No Trace, No Mercy

“Grief I could survive. But suspicion—that sharp, creeping kind that wraps itself around trust and strangles—grief never stood a chance against that.”

As the moments stretched, each second seemed to thicken with meaning, like the world had slowed just enough to let us truly feel the weight of it all. I didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to break the fragile stillness we’d carved out beside the river—a space where nothing had to be explained because everything was already understood.

But eventually, and with great reluctance, I eased back. My arms loosened their grip around Jamie, the contact slipping away like breath from a mirror. He didn’t stop me. Grief rarely clings—it just lets go with quiet devastation.

Still hunched on my knees, I shifted slightly on the rough ground. My legs prickled with pins and needles, but I ignored them. My hand—shaking, though I hadn’t noticed until now—reached toward Duke. The fur was coarse under my fingertips, no longer warm. Just... fur. A coat stripped of its wearer. I let my hand rest there for a moment longer than I should’ve, as if touch might anchor something that was already drifting too far away to catch.

He had been so full of motion. Of mischief. Of uncomplicated loyalty. And now, nothing.

The silence pressed in.

Jamie’s gaze lifted, and when our eyes met, I felt the shift before he spoke. The weight of his grief was still there, yes—but behind it, something older. Hotter. Sharper.

"I'm going to get whatever did this," he said.

His voice cut clean through the hush. There was no tremble in it, no theatrics—just steel forged in fire. His jaw was set, the muscle twitching just beneath the surface, and the red rims of his eyes only made the resolve behind them burn brighter.

I nodded, slow and deliberate. There was nothing else to do. Sometimes vengeance is the only thing left that makes sense—the only shape anger knows how to take when everything else has broken. I understood the need for action, for a name, a target. Something to face that wasn’t the empty space Duke had left behind.

"Do you think it was a shadow panther?" I asked.

The words came out quietly, but they carried the weight of the night still echoing in my bones. My throat tightened as I said it, the memory flickering into focus—the size of it, the speed, the silence of its approach. The dark shape that had emerged from nowhere and carved terror into my skin.

Jamie's brow furrowed, confusion flickering across his grief-numbed features.

"A what?"

His voice was hoarse, but the bewilderment in it was genuine.

"A shadow panther," I said again. My hand, unbidden, moved to the scratches on my arm, fingers brushing the bandaged welts that still pulsed faintly with pain. The gesture wasn’t for him—it was grounding. Proof that it had happened. That it wasn’t just some waking nightmare.

"It's the creature that attacked me last night."

"It wasn't a shadow panther," the voice came sharp and uninvited.

I flinched. So did Jamie. The interruption cleaved us from our grief so abruptly it left the air vibrating with aftershock.

We turned in unison—two wounded animals scenting something new. A woman stood a few metres away, as if she’d simply emerged from the landscape itself. There’d been no footsteps. No rustle of approach. Just... there she was.

"I'm Charity," she said, flatly.

No softening. No preamble. Her tone was unceremonious, almost clinical, as though introductions were a bothersome formality she’d been instructed to observe but didn’t believe in. She offered no smile, no extended hand. Just the words, dropped like a file onto a desk.

I blinked. It was the sort of name that didn’t suit the image in front of me.

My gaze swept over her, instinct and training snapping back into place through the haze of emotion. She was tall and lean—muscle tight across her limbs like taut wire, her stance still as sculpture. Her skin was weather-worn and sun-kissed, the kind of tan earned under real sun, not beauty salon bulbs.

But it was her outfit—or what passed for one—that gave me pause.

Armoured plates clung to her like an afterthought, rough-forged and uneven, more functional than flattering. They protected her chest, shoulders, hips—just the vital zones, leaving most of her skin bare to the harsh elements. It wasn’t erotic. It was efficient. Practicality worn like defiance.

A bow rested in one hand with relaxed familiarity, the curve of it smoothed by long use. A quiver full of arrows was slung over her back like a part of her spine. She looked like she could melt into the wilderness and kill you without breaking pace.

Not from Earth, then. Or if she was, Earth hadn’t been home in a very long time.

There was a wildness to her that felt deliberate—something honed rather than chaotic. A person who’d made peace with danger. Maybe even courted it.

"How do you know that it wasn't a shadow panther?" Jamie’s voice broke through my quiet appraisal. His tone was cautious, but I heard the thread beneath it—something between wary hope and the reflexive doubt of someone who’d had too many assumptions upended already.

I kept my eyes on Charity, but a flicker of unease threaded through my gut.

Because if it wasn’t a shadow panther… what the hell was it?

Charity, without missing a beat, motioned toward Duke's lifeless form. "May I?" she asked, her tone measured, her eyes locked with Jamie’s in a steady, unflinching gaze.

There was something in the way she asked—not just politeness, but protocol. Not deference, but respect. A quiet recognition of grief, as though she’d stood at the edges of death often enough to know where not to tread too heavily. And yet, beneath that calm exterior, there was certainty. The sort of calm that doesn’t come from gentleness but from sheer, repeated survival.

Jamie hesitated. Only for a heartbeat, but it landed with weight. The moment drew out around us—him holding Duke, her waiting in that taut stillness, the air thick with grief and decision. His jaw flexed slightly, some inner muscle of trust tightening, then releasing.

He gave a single nod.

An unspoken surrender. Not of authority, but of something more fragile. The letting in of a stranger when you’re cracked open and bleeding.

Henri released a low growl.

I startled slightly, my gaze dropping to the dog I hadn’t even realised was there. Curled close to Jamie, tucked beneath his elbow like a shadow I’d mistaken for earth. How had I missed him?

Because you were too busy falling apart, my inner voice scolded. The shame came sharp and immediate. Duke’s brother. Still here. Still breathing. Still watching.

And I hadn’t seen him.

Henri’s growl deepened, throat vibrating with unease, short legs stiff and braced. It wasn’t aggression, not exactly—just that tightly wound tension dogs hold when they don’t know if they’re supposed to attack, defend, or grieve.

Charity took a step forward and Henri’s protest grew louder, transforming into a sharp bark. The sound snapped through the moment like a cracked whip.

But then, from somewhere near the campfire, a clatter rang out—metal on stone, loud and thoughtless. Pots, maybe. A careless hand or the wind playing havoc. Whatever it was, it stole Henri’s focus in an instant.

With the suddenness of a much younger dog, Henri spun on his haunches and bolted toward the noise, his squat legs kicking up dry dust that swirled in his wake.

We watched him go—ears flapping, tail swishing—and something about his sudden energy felt both absurd and deeply, heartbreakingly human.

He paused at the back of one of the tents, barely visible in profile. His small body was tense, tail drooping now, ears angled back in uncertainty. Then he looked over his shoulder, straight at us.

The look on his face—if dogs can be said to wear expressions—was devastating. Not confusion exactly, but searching. A glance that reached for something that wasn’t there. A question he didn’t have words for, but we understood all the same.

Where’s my brother?

A lump rose in my throat, hard and unyielding. Poor Henri. Did he understand? Could he feel that absence yet? Or would he go looking, again and again, until grief caught up to him in the slow, merciless way it always does?

Then, just as suddenly, Henri turned and disappeared behind the tent flap, swallowed by canvas and silence. The dust he’d kicked up lingered, hanging in the air like the echo of a presence just left behind.

And just like that, he was gone.

The emptiness he left behind barely had time to settle. Charity stepped forward with quiet intent, claiming the space at Jamie’s side like it had always been meant for her. There was no hesitation in her stride—just that steady, unsettling purpose. Like someone following a thread only she could see.

She squatted next to Jamie with the ease of someone accustomed to uneven ground, her movements economical, controlled. There was a brief flicker of restraint in her posture, a moment’s pause as if she understood that what lay before her wasn’t just a body—it was loved. Then the hesitation vanished, replaced by a kind of clinical resolve, and her hands moved towards Duke with surprising gentleness.

I watched, caught somewhere between resistance and curiosity. Her fingers, calloused and deft, parted the fur near Duke’s belly with a care that contradicted the stark, wild image she projected. There was something reverent in the way she moved, as though even she wasn’t immune to the weight of loss.

"See the edges around the wound?" she asked, her voice low but precise.

I leaned in, the air between us thick with the scent of dust, blood, and something sharper beneath—metallic, almost electric. My eyes followed where she pointed, narrowing as I took in the wound’s shape. It was cleaner than I expected. Too clean. Not the ragged tear of teeth or the jagged score of claws. There was a surgical precision to it, a coldness that felt disturbingly deliberate.

"It's too clean to have been caused by any claw or tooth," she continued, and there was no question in her tone—only certainty. The sort born of experience I didn’t want to ask about.

"Then what was it?" I asked, barely above a whisper. The words dried in my mouth even as I spoke them, but I needed the answer. Even if I hated it.

Charity didn’t pause. Didn’t blink. Her reply came as though she’d already filed the thought away, already moved on to classifying it in some unseen report.

"Looking at the discolouration of the skin, my best guess is that it was an Okaledian dagger that killed the creature."

Okaledian dagger. The term dropped into my brain like a foreign object—jarring, sharp-edged. It didn’t belong here, in this moment, next to Duke’s body and Jamie’s bloodshot eyes. It was the kind of word that rewrote the rules, tilted the map under your feet.

I didn’t speak, but the phrase echoed inside me. What the hell is that?

Beside me, Jamie stiffened. His grief shifted—hardened. When he spoke, his voice was a blade drawn slowly, deliberately.

"Creature? His name is Duke."

The force behind the words startled even me. Not just grief now—defence. Honour. Jamie was drawing lines, refusing to let Duke be reduced to some statistic in a stranger’s story.

Compelled, and not just out of loyalty, I added, “You do know he is a dog, don’t you?”

I meant it to be rhetorical. A gentle dig, maybe. But there was something else buried in the question. Something I hadn’t admitted to myself until it left my mouth.

Do you understand us at all?

Could she see what we saw? That Duke wasn’t a ‘creature’. He was family. Fierce and foolish and faithful. Not a body. Not a casualty. Not a clue.

Charity’s focus remained unbroken. She didn’t so much as flinch at our indignation, her attention fixed entirely on Duke’s wound. Her brows furrowed with silent calculation, eyes tracking the line of torn flesh like it held the answer to a different question altogether—one only she understood.

"I've seen similar creatures... dogs, like yours, but nothing quite like it. Creatures like this aren't so common in Chewbathia."

Chewbathia? Another word that didn’t belong here, yet was delivered with such offhand familiarity that it made my skin crawl. Like she was speaking from a geography no map would admit to. Another tear in the already-threadbare logic of this place, and of her.

The question why not? lit up in my brain, bright and demanding, but what came out of my mouth was smaller. More honest. "I feel like my brain suddenly has another dozen questions after that."

I rose slowly, knees stiff from crouching, the ache in my joints amplified by the slow-drumming throb behind my eyes. Fatigue had rooted itself deep in my body—grief, adrenaline, fear, all congealed into a sort of leaden heaviness that even the dry air couldn’t sweat out.

Jamie mirrored the sentiment with a low, bitter edge. "So do I," he said, voice rough with confusion... and something darker underneath. His fingers, stained with Duke’s blood, dragged across his forehead, smearing a grim mark that looked more war paint than accident.

His eyes found mine, a flicker of solidarity passing between us—a glance that said, You feel this too, right? This... wrongness? Then he turned back to Charity.

"But if Duke was killed by a dagger—"

He stopped. Just for a second. But it was enough to let the realisation catch up to the words.

Then, with sharpened clarity, he finished: "—then who the fuck was wielding the dagger?"

His voice cut through the still air, each word loud enough to ripple across the riverbank. It landed like a slap, the question none of us wanted to ask suddenly alive and breathing between us.

A jolt of adrenaline surged through me, wiping clean the exhaustion. My breath caught. I crouched beside him again, the motion instinctive, low and close. This was no longer grief. This was danger. Real, immediate, human.

I leaned in, voice hushed and urgent. "Do you think somebody in the camp killed Duke?"

The idea tasted wrong even as I said it—acidic and unreal—but it wouldn’t leave. The camp, with its flickering fires and makeshift unity, had just warped under the weight of suspicion. The thought that someone had done this... that they were maybe watching us now...

Charity spoke before Jamie could.

"Nobody that you know," she said, evenly.

The certainty in her voice was like a cold blade pressed to the base of my neck. Not cruel. Just final.

Jamie and I both turned to her, spines straightening, voices overlapping.

"What do you mean?"

Our question came out in perfect unison, a harmony of disbelief and dread.

Jamie's next words trembled, just barely.

"There's someone here that we don't know?"

The air shifted. What had once been mourning solidified into something else entirely: fear. Not vague or distant—but close. Immediate.

A stranger. Among us. With a blade.

And we hadn’t seen them coming.

"A Portal Pirate."

Paul’s voice sliced through the air. He emerged beside us like a summoned ghost, his presence sudden but unnervingly calm, as though he’d been there all along, just waiting for the right line to deliver.

The phrase landed hard.

Portal Pirate.

It sounded fictional—like something out of a low-budget dystopian series. A term made up by someone who wore mirrored sunglasses indoors and gave every enemy a backstory and a codename.

But Paul didn’t say it with irony.

He said it like it meant something. Like it explained everything.

My stomach tightened instinctively. That low, creeping pressure that comes when the edges of a nightmare begin to blur into the real.

Jamie’s reaction came fast.

"What the actual fuck?"

It was supposed to be under his breath, but the words rang out louder than intended, hanging in the open air like an alarm that no one quite knew how to turn off. I felt the same disorientation—like the ground had tilted, just enough to make standing upright feel like a conscious effort.

His eyes found mine, wide and searching, filled with the same mix of dread and disbelief that was curling like smoke in my own chest. There was nothing I could offer him in return but the mirror of his own panic. No answers. Just shared unease.

Before the silence could settle again, Charity cut in.

Her voice was cool, composed, but there was weight in it—subtext sharpened by experience.

"He's likely lost and been separated from his partner. Some danger must have befallen one of them before they could execute the location registration. They're always in pairs. Never work alone. Cunning and violent bastards they are together. But alone, they can be brute savages. Their instinct for hunting and survival runs deep."

Each sentence dropped with surgical precision, like she was reading a classified report aloud. Not a theory. A certainty. Her certainty.

But for me, her words were ice water down the spine. Location registration? Hunting instinct? Separated from a partner? It all painted a picture far more chilling than the one I’d been trying to make sense of. This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t nature lashing out.

This was calculated. And it was close.

The image formed—half-shadow, half-imagination—of someone moving through our camp unseen. Watching. Waiting. Perhaps wounded. Perhaps more dangerous because of it.

A cornered predator.

And we had no idea where—or who—they were.

Paul’s next words were aimed at Jamie, the kind of ill-timed declaration men make when they mistake information for comfort.
"Charity managed to kill one of the beasts last night. It's at the camp if you want to see it."

His tone had shifted—lifted slightly, like he expected admiration, maybe even gratitude. There was a hint of pride clinging to his words, something almost boyish in the way he glanced between us, eager for his contribution to matter. It struck a sour note.

We were still kneeling in the dirt beside Duke’s body, his blood drying in the soil like a promise that couldn’t be unmade. And Paul, for all his steadiness, was talking like this was some sort of war trophy.

My mouth tightened. I said nothing.

The weight of the moment hadn’t landed on him the way it had on us. Or perhaps it had, and this was just his way of deflecting—filing the grief under ‘useful information’ and moving briskly on to strategy. Either way, it grated.

And then, as if eager to complete the scene, Paul added, almost breathless now, "She wounded another and it appears, somehow, that a third shadow panther managed to follow Beatrix through the Portal to Earth."

His gaze swung toward me like a spotlight, and I felt its heat. Not accusatory, not quite—but close. The implication that my passage between worlds had let something through. That I’d brought it. That it had followed me.

I gave a small nod. Reluctant. Heavy with everything I didn’t want to confirm. Jamie didn’t need the whole story—not now. But the truth sat between us like a shadow with teeth.

Jamie looked up. His eyes—so raw, so recently hollowed—sparked, just for a moment. A flicker of something not quite hope, not quite madness. It was the glimmer of a thought taking root. His gaze pinned me, questioning without words.

If something can follow you back… maybe we can follow something forward.

I felt it too—that wild, dangerous possibility. That maybe Earth wasn’t as unreachable as we’d been led to believe. The idea flared between us, untamed and foolish and utterly human.

But then Charity spoke, and the air changed.

"It doesn't change anything for you," she said, flatly.

Her hand landed on Jamie’s shoulder. Not a gesture of comfort. Not even a warning. Just pressure. Just weight. Like she was anchoring him in place before the wind could carry him off with the idea.

"You'll never leave Clivilius alive."

Her words dropped like a lid snapping shut.

Cold. Irrevocable.

And just like that, the glimmer in Jamie’s eyes went out.

Paul’s interjection came with the ill-timed enthusiasm of someone trying to help but missing the mood by a full mile. "But I think Duke can leave. You could have Luke take him to be buried on Earth?"

The words hung there, absurd and echoing, as if they’d been spoken into the wrong world. For a moment, the air felt thinner—sucked of breath by the sheer wrongness of the suggestion.

I stared at Paul, trying to process what I’d just heard. My brain caught up a second behind my heart, which had already recoiled. The idea of removing Duke, of boxing him up and sending him away like excess cargo, turned my stomach.

Jamie’s reaction was immediate. Visceral.

"Fuck no!"

His voice cracked through the hush like a whip. Not anger for anger’s sake, but something rawer. Protectiveness, maybe. Grief, weaponised. The sound of a man whose heart had already been broken once and refused to have the pieces scattered.

I felt it too. That rush of indignation. The audacity of imagining Duke anywhere but here—with Jamie.

"It's not fair on Henri. Duke belongs here now. We'll find a suitable place to bury him here today."

Jamie’s voice was low now, but steady. A declaration. A tether thrown down in the midst of all this surreal horror. Duke wasn’t just a casualty of the night—he was his. And no alien world, no rules or threats, was going to change that.

Paul said nothing more. Just nodded. Small, awkward. A silent step backwards from a line he hadn’t meant to cross.

Then Charity, ever the scalpel, cut through.

"It's not possible to bury him," she said.

The words didn’t rise. They dropped. Hard and cold, like stones into an already full grave.

"You have no walls, no protection. Burying him will only attract creatures much worse than shadow panthers and Portal Pirates."

The silence that followed was thick with the aftershock. My stomach lurched—plummeted straight to the earth, where I suddenly felt the chill of stone beneath my knees. A breeze skimmed across the river, whispering of things not yet seen. Things waiting. Watching.

Worse than what we’ve already seen?

The thought hit like ice in my chest. I couldn’t even name what we’d faced—and now there was worse? My mind turned traitor, filling in the blanks: eyes glowing in the dark, teeth that didn’t belong to any anatomy book, creatures drawn not by movement or light but by grief itself—by death.

The idea of Duke, buried and not at rest, lured from the soil by some nameless thing—it made me nauseous.

We were in a world where even mourning had rules.

And none of them were ours.

"What then?" asked Paul, his voice coloured by a hesitancy that clung like smoke in the still morning air. It wasn’t just uncertainty—it was the creeping edge of fear. The kind that settled in your chest when none of the choices in front of you felt survivable.

I swallowed hard. The same question echoed inside me, unspoken but relentless.

Charity didn’t hesitate. Her reply was brutal in its efficiency. "You'll need to cremate his body."

No softening. No euphemism. Just a blunt directive delivered with the cold detachment of someone who'd seen too many bodies to romanticise what needed to be done with them.

Jamie reacted like she'd slapped him.

"Like fuck we will!"

The words tore from his throat, hoarse and ragged. He surged to his feet so suddenly I flinched. His movements were clumsy, all elbows and defiance, as if the grief had short-circuited whatever coordination he usually had. His feet slipped slightly in the soft dirt, and for a moment it looked like he might collapse under the sheer weight of it all.

But he didn’t.

He held on—clutching Duke against his chest like an anchor, his shirt already soaked through with blood and dirt and sorrow. His arms wrapped protectively around the lifeless body, trembling with fury and tenderness both.

"Don't worry, Duke," Jamie whispered, leaning close, his voice cracked with a gentleness that made my throat tighten. "I won't let them destroy any trace that you ever existed."

There was something unbearable in that sentence. Not just sadness, but devotion so fierce it bordered on delusion. And who could blame him? Grief warps logic, folds time. When everything else is slipping through your fingers, you hold on to whatever's left—even if it's already gone cold.

"Jamie," Paul said softly, stepping forward with care, as though trying not to startle a wounded animal.

His voice was steady, but there was a pleading note beneath it—a thread of reason trying to weave through the chaos. "We don't have a lot of options here."

My shoulders sagged under the invisible weight pressing down on all of us. Logic throbbed in my temples, insistent and cruel. Paul’s right. We couldn’t afford sentiment in a place like this. Not when it invited things worse than shadow panthers. Not when the rules of this world didn’t care about our grief.

But try telling that to a man cradling his best friend’s body.

"No!" Jamie’s roar split the air, louder than before—defiant, grief-wracked, final. His voice echoed off the canvas tents and open sky like a challenge hurled into the void. "We're not burning Duke."

Paul, Charity, and I moved as if by unspoken cue, voices overlapping in a three-pronged attempt to breach Jamie’s grief-forged barricade. There was no strategy—just urgency, emotion, and a shared desperation to stop him from doing something that could jeopardise us all. We spoke over each other, sentences tangled with logic and fear, appeals to reason and to love, but none of it landed. Jamie stood resolute, clutching Duke like a shield against the world we were trying to drag him back into.

And then—

"Has anyone seen Joel this morning?"

The voice didn’t rise, but it cut clean through the din like a blade.

We turned in near-perfect synchrony, as though choreographed by tension itself. The woman who’d spoken was unfamiliar to me. She had that look about her—the strained quiet of someone who had been holding herself together all morning but had just reached the limit of silence. Her presence until now had been ghostlike, barely registered at the edge of our grief-saturated tableau.

But now she was here. And her question changed everything.

The name hit me like a drop of cold water.

Joel.

"I've been with Jamie since I arrived," I said, the words escaping almost automatically. But even as I spoke them, a slow, creeping realisation slid down my spine.

I hadn’t seen him. Not once.

Not since I crossed over. Not since I fled that blood-soaked kitchen, Portal Key clenched in my hand. Not since the shadow panther.

Not since I’d assumed he was already gone.

My stomach tightened. In my mind, Joel had existed as an echo—an aftermath. A body, a memory, a loss already written.

"I've not seen him at all this morning. I just assumed he was still resting in his tent. Is he not there?" Paul’s voice pulled me back. He sounded dazed, like someone waking from a dream just as it turns to nightmare.

The woman shook her head once, briskly, as if she couldn’t afford the delay of explanation.

"No."

Just that.

One word, brittle with fear.

And in the silence that followed, everything around us seemed to lean in.

In an instant—so sudden it seemed to bypass thought entirely—Jamie’s knees buckled. He crumpled with a kind of tragic grace, his descent almost balletic in its slow inevitability. But this wasn’t art. This was collapse. Real and raw.

His elbows hit the ground with a dull thud that jarred through the quiet like punctuation at the end of a sentence none of us wanted to finish. Still, his arms never loosened. Duke remained clutched to his chest, the desperate embrace of a man unwilling to let go of what had already gone.

"Jamie!"

The name tore from multiple throats at once, a chorus of instinct. We surged toward him, our earlier arguments dissolving in the face of something more urgent. There was no hesitation, no discussion. Just motion. Grief might fracture people, but anguish like this pulled us together whether we liked it or not.

The woman—Joel’s inquirer, now transformed before our eyes—knelt swiftly beside Jamie. Her presence shifted in an instant, from outsider to authority. There was a precision to her movements, like her body had long since been trained to act before panic could take hold.

Her fingers brushed Jamie’s temple, then his jaw, checking signs we couldn’t see, searching for something more than physical pain. Her silence was focused, not uncertain. After a brief pause, she looked up sharply, her gaze pinning Paul like a dart.

"Gather everyone to the campfire," she said, her voice calm but commanding, the kind of tone people obey without asking why.

Paul didn’t question it. He gave a single nod—quick, efficient—and turned away, already moving. One crisis replaced another. The air itself seemed to ripple, the gravity of this new uncertainty tugging at everything around us.

I watched the woman with a cautious eye. There was a competence about her I recognised, though I couldn’t place it. Then a thread of memory snapped taut—Paul’s voice earlier, mentioning the camp’s doctor.

"You must be Glenda," I said, half statement, half question, my voice low and laced with something bordering on reverence.

"I am," she replied, her tone even, as she rose and dusted herself off with economical gestures—nothing wasted. There was something no-nonsense in her bearing, reinforced by the clipped musicality of a Northern European accent. She radiated a kind of quiet power, the sort earned, not taught.

"I'm going to find something suitable to wrap Duke in. Please help Jamie get himself cleaned up. I'll meet you back here before we take the dog to the campfire."

"Yes, doctor," I said reflexively, the words automatic but sincere. In this mess of grief and unknowns, Glenda felt like a lighthouse—a calm, clinical presence cutting through the storm.

As she and Charity moved off with purposeful strides, I turned back to Jamie. He was hunched in the dust, Duke still pressed to his chest, as if movement would unmake what little he had left.

I crouched beside him, slow and careful, not wanting to startle or force. The closeness felt intimate, but not intrusive. I could feel the tremble still running through his arms, the quiet quake of a man trying not to shatter completely.

"Come on, let’s get you clean," I murmured, my voice barely more than breath. I reached for his arm—caked in blood, dirt, sorrow—and gave it the gentlest tug I could manage.

It wasn’t much.

But it was something. A hand reaching back through the dark.