Rain hissed through the trees and pattered over the blackened scar ahead.

Sera’s voice did not rise over the rain. It never had to. “Remember, fresh starmetal. Stay sharp, keep close, and treat everything twice.”

Bren snorted and hitched his cloak higher against the weather. “Hear that, Garrick? I know the rest of us can manage not to lick the crater.”

Somewhere ahead and to the left, beyond the wet alder, Garrick answered without turning. “I only did that once.”

Hollis laughed under his breath. Even Sera let out a huff, though she kept walking. Rain from the edge of her hood ticked softly off the fletching over her shoulder.

“That was lamp oil,” Bren said.

“It was dark,” Garrick called back. “And I survived it.”

“That does seem to be your preferred defense,” said Hollis.

The trees thinned by degrees as they neared the impact site. The undergrowth had been scoured flat in places, then twisted back on itself in others. A smell hung in the wet air that was not smoke and not metal but some ugly marriage of the two. Now and then Bren caught sight of ground that gleamed through the rain like melted glass. Nothing moved in the brush. No birds called. Even the storm seemed quieter here.

Garrick had drifted ahead the way he always did, first as a gray shape between trunks, then as the occasional lift of a hand or turn of a shoulder, then as nothing at all. Scout’s habit. Garrick’s habit. He ranged, doubled back, vanished, reappeared grinning when no one had seen him go. It would have been more alarming if he had stayed where anyone could watch him.

When Bren next opened his mouth, he did it expecting the familiar answer.

“Try not to get yourself swallowed by anything strange, Garrick.”

No reply came back.

Bren took another three steps before he noticed it. He frowned and looked left through the rain. “Garrick?”

Only water in leaves.

Sera stopped. “Eyes up.”

Hollis peered ahead, blinking rain off his lashes. “He may have gone to higher ground.”

“He’d shout if he found something,” Bren said.

“Unless he thinks it’s worth being smug about first,” Sera said.

That should have drawn Garrick out. If not to report, then to disagree. Bren waited for the inevitable line from somewhere inconveniently far off.

Nothing.

The rise ahead was small, hardly more than a swell in the churned earth where roots had heaved. Alder branches hung low over it, heavy with rain. Sera pushed through first, one hand near the knife at her belt. Bren followed close enough to feel the wet whip of branches against his cheek.

He saw the puddle first. It had spread broad and shallow in a hollow of dark soil, fed by the rain and by the trickle of runoff from the scorched ground beyond. Then he saw the body lying face down in it.

Garrick’s cloak was plastered to his back. One arm had folded under him. The other lay crooked out in the water, fingers half sunk in mud. Rain dimpling the puddle around his head made it look, absurdly, as if the earth itself was trying to bury him by inches.

Sera was already moving. Hollis nearly ran past both of them and dropped to one knee in the mud. He hesitated just long enough to brace Garrick’s shoulder, then rolled him enough to bare part of his face to the rain.

Garrick’s eyes were half open. Water ran over one cheek and gathered at the corner of his mouth. There was no wound that they could see. No blood. No torn flesh. Just Garrick, as if he had gone down drunk in a roadside puddle after some bad tavern boasting and meant to rise a moment later cursing the cold.

Hollis pressed fingers to his throat. Rain beat on cloaks. Water slid off leaves. Somewhere deeper in the scarred woods, something cracked once under its own weight.

Hollis lifted his head.

“He’s dead,” he said.

Garrick, who slipped wardens, traps, winter roads, and three separate warrants by Bren’s count. Garrick, who could talk himself out of a cell faster than Bren could lock it. Garrick, who survived by treating consequences as something that happened to slower men.

Dead in a puddle.

The sound tore out of Bren before he knew it was there, one sharp, ugly bark of laughter. “You can’t be serious.”

Silence followed for a beat before Sera rounded on him. “What is wrong with you?”

Bren’s mouth opened. He had no answer worth giving. None of the words that came to mind were forgivable aloud.

“I—”

Garrick laughed.

It came from the body in the puddle, low and wet and broken in the middle, Garrick’s old laugh dragged wrong through a throat that had forgotten how breath worked. Hollis lurched backward so hard he went over onto one hand. Sera’s words died in her mouth. Bren felt every hair lift on his arms under the wet wool of his sleeves.

No one moved.

Rain struck Garrick’s open cheek. Water filled the print Hollis’s knee had left beside him. For one mad instant Bren dared to hope he had imagined it.

Then another laugh answered from the trees behind them.

That one was his.

Not exactly. Not cleanly. But it had his clipped breath in it, the bitter little hitch on the front. It came from somewhere just beyond the alder, thin through the rain and close enough that he turned before he could stop himself.

Nothing stood there.

Hollis made a small sound through his nose, not quite fear and not yet understanding.

A third laugh came from the right.

Sera’s. Shorter than Garrick’s, harsher than Bren’s, the same brief disbelieving huff she had let out on the trail.

It, too, came back frayed and wrong.

Hollis’s own laugh rang from somewhere out by the blackened glass, softer and breathier than the others. Bren watched Hollis go white under the wet strands of hair stuck to his forehead.

The body let out another bubbling laugh from the puddle.

Bren’s came again, farther off.

Then Sera’s from behind them.

They came one at a time, never in the same place twice, each nearly familiar until the end of it went wrong.

“Back together,” Sera said, and even now she sounded like command and not panic. “Now.”

They closed without speaking, boots sucking at mud, shoulders nearly touching. Bren could feel Hollis trembling through his soaked sleeves. Sera had drawn her knife, though it seemed uselessly small in the rain.

The laughter kept moving.

From the crater lip. The alder. Somewhere low, in the puddle at their feet. From the dark between the trunks where Garrick should have been watching for them.

Bren turned toward one in his own voice and another answered in Garrick’s from the other side. Sera shifted toward hers, and Hollis flinched as his came back from somewhere ahead. Each sound pulled at the ear. Each asked to be followed. Each was wrong.

Garrick laughed again from the puddle.

Bren did not look.

A laugh in Sera’s voice snapped from the trees at their back. Hollis’s answered from the blackened ground ahead. Bren’s own came from the rain to his left, closer now, close enough that he felt his body tighten toward it despite himself.

Then the last laugh came right beside his ear.

It was quiet.

Intimate. 

It sounded nothing like any of them.