“We didn’t leave anyone,” Neil said, standing up to Thalia’s fury. “Your son told us to hold them back while he was already running for it. It’s not our fault your—”
Thadwick’s other lackey thumped Neil on the arm to shut him up. Venting a decade of frustration at that moment would likely get them both killed by Thadwick’s furious mother. It looked like it might happen anyway until Danielle arrived, placing herself between Thalia and the pair.
“We need to go find him,” Thalia told Danielle, the other pair vanishing from her consideration. Thalia regained some composure as she looked at her friend’s face.
“I’m sorry,” Danielle said, “but we’re still taking stock. People who were isolated are still drifting in; he may well too. Sending more people out before we have headcounts is borrowing trouble when we already have a surplus.”
“He’s my son! If it were Humphrey still missing, would you be sending people out?”
“Humphrey is still missing,” Danielle said, her face as hard as granite.
“Oh,” Thalia said helplessly, after a lengthy pause.
“Did Cassandra come through alright?”
“She’s taking a headcount of the family, right now.”
“I’m glad. I need your best right now, Thalia. Or at least your good enough, which is still better than most people’s best.”
Thalia nodded.
“Good. Now let’s start getting things under control.”
Humphrey eventually turned up, accompanied by the brother-sister pairing of Rick and Phoebe Geller. The survivors of Rick’s team were with them, having lost two of their number. Henry Geller, their flame-wielding damage dealer, had died. Their big front-liner, Jonah, had held back the enemy to let the others escape, his ultimate fate unknown.
Emir and his people finally arrived. They were too late to intervene in the battle, but were a boost to the makeshift camp’s crippled morale. Once word passed that a gold-ranker had arrived to assist, hope was resparked in hearts full of fear. He alone was enough to prevent a repeat of the battle they had just escaped, and there were more silver-rankers on the way.
Emir met with Danielle, getting a rundown of events. There were still people unaccounted for, but the tracking stones in Emir’s possession allowed them to sort the missing from the dead. They organised teams to retrieve the living, with every recovery team having a silver-ranker for safety.
With the initial organisation done, Emir sought out Rufus, Gary watching over him. Rufus’s blank eyes took a moment to register Emir’s presence.
“I failed her,” Rufus said, his voice barely audible.
“No,” Emir said softly, moving to place a hand on his shoulder. “She died as well as any of us could ask. Comrades behind her, enemies in front of her and friends beside her.”
111
Strange Star
Most of the ill-fated expedition was extracted back through the aperture that had been their entry point. On the other side was a recovery camp, ready and waiting. Only silver rankers and bronze-rankers stayed in the astral space, and not all of them.
Every member of the new, streamlined expedition had either arrived with Emir or been hand-picked by Danielle and Thalia. They drew back to the island that had their underwater aperture just offshore, using it as a staging point. As preparations were made to track down their missing people, a steady stream of departing expedition members waded into the water and through the aperture just below the surface. The tricky part was managing the people still unconscious after being healed from extreme injury. The adventurers with water powers were employed to see them through.
With the withdrawal from the astral space organised, the next priority was to retrieve the adventurers who had become separated from the group. Teams led by silver rankers set out, using tracking stones to find them. Only once that was done would they turn to finding and destroying the enemy.
With only the cream of the expedition remaining, bolstered by Emir’s people, Danielle was confident of eradicating the construct army and its masters. Her greatest concern was actually finding them. The follow-up attack she had been fearful of never arrived, and the search teams hadn’t run into anyone but missing expedition members.
“There’s a problem,” Emir said. He was in the command tent with Danielle and Thalia.
“You’ll have to narrow that down,” Danielle said without humour.
“We still have nineteen missing people are still alive, according to their tracking stones,” Emir said. “The problem is that for five of them, their stone indicates they’re still alive, but can’t track them.
“Could they have lost their badges, or had them taken?” Thalia asked.
“If they lost them, we’d still be able to track the badges. The best explanation we can hope for is that the astral space has regions that naturally mask tracking. I’ve seen it in astral spaces before, although they were all less stable than this one.”
“Not unheard of,” Danielle said.
“It could be racial gift evolution,” Thalia said. “Our lost people certainly have the right conditions to trigger it.”
“We know ability evolutions change an ability to meet immediate needs,” Thalia said. “An ability that prevents them from being tracked would make sense.”
“But five people, all getting skill evolutions at once, and all the same or similar abilities?” Danielle asked. “It would be great if that’s what happened and they’re all fine, but we can’t anticipate that being the case.”
“The alternatives get worse from there,” Emir said. “Something may have happened to them that changed their aura so much that they no longer match the aura imprint on their badges, which would break the tracking magic. Which would suggest the enemy found them and did something to them.”
“Who are the five?” Danielle asked.
Emir looked at Thalia with sympathy.
“I’m sorry, but they include Jonah Geller and Thadwick Mercer.”
Thalia’s face twisted but she kept herself under control.
“What are we going to do about it?” she asked.
“Once we have the ones we can track,” Danielle said, “we need to sweep this whole place anyway. The goal is still to find out what is happening to the astral space and stop it. If our people are still out there to find, we’ll find them.”
“And how long will that take?” Thalia asked.
“We’ve surveyed enough to know the astral space is only a fraction of the size of the world it’s attached to,” Danielle said. “We don’t leave until we retrieve all our people, living or dead.”
“Quite right,” Emir said. “And as it happens, my people are specialists at finding things over large areas that are often hidden with magic. Hope is by no means an outlandish choice.”
Thalia nodded. “I want to hear as soon as we find anything.”
“Of course.”
The support camp outside the aperture was an array of large tents set up near the opening. The aperture was in a crevice in a rocky outcropping and people were coming out in a steady stream. On the astral space side, the healers were in triage mode, healing people up just enough to send them through the underwater aperture. The soaking wet adventures were then sorted into two groups. Those in need of further healing were taken to the recovery tents, while the rest were sent to the dormitory tents.
Vincent was in charge of the camp and had roped Jason in as his assistant. There wasn’t much call for Jason’s cleansing ability, just the occasional infection. Vincent was in charge of making the actual decisions, with Jason’s job being to sort out any problems with enacting them.
Jason’s biggest responsibility was dealing with people who weren’t happy with the arrangements and keep them from bothering Vincent. It was, Vincent claimed, the entire reason he chose Jason to assist him. Even after escaping the horrors of battle, there were some who felt the need to complain about the accommodations. These were the ones who never saw the frontline and were evacuated first.