Chapter 73: WHAT SURVIVED

The first person to reach Rhea was an old woman with one ear torn near the tip. She came down the nearest ladder too quickly for her age, missed the last rung, caught herself against the trunk and crossed the remaining distance without slowing.

Her palm struck Rhea across the shoulder hard enough to make Gumm lift his head. Rhea only blinked before the same hand caught the back of her neck and dragged her into an embrace, the old woman burying her face in Rhea’s hair while whatever she tried to say broke apart between scolding and sobbing.

More people descended from the platforms. Sio stayed beneath the first bridge with Angle, rainwater tapping his shoulder from the woven edge above while he counted twenty-six survivors before movement deeper in the settlement made the number uncertain.

It was still too few for the homes wrapped around the trees. Children watched from behind adults, a broad-shouldered man kept one arm bound across his chest, and fresh timber replaced burned sections of several bridges while patched solar cloth continued collecting what little evening light reached the canopy. The place had not become the graveyard Rhea remembered; the people left behind had dragged it back into being a home.

Rhea finally wrapped both arms around the old woman, keeping her claws tucked carefully against her back. Sio looked away when Rhea’s face disappeared into grey hair, and beside him Angle had already turned toward the smoke rising from a communal cooking platform, his thumb resting against the strap around his left wrist.

The child who had shouted from above slipped between two adults and stopped in front of Rhea, a small tail twitching behind one leg. "You really came back." Rhea lowered herself until they were eye level and answered, "I came back before," which made the child look toward the adults as though Rhea had said something impossible.

The old woman’s hand tightened on Rhea’s shoulder. "Not like this." The people nearest them quieted, and Rhea’s gaze moved across faces she had apparently mourned already.

"I was here. I saw..." Her attention caught on a platform collapsed around the roots of a huge tree, where blackened timber still showed beneath newer boards. "I found everyone."

The old woman took Rhea’s wrist when her fingers began trembling. "You found what they left where you could see it." Rhea’s ears went rigid, and Sio heard the faint scrape of Angle’s gauntlet as his hand closed beside him.

They were led deeper into the settlement before anyone explained further. Several survivors watched Angle’s gauntlets and the purple mark beneath Sio’s eye, but no one asked who they were, as though whatever Rhea had brought home mattered less than the fact that she had come home at all.

The village curved with the jungle instead of cutting through it. Platforms wrapped around living trunks, bridges dipped where roots had pushed upward over the years, and doorways differed in height and width for bodies that had never been built exactly like human ones; claw grooves had polished some frames smooth, while ceramic channels caught water from broad leaves and carried it into covered basins below.

The damage cut through that care. One home had no front wall, another stood intact except for five dark holes punched through its floor, and a tree wider than Sterling’s aircraft had split along one side and been bound with living vine that someone was patiently training across the wound.

Near the settlement’s center, cooked roots and wet bark gave way to old ash, medicinal paste and iron that repeated rain had never fully washed from the wood. Rhea slowed there, and the people around her did the same without being asked.

A clearing opened between the trees, its disturbed soil already pushing up fresh green shoots. The graves had no names on them; each held an object instead, a carved spoon, patterned cloth, a child’s bracelet, polished stones, broken tools and hunting knives arranged in uneven rows.

Gumm slid from Rhea’s shoulders and wrapped himself around her forearm while she stared at the nearest line. "How many?" she asked, and the old woman answered without softening it. "One hundred and twelve buried. Twenty-six of us survived."

Rhea’s mouth opened, but whatever came first never left it. "There were more bodies than that when I came here." The old woman nodded once and told her, "Some belonged to the people who came with the killer. Some we never found again."

The wording caught Sio before the number did. "The killer?" he asked, and a man with one arm bandaged against his chest stepped forward, burned fur leaving pale skin exposed along one side of his neck.

"There were others here," the man said, "but only one fought the village." He looked toward the broken platforms instead of Rhea. "The others stayed behind him. Sealed clothes, covered faces, cases and restraints. He opened the way. They followed."

Angle crouched when the survivor pulled a woven cover from a wooden crate beside the graves. Burned pieces of pale armour lay inside with scraps of synthetic fabric and several broken restraints, one narrow enough for a human wrist and another shaped for a limb whose joint would not have bent like theirs.

"They didn’t fight unless someone reached them," the survivor continued. "They watched." His good hand tightened against his knee. "When he was done, they started checking us."

Rhea’s claws extended a fraction. "Checking what?"

The old woman rubbed her thumb across the torn edge of her ear. "Teeth. Eyes. Tails. Scars. Blood. They cut people who were still breathing and talked about them as if we weren’t listening." Her gaze travelled toward the graves. "The old were left. Some of the wounded were finished. Younger ones were separated."

A pulse worked beneath Rhea’s jaw. Sio shifted toward her on instinct, then stopped short of touching her; the familiar warmth of her scent survived beneath rain and medicinal paste, but something sharper threaded through it now, and Gumm climbed higher until his head tucked beneath her chin.

"How did you survive?" Rhea asked. The old woman pointed below the platforms, where what Sio had taken for thick walls of roots hid narrow doors nearly indistinguishable from the living wood.

"Storm chambers," she explained. "The children use them when the jungle winds get bad. Four families reached them before the lower bridges were surrounded, and seven hunters were outside the settlement when it happened." The burned man added that others had crawled into the river gorge after being thrown from the platforms, though several had died before they could be brought back.

Rhea looked around again, this time counting faces. "And me?" she asked, and the survivors exchanged glances that made Sio’s shoulders tighten.

"I remember coming through the eastern trees," Rhea continued. "Smoke. Bodies on the bridges. I remember reaching the center." Her fingers pressed into her temple. "After that, I wake near Veilhollow."

The old woman’s expression changed from grief to confusion. "We hoped you knew what happened." A woman holding a sleeping child stepped closer and said they had found fresh footprints after the attackers were gone, along with blood and one body moved from where it had fallen.

"Your tracks went toward the lower stream," she told Rhea, glancing at the bare skin around her wrist. "Then they stopped." Rhea stared down at her hands as though the missing hours might still be written across them.

Angle kept his voice low. "How long between coming here and waking near Veilhollow?" Rhea shook her head and answered, "I don’t know. The cuff was gone when I woke up, and parts of my head felt wrong." When the old woman asked what cuff, Rhea’s mouth tightened and she said nothing, which told Sio enough about how much of the Baron’s prison she wanted to explain here.

Her question to Ursa returned to him with a different shape now. Rhea had not asked whether the Vestige could return forgotten things because she wanted ancient knowledge; she had gone into Veilhollow carrying a hole in her own memory and had been willing to become its examiner for the chance to fill it.

A shout from the outer bridges broke the clearing apart. Two survivors came down carrying a long metal case between them, mud hardened along its sides and roots tangled over part of a lid that showed no visible hinges.

"We found this where the western slope washed out," one of them said as they lowered it beside the crate. The burned man scraped mud from a recessed section and added, "It was buried under roots. We couldn’t open it."

Sio crouched beside the case. His Scar found several connections running through the object, but none behaved like a simple latch or seam, and when Angle asked whether he could open it, Sio ran a thumb over the smooth edge and said, "Not unless you want me to portal random pieces out until something expensive screams."

Despite everything, Rhea’s mouth almost moved. "Was this theirs?" she asked, and the old woman answered, "We think so."

The case changed the silence between Sio and Angle. If it belonged to the people who had destroyed the settlement, opening it could produce the first real trail toward them; it could also point straight toward the kind of force Sio and Angle had survived by avoiding.

Angle met his eyes across the case. Sio knew the thought without needing Silas or his Scar to tell him: they had only just stopped running from one disaster, and Rhea was preparing to walk toward another.

Rhea placed her palm on the muddy metal. "I’m finding them." Angle’s jaw tightened, while Sio looked from her hand to the graves and understood that she had not asked either of them to follow.

One of the survivors reached inside his coat before either man answered. "Then you need to see this too." He drew out a strip of translucent material cracked through one corner, faded symbols running beside a sequence of numbers and a dark mark partly burned away.

"We found it near the river three days after the attack," he said. "There were drag marks around it, deep enough that whatever they moved was heavy." Rhea accepted the strip carefully, and the survivor watched her read symbols none of them yet understood.

His last words changed what the graves meant. "We don’t think everyone they took was dead."