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Real partnership, she realized, was not constant comfort. Sometimes it was refusing to soothe the wound an enemy wanted to use. Tavi’s voice crackled over the communicator. “The main relay is adapting. It is learning which memories fail.”

“Can you feed it false data?” Kesta asked.

“With what?”

“Command conflict. Tell it Dreven and Rath are both primary subjects.”

Rath overheard. “I object to being experimentally compatible with him.”

“Your suffering is noted.”

Tavi injected both warlords’ implant signatures into the relay stream. The drones hesitated, target logic splitting between two command-class males who were cooperating instead of competing. For one precious minute, the empire’s assumptions became its weakness.

Ash and Red Basin fighters used that minute to separate the activated from the unimplanted, move the children behind mineral shielding, and secure the smaller wagons. Then the fourth drone reached the boundary stone and projected a designation across Kesta’s chest.

H-PRIME ACQUISITION.

K-COMMAND SUBJECT PROXIMITY CONFIRMED.

The line beneath it remained incomplete.

MATCH CANDIDATE: KHAROVIAN COMMAND CLASS.

No name. No direct proof that Dreven had been selected for her. The uncertainty was deliberate, Kesta thought: enough information to destabilize them and too little to answer anything. A retrieval filament snapped around Kesta’s waist and yanked her off her feet. She hit the ground hard and began sliding toward the wagon as Dreven lunged after her.

“Stop!” Kesta shouted.

He stopped one step from the relay field. The restraint tightened. Every instinct in him demanded forward motion. The imperial system wanted that response. It had built the entire crossing to force him into the activation radius.

Kesta clawed through her medical belt, found the acid ampule used for calcified sutures, and crushed it against the filament. The line smoked but held.

Rath shot the wagon relay. The blast threw him backward and weakened the filament enough for Kesta to cut herself free. Dreven remained outside the field until she crawled clear, holding position when every visible instinct in him demanded the opposite. Only then did he move.

He lifted her from the mud, hands under her arms, and set her on her feet without pulling her against him.

“Permission?” he asked, breathless.

“To check me, yes.”

His hands moved over her ribs and spine with brutal care. No obvious breaks. The restraint had burned a line across her waist. Around them the crossing dissolved into three battles: implanted fighters against their own bodies, rescue teams trying to free the convoy, and drones attempting to preserve the pairing data. Kesta seized Dreven’s wrist. “The relay is inside the main tank. We cannot destroy it without losing the water.”

“Then we lose the water.”

“No. Ash Camp dies slowly without it. Red Basin may too.”

Rath rose from the mud, blood running from one temple. “My people can drain the tank manually.”

“Not before the next pulse,” Kesta said.

Tavi’s voice came through the short-range communicator. “I can isolate the relay if someone reaches the underside hatch.” The hatch lay beneath the wagon, inside the deepest part of the activation field. Dreven said, “I will go.”

“The field is built for Kharovian command implants.”

“It is also built for you.”

“Then neither of us goes alone.”

His eyes narrowed. “Kesta.”