The Dagger, Not the Dark

Jamie had been holding Duke since the night before. He sat at the river's edge with his legs in the water and the dog's body cradled against his chest, and the stillness of the scene — man, animal, current — carried the particular weight of a vigil that had outlasted its purpose and become its own form of refusal. He had already sent Luke away. The rejection had been total, delivered with a fury that assigned blame for Duke's death to the man who had brought them all to Clivilius and who had spent the night on a kitchen floor in Berriedale while the settlement faced the consequences. Luke had retreated. Jamie had remained. The river moved past him with the indifference of a system that had no opinion about what sat on its banks.

Beatrix arrived carrying wounds from the same species that had attacked the camp, though she did not yet know this. She saw the bundle in Jamie's arms before she understood what it was. The recognition struck physically — a gasp, a halt, the body processing what the mind had not yet permitted. She knelt beside him without speaking, because the scene did not require speech and could not have been improved by it. The embrace that followed was not romantic, not strategic, not performed for anyone's benefit. It was the contact of two people whose capacity for solitary endurance had been exhausted simultaneously, and who discovered in the same moment that shared weight, even when it solved nothing, was fractionally more bearable than weight carried alone. They held each other beside the river while the dog lay still between them and the Clivilius sun rose over a camp that the night had destroyed.

The woman who interrupted the mourning did so without footsteps, without announcement, and without apology. Charity was a Chewbathian Hunter — lean, armoured in rough-forged plates that protected only the vital zones, carrying a bow with the relaxed familiarity of someone who had used it more often than she had used language. She was not from the camp. She was not from Earth. She had killed one shadow panther the previous night and wounded another, and she had arrived at the riverbank not to offer condolences but to examine the body, because the body was telling a story that grief had prevented anyone from reading.

The wound in Duke's belly was wrong. Charity identified this with the clinical precision of a person whose survival depended on distinguishing between the marks left by different weapons and different predators. The edges were too clean. No claw produced cuts this straight. No tooth left margins this precise. The discolouration of the skin around the wound carried a signature she recognised — the chemical residue of an Okaledian dagger, a blade forged in a settlement whose metallurgy produced a distinctive oxidation pattern on flesh. Duke had not been killed by an animal. Duke had been killed by a person, with a weapon, in a camp that had believed its only threats came from themselves.

The revelation restructured the morning in the time it took Charity to speak three sentences. Jamie's grief, which had been directed at the wilderness — at shadow panthers, at the cruelty of a dimension that hunted domestic animals — now required a different target. Someone had been inside the camp. Someone had carried a blade designed for killing and had used it on a dog whose only crime was being present in a settlement that the blade's owner had infiltrated for purposes no one yet understood. Paul, arriving at the riverbank with the timing of a man who had been watching and waiting for the right moment to contribute information, provided the term: Portal Pirate. Charity supplied the context — they operated in pairs, they were cunning and violent together, and alone they were worse, because isolation activated survival instincts that dispensed with strategy and relied on brute savagery. One of them was somewhere in or near the camp. The partner was unaccounted for. Duke's murder was not random violence. It was the behaviour of a separated operative whose training included killing anything that might raise an alarm.

The cremation debate that followed was the first collision between the camp's emotional needs and Clivilius's operational rules. Jamie refused. Charity stated the facts without softening them — no walls, no protection, and a buried body would attract things worse than shadow panthers and Portal Pirates. The word "cremate" landed on Jamie like a physical blow, and he was on his feet with Duke clutched to his chest before the sentence finished, refusing to permit the destruction of every trace that the dog had existed. Paul attempted reason. Beatrix understood the logic but could not bring herself to advocate for it while standing next to a man whose grip on the body was the only thing preventing his complete disintegration. The argument circled without resolving, each participant carrying a position that was correct within its own framework and incompatible with every other.

Glenda's arrival ended the debate by replacing it with something worse. She had been searching the camp for Joel — the boy whose throat had been cut in Berriedale, whose body had arrived at Bixbus via the river, whose recovery she had monitored. Joel was not in his tent. Joel had not been seen that morning. Joel was missing, and the timeline of his disappearance overlapped precisely with the window during which a Portal Pirate had been operating inside the camp with an Okaledian dagger.

Jamie's knees gave way. He went down with Duke still in his arms, elbows hitting dust, and the people around him — Beatrix, Paul, Charity, Glenda — converged with the instinct of humans responding to a fall whose cause they understood but could not remedy. Glenda took command. Paul was sent to gather the camp. The morning, which had begun as a vigil for a dead dog beside a river, had become an emergency whose scope included murder, infiltration, and a missing boy whose survival depended on decisions that had not yet been made by people who were not yet ready to make them.