Then he pointed at the Guardian truck. The sounds still coming from inside it.

"The other maps and the detectors are in there," he said.

Nobody said the obvious thing out loud. The obvious thing was that someone was going to have to go in.