Dessin's next report was due in eleven days, and it was that single, immovable number that finally gave Marek's plan its shape.

"He reports on the fifteenth," Dessin explained, spreading a hand-drawn schedule across the map table with considerably more confidence than he'd shown a week prior, the particular steadiness of a man who'd finally been given something useful to do with his fear. "Standard cycle — a rider collects the letter from the dead drop behind the old mill, carries it to the depot, returns with instructions or, occasionally, nothing at all if there's nothing new to convey. The guard rotation always shifts the day before a collection, though I never understood why until now. I'd wager it's so a fresh set of eyes reviews whatever comes in."

"Which means the day before the collection, the guards are least familiar with the depot's current rhythm," Marek said, already tracing possibilities across the sketch. "New rotation, new faces, less certainty about what's normal and what isn't. That's our window, if we're going to have one at all."

*That's a narrow margin to build an entire rescue around,* Eric said, wary despite the genuine usefulness of the intelligence. *One day, one shift change, and everything has to go right the first time.*

Vane relayed it, and Marek's expression tightened in acknowledgment. "I know it's narrow, Marshal. I don't love it either. But narrow and real beats wide and imaginary. We wait for a better opportunity that may never come, or we take the one Dessin's actually handed us."

"We take it," Vane said, after a long moment's consideration. "But we plan for every way it could go wrong, not just the way we want it to go right."

Dessin lingered after the others had begun studying the map in earnest, catching Vane's eye with the particular hesitance of a man unused to being asked his opinion on matters beyond his station. "Marshal — if it helps, I could request a delay. Claim some minor complication with the supply figures, buy an extra few days if the timing doesn't suit."

"Would that raise suspicion?" Vane asked.

"Possibly. I've never delayed a report before. But I'd rather risk suspicion than have you walk in unprepared because I insisted on keeping to a schedule that no longer served anyone's interest but hers."

"Noted," Vane said. "We'll hold that option in reserve. For now, we build around the fifteenth and adjust only if we must."

Dessin nodded, some of his old anxious deference giving way to something steadier — the particular confidence of a man discovering, perhaps for the first time in three years, that his judgment was actually being weighed rather than merely tolerated.

---

The plan, once Talwyn, Marek, and Vane had spent the better part of two days refining it, was deliberately modest in scope — not an assault, Marek insisted repeatedly, but an extraction, a distinction that mattered considerably more in practice than it might have sounded in the abstract.

"Six of us," Marek said, laying out the final roster. "Myself, Osric, two more of my quietest scouts. Captain Adler and Kael, for exactly the reason we discussed — if there's another bonded subject inside, Kael may sense them before any of us could locate them by sight alone. And you, Marshal, though I'll say plainly I'd rather you stayed at the garrison and let me run this myself."

"Not a chance," Vane said, flat.

"I expected as much," Marek said, dry. "But hear the reasoning at least. If something goes wrong in there, the garrison needs its Marshal alive and here to answer for it, not trapped or worse behind depot walls that officially don't exist."

*He's not wrong to worry,* Eric said, quiet, meant only for Vane. *But I think you already know you're not staying behind either way.*

*I know,* Vane answered, silent. *I just needed to hear someone say the responsible thing out loud before I ignored it anyway.*

"I hear the reasoning," Vane said aloud. "And I'm still going. If there are people in there who've been waiting years for someone to come, I want them to see their Marshal walk through that door himself, not simply hear secondhand that someone eventually cared enough to send help."

Marek studied him a long moment, then nodded, some old resignation settling into acceptance. "Then we go over the entry route again, from the beginning, until every one of us could walk it blind."

"One more thing," Talwyn added, from where he'd been quietly reviewing the roster. "I'd like to accompany you as far as the tree line, if not further. Not for the extraction itself — I'm no soldier, and I won't pretend otherwise — but if there are documents inside worth reading, records of Voss's actual work, I'd rather be close enough to examine them myself than wait for a secondhand description that might miss what actually matters."

"That's a risk I'm not eager to add to the roster," Marek said, wary.

"I understand the concern. But thirty years of buried records won't decode themselves, Marek, and I suspect whatever Voss keeps in that building will need a scholar's eye more than a soldier's, if we're to make proper use of it afterward." Talwyn's gaze was steady, unflinching despite his evident nerves. "I've spent my whole career reading about danger from the safety of an archive. I'd like, once, to actually be useful at the moment it matters most."

Vane weighed the request, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he respected it too much to refuse outright. "The tree line only, and you stay with whoever's holding the perimeter. If it goes badly, you retreat the instant Marek gives the word, no arguments."

"Agreed," Talwyn said, visibly relieved. "Thank you, Marshal."

---

They rehearsed for six straight days — the approach through the tree line, the precise count of steps to the depot's east wall where Marek's scouts had identified the weakest point of observation, the signal Kael would give the instant he sensed another bonded presence, the fallback routes if the guard rotation didn't shift exactly as Dessin predicted. Eric found himself, over those days, settling into something he recognized from his old life without quite expecting to find it again — the particular focus of preparing meticulously for a high-stakes procedure, running through contingencies until the fear of the unknown gave way to the calm competence of genuine readiness.

*You've done this before,* Vane observed, quiet, during one of the rare still moments between rehearsals. *Not this, exactly. But this feeling. Preparing for something that could go badly wrong.*

*Surgery,* Eric said. *Every operation I ever performed started exactly like this. Rehearse until the fear stops being useful and starts just being noise, then set it aside and do the work. I didn't expect to find the same rhythm again, on this side of things, but I suppose fear doesn't care what body it's borrowing.*

*Does it help? Knowing the rhythm?*

*Some. Mostly it reminds me that competence and fear aren't opposites. You can be both terrified and entirely capable at once. I proved that a hundred times over an operating table, and I intend to prove it again in eleven days.*

Vane's hand found his own chest, slow and steady, the gesture long since worn smooth with familiarity. "Ten now."

*Ten,* Eric agreed. *Not that either of us is counting.*

"Obviously not," Vane said, dry, and something in the exchange — the small, worn humor of two people who trusted each other enough to make jokes even at the edge of genuine danger — settled something anxious in Eric's chest that no amount of rehearsal alone could have managed.

---

Marek ran the fourth rehearsal in full darkness, insisting the team walk the approach route with no lantern at all, relying only on the faint starlight and the muscle memory they'd built over the preceding days.

"If something goes wrong in there, you won't have the luxury of light to fall back on," he said, when Osric grumbled about the difficulty of it. "Better to stumble here, on ground we control, than there, where a misstep costs more than pride."

Vane found the darkness oddly clarifying rather than disorienting, the absence of sight sharpening every other sense until he could track the position of each teammate by sound and breath alone. *You're better at this than you were a week ago,* Eric observed, quiet approval threading through the words. *Whatever else this mission costs us, you've clearly learned something real from Marek's drilling.*

*High praise, from a physician who spent his old life indoors under good lighting.*

*I contain multitudes,* Eric said, echoing Vane's own words back at him with evident amusement. *Also, I've been paying very close attention. It's difficult not to, given how thoroughly you insist on sharing every sensation with me whether I ask for it or not.*

"That's the nature of the bond, not a personal failing," Vane muttered, low enough that only Eric could hear it over the rustle of the others moving through the dark ahead.

*I didn't say it was a failing. I rather like the view, all things considered.*

Vane's step faltered, just slightly, at that, and he covered the stumble with a muttered curse aimed at a root that had, in fact, done nothing to trip him. Marek, several paces ahead, called back without turning. "Everything all right, Marshal?"

"Fine," Vane said, and did not elaborate further, though the warmth spreading through his chest had considerably less to do with exertion than Marek likely assumed.

They completed the rehearsal in silence after that, each of them settling into the particular focus that came only in the final stretch before real danger, and when Marek finally called the exercise complete, satisfaction evident even in the dark, something in the team's collective bearing had shifted — less like soldiers merely following orders, more like people who had, over six days of shared preparation, begun to trust each other with something considerably heavier than a simple mission.

---

The night before the final rehearsal, Freya sought Vane out again, Kael's shimmer steady but subdued at her collarbone, carrying a question she'd clearly turned over for some time before finally voicing it.

"If Mira's really in there," she said, without preamble, "and we can only reasonably extract a few people safely on the first attempt — what happens to the others? Do we choose who gets saved and who waits for a second try that might never come?"

The question landed heavier than Eric had expected, and he felt Vane's own hesitation mirror his, neither of them possessing an answer that didn't feel, in some fundamental way, insufficient to the weight of what was actually being asked.

*I don't know,* Eric admitted, honest rather than comforting. *I wish I had a better answer than that. But I know we go in with the goal of getting everyone out if it's at all possible, and we adjust in real time if it isn't, rather than deciding in advance who matters less.*

Vane relayed it, and Freya's jaw tightened, some old grief moving behind her eyes. "That's not really an answer."

"No," Vane agreed, quiet. "It isn't. I don't have one, Captain. I only have the promise that nobody in there gets left behind because it was convenient to leave them, and the honest admission that I can't guarantee we'll manage everyone regardless."

Freya held his gaze a long moment, then nodded slowly, some of the old guardedness she'd carried since her arrival finally, fully absent from the gesture. "That's more honesty than I expected. Thank you for not pretending otherwise."

Kael's voice came through then, quiet and unprompted, carrying a weight Eric hadn't expected from him. *For what it's worth, Marshal — I would rather go in and get none of us out safely than sit here and do nothing while people suffer the way I once feared Freya might. Whatever the cost turns out to be, I'd choose trying over waiting, every time.*

Vane relayed it, and something in Freya's expression softened at hearing her own bonded voice speak so plainly to someone else. "He means that. I've watched him choose exactly that kind of risk before, on my behalf. I trust him to mean it now, on behalf of strangers."

*Tell them both,* Eric said, *that courage like that is precisely why I believe we'll get more people out of that depot than either of us currently dares hope.*

"I've learned, this past year, that pretending certainty where none exists tends to cost more than admitting the truth ever does," Vane said. "Whatever we find in there, we face it as it actually is, not as we wish it were."

She left him with that, and Vane sat alone a while in the gathering dark, Eric's quiet steadiness the only company he needed as the count of days ran down toward the fifteenth, and whatever waited for them behind the depot's unmarked walls.

---

Talwyn found him there some time later, a fresh page of notes clutched in one hand, though he hesitated at the tent's entrance rather than entering immediately.

"You look like a man carrying more than the mission warrants," the old scholar observed, settling uninvited onto the low bench across from Vane. "Or perhaps exactly as much as it warrants, and I simply don't yet know the full weight of it."

"Freya asked me who we choose, if we can't save everyone," Vane said, quiet. "I didn't have a good answer."

"There isn't one," Talwyn said, without softening it. "Not a good one, at any rate. I've read enough history to know that every rescue ever attempted against long odds carries exactly that horror buried somewhere in its planning, whether the planners admit it aloud or not. The honest answer is that you do everything within your power to make the choice unnecessary, and you live with whatever remains if it isn't."

*He's right,* Eric said, quiet. *It's not comforting. But it's true, and I'd rather face the mission with that truth than with a false promise we might not be able to keep.*

Vane relayed it, and Talwyn inclined his head, something almost gentle in the gesture. "Your physician has a clearer head about this than most commanders I've served under, Marshal, if I may say so."

"He usually does," Vane said, and meant it more than the dry humor of the words suggested.

Talwyn rose to leave, then paused, turning back with the particular hesitance of a man who had one more thing to say and wasn't certain it was his place to say it. "For what it's worth — whatever you find in that depot, however it goes, you've already done more to stop this than anyone in thirty years managed. That's worth remembering, whatever the fifteenth brings."

He left before Vane could find a response worthy of the sentiment, and the tent settled back into quiet, the weight of thirty years finally, at long last, beginning to feel like something that could actually be answered rather than merely endured.

---

Later, once the lamps had burned low and the rehearsals for the day had finally, mercifully concluded, Vane lay on the narrow cot with one arm flung across his eyes, the accumulated exhaustion of six days' preparation finally catching up to him all at once.

*You should eat something,* Eric said, gentle but insistent, the particular tone he reserved for matters of Vane's own stubborn neglect of his body's needs. *You've barely touched food today, and whatever the fifteenth demands of you, it won't be served by a body running on nothing but nerves and rehearsal.*

"Not hungry," Vane said, though the admission came out more tired than defiant.

*I know. Humor me anyway.* Eric let warmth thread through the insistence, softening what might otherwise have been simple nagging into something gentler. *I spent years watching soldiers collapse from exhaustion they swore they didn't feel, right up until the moment their bodies stopped listening to their pride. I'd rather not add you to that list ten days before I need you at your sharpest.*

Vane huffed something almost like a laugh and levered himself upright, reaching for the half-forgotten bread and dried meat someone had left near the tent's entrance hours before. "Bossy."

*Thorough,* Eric corrected, and let something warmer color the exchange as Vane ate, slow and reluctant at first, then with more genuine appetite as his body reminded him, belatedly, how hungry it actually was. *Better.*

"You're insufferable when you're right."

*I'm insufferable regardless. Being right just makes it more noticeable.*

Vane's mouth curved, real amusement finally breaking through the day's heaviness, and once the meal was finished he set the plate aside and simply sat a while, letting the quiet stretch between them without any particular urgency to fill it. The lamp guttered low, casting long shadows across the tent's canvas walls, and Eric felt, through the bond, the slow unwinding of tension that came only when Vane allowed himself, fully, to stop bracing against the next demand the day might make of him.

*Come here,* Eric said, soft, echoing the request from nights before, and Vane obeyed without argument this time, settling back against the thin pillow with his hand pressed flat over his own sternum, the old gesture gone entirely unguarded now that no one remained to witness it but the two of them.

*Ten days,* Vane murmured, eyes already drifting closed. "Feels like both too long and not nearly long enough."

*I know.* Eric let the warmth of the bond carry the words, steady and unhurried. *Whatever the fifteenth brings, we meet it exactly the way we've met everything else. Together, and choosing it, every single time it matters.*

Vane's breathing slowed, evened, the last of the day's tension finally bleeding away into something like rest, and Eric stayed with him through the quiet hours that followed, counting down, in his own way, the same ten days Vane had claimed not to be counting at all.