Jake stood in the rest stop and was completely, comprehensively alone in his own head for the first time in eleven years.

He looked at the leader of the eastern men.

"Who are you people?" His voice came out steadier than his hands.

He was grateful for that, at least.

"What do you want with me?"

The leader didn’t answer immediately. He was looking in the direction Eskar had run — down the curve of the valley road, the empty afternoon stretch of it — with a faint, considering expression. The look of a man recalculating something. He stood like that for a moment, and then, without looking at Jake, he made a small gesture.

He moved his two fingers, extended toward one of the figures at the perimeter. Then a slight inclination of the head in the direction of the road.

The figure peeled away from the perimeter immediately, without a word, moving toward the road with the quiet, purposeful pace of someone who had been told one thing and needed nothing else.

Jake understood what the gesture meant.

He understood it with the clarity of cold water; the shapeless situation suddenly acquired one very specific, very terrible shape — Eskar running down that road, the figure moving after him, and the leader’s hands clasped calmly behind his back.

*

The figure disappeared around the curve of the valley road.

Jake watched him go.

There was a specific kind of horror in watching a person move toward another person with that quality of intent — not running, not urgent, just walking, with the patient, unhurried certainty of something that already knew how the thing it was walking toward was going to end.

The figure didn’t need to hurry. The road was empty and Eskar didn’t know it was coming.

Jake’s mind lurched toward it and then lurched away, because looking directly at what that meant was not something he could do right now and remain functional, and remaining functional was the only thing he had left that might matter.

He thought, wildly and briefly, of Granny.

It was not a rational thought to think of her hiring these people to deal with him.

It arrived the way thoughts arrive in shock — sideways, without introduction, trailing a logic that dissolves the moment you examine it.

Someone had sent these men. Someone with the resources of Roakan behind them, with trained blades and a signal whistle and the operational confidence of a long-planned thing finally reaching its conclusion. Someone who had known about the mark.

Granny knew about the mark. Chelsea had seen it a hundred times. Chelsea had called it a lucky charm, had said it with the easy certainty of someone who genuinely believed that, and Jake had believed Chelsea believed it, and—

He looked at the leader.

The leader was looking back at him with the warm, patient expression of a man who had nowhere else to be.

"Young man," he said.

"We have been looking for you. You understand — for years."

His voice had a quality that Jake’s blood sense registered as something other than what the surface presented.

Not warmth. Warmth was the surface.

Underneath it, the particular vibration of a thing that had been tightly controlled for a long time and was now, in the relief of completion, allowing itself to relax very slightly. The way a held breath released.

"You have the wrong person," Jake said.

He said it with conviction. He said it because it was the thing to say, the move to make, and the card you played when you had nothing else — denial, confusion, misdirection. He said it, and he watched it land on the leader’s face and he watched the leader’s face do nothing at all with it.

"I’m sure," Jake continued, keeping his voice level, "that whoever you’re looking for—"

The blade came from behind.

He felt it before he heard it — the displaced air, the specific whisper of a sword moving fast through a close space — and then the back of his shirt opened in a single clean line, the fabric parting with a sound like a caught breath, and the cold valley air hit the skin of his back all at once.

They weren’t cutting him but removing his shirt.

The man behind him had parted the shirt with surgical precision — close enough that Jake felt the flat of the blade drag briefly across his shoulder blade, deliberate and controlled, the message in the control as much as in the act itself.

We can do this to cloth. We can do it to other things.

A hand came down on Jake’s shoulder. It was heavy and came with a pressing force that was not quite a blow and was not quite anything else, a force that communicated downward in a language that bypassed translation entirely.

Jake’s knees found the ground as he slammed against them.

He winced in pain as his wounds throbbed when he hit the ground.

He was kneeling in the packed grass of the rest stop with the ruins of his shirt hanging open at the back and his sword still — somehow, still — in his right hand, though the angle of kneeling made it useful for nothing, and the figures at the perimeter had shifted inward slightly, closing the geometry.

The leader walked toward him.

He moved with the ease of a man crossing a room he owned, unhurried, each step placed with the deliberateness of someone who was choosing to move slowly because he could, because nothing in this rest stop was going to stop him or surprise him and he saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

He stopped in front of Jake and looked down, and then he crouched — a considered motion, bringing himself to Jake’s level.

He reached out and moved the torn shirt aside.

The jade star mark sat on Jake’s left shoulder exactly as it always had — the size of a palm, the points cleanly defined, the color a deep, clear green that sat a shade apart from any ink Jake had ever seen used for tattooing and had always, in the back of his mind, noted as slightly wrong for a tattoo. Slightly too vivid and present.

The leader looked at it for a long moment.

Then he looked at Jake’s face.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked.

The question was genuine.