Chapter 30: Plan [2]

It wasn’t a joke at Kai’s expense anymore. Kai didn’t even flicker an eyelid. He just turned his head, slowly, and answered to the wrong name with the deliberate pace of a man peeling a sticker off a delicate surface. If it still bothered him, his face was a masterful liar.

But it was clear Kai didn’t like the nickname, and unlike with Cane, who he was still terrified of, Kai was more than willing to glare at Cassius for that.

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Back in his own sad patch of dirt, Cane found Yelena and Marcus locked in the exact same argument from the day before. The rest of their team was scattered in loose, noncommittal knots, waiting to see who would win so they knew who to follow. No one was actually picking a side.

"I’m scouting the southern approach," Cane announced to the air.

He didn’t offer a route, a partner, or a timeline. He just turned and walked toward the trees. Nobody stopped him. Nobody asked for details. Nobody even looked up long enough to register he was leaving. It landed as a small, quiet blow. Not because it was dangerous—it was, in fact, the entire point—but because it was a stark confirmation of how little anyone in this arena would miss him if he just didn’t come back.

He found a proctor near the southern checkpoint, a stocky, weather-beaten man holding a clipboard.

Cane made his pitch, keeping his voice reasonable, his explanation concise.

He told them about unusual movement past the ridge. A quiet patrol repositioning. A simple precaution, framed around the duskfangs. The proctor nodded along, actually listening, right up until Cane gave his name.

"Cane Valerian."

Something closed behind the man’s eyes. A switch flipped. The listening stopped. "We have the situation under control, student. Return to your designated area."

The dismissal was flat, practiced, identical to the one he’d gotten from the Wildwood Trial administrator.

It seemed the the proctor didn’t know about the attack. Of course he didn’t, if the Academy knew, they would have done something to stop this. But they didn’t, meaning there was something else going on that they thought Cane was referring to.

For one unguarded second, something real and exhausted surfaced on Cane’s face. This was getting annoying. He smoothed it over before it could fully form, but not before it had happened. He walked away without pushing, the failure filed away. The southern half of the map, he decided, was officially his problem now.

At the parapet, Cassius’s boredom had reached a critical stage. He turned to Kai, a hopeful, pleading look in his eyes.

"So, about that promise Cane made me. The one about the tits. Do you know anything? Any logistical details I should be aware of?" He was half-joking, half genuinely fishing for information.

Kai’s deflection was immediate, and sharper than any version Cane had heard from him before. "A promise from a man with no plan and worse follow-through is just a wish wearing a better outfit, Cassius. If you genuinely want to see a woman’s chest before you graduate, your odds improve if you try talking to an actual woman."

Cassius looked wounded. "I talk to plenty of women, thank you very much."

"Does ’talks to’ and ’talks at while they slowly back toward the nearest exit’ mean the same thing where you’re from?" Kai asked, not missing a beat.

Cassius opened his mouth, closed it, and settled for a low mutter. "Your tongue gets sharper every week."

"I’ll take that as a compliment."

Cassius tried one last angle, half-serious. "Are you just covering for him? Roommate loyalty?"

"If Cane had a plan worth covering for," Kai said flatly, "I really doubt he does. But even if he did, do you think he’d tell me of all people? I doubt so."

Through the entire exchange, Cassius’s gaze kept drifting. His eyes slid toward the distant movement of another team, lingering for a moment on a girl with a pair of bouncing tits as she ran. He glanced toward a cluster of archers on a nearby ridge, his attention snagged by the curve of a female student’s ass as she bent to retrieve an arrow. He was arguing, but he was only half-present, a small, ordinary inattentiveness that meant nothing at all right now.

Back near the eastern treeline, Raven found what she came looking for.

The forest floor looked wrong. A wide patch of leaf litter lay too evenly, a smooth, deliberate blanket that neither wind nor wandering animals would ever leave behind. She knelt, her fingers brushing the dry leaves aside. Just beneath the surface, buried shallow enough to find but deep enough to hide, sat a simple leather satchel. She unbuckled the flap. Inside lay a neatly coiled rope and several lengths of folded, dark cloth. No daggers. No poison. Nothing that screamed attack. This was preparation. This was the quiet, tedious logistics of men getting ready to do a job, not men already doing it.

A few yards away, the mud held a different story. Footprints clustered, overlapping in tight, repeated patterns. They didn’t lead anywhere. They simply were. This was the signature of bodies that had stood in one place for a long, dull stretch, waiting. There were no corpses, no blood, nothing to suggest a fight had happened here. Just the quiet, accumulating certainty that someone had used this patch of forest as a staging ground, a place they expected to return to.

She crouched over the satchel, not touching it, just looking. The sheer economy of it—nothing wasted, nothing extra, nothing that would explain itself to a stranger—unsettled her. It felt familiar. It felt like the kind of quiet, brutal competence the Ashen Talons had always valued over anything flashier. She didn’t like how much it felt like coming home.

They met at the dead tree, the one split clean down its trunk by lightning years ago. It stood stark and white against the green, a landmark a blind man could find in the dark. Cane was already there, leaning against the dead wood, watching her approach. He had the kind of look on his face that said he was about to try being clever.