Chapter Text
Bad news has a way of arriving like it owns the room.
Not loud. Not frantic. Just inevitable, sealed, sanctioned, and heavy enough that everyone else instinctively steps back so it can land properly.
The report comes late.
It comes thick.
It comes wearing a Victoria seal.
The envelope is too fine for routine deployment orders, paper pressed smooth as bone. The wax bears the imprint of a lion half-worn down by repetition, as if whoever stamped it has been using the same seal through three different crises and one quiet collapse, and the lion has grown tired of roaring.
Ophel turns it over once in her hands. Her thumb runs along the edge like she’s checking the sharpness of a blade.
The briefing room is quiet around her: the low hum of Rhodes Island’s systems embedded in the walls, the faint rattle of ventilation, the murmur of operators moving outside the door. The air smells faintly of burnt coffee and disinfectant, comforting in the way an old scar is comforting. Familiar. Predictable. Owned.
“Doctor?” A logistics operator hovers at the doorway, clipboard tucked to her chest like a shield. “Do you need-”
“I’m reading,” Ophel says.
Her voice is calm. Pleasant enough. The kind of tone that doesn’t invite further questions, the kind of tone that makes people remember she can be kind and still be unmovable.
The operator nods and withdraws. The door clicks shut.
Ophel is alone with the letter and the weight of it.
She breaks the seal with her thumb.
The paper sighs as it opens.
For a moment, she lets herself register the texture: crisp, expensive, smug. Victoria never wastes the chance to remind you it can still afford quality paper while its countryside burns.
Then she reads.
There’s the usual cluttered precision of high-level requests. Territory names. Coordinates. A polite description of things that anyone in Victoria would simply call war.
-To Rhodes Island,
in light of the recent escalation in the western Victoria front…-
She skims.
She’s practiced at skimming. Paperwork is a language of its own: you learn to find the truth in the spaces between the phrasing.
Mobile cities requisitioning each other’s supply lines, requisitioning, as if theft becomes lawful when you say it with enough vowels. Local militias declaring themselves “transitional governments.” Nobles shifting allegiance between breakfast and supper, trying on loyalties like coats. Mentions of artillery. Of Sarkaz contractors hired for “stabilization.” Of civilians being moved like cargo because it’s cheaper than letting them stay where they are.
She reads it all. She registers it.
None of it sticks.
Not because it isn’t horrifying.
Because horror is old news.
What catches is the pattern underneath: Victoria’s spine has cracked, and the fracture is being papered over with titles and seals and polite requests for help that sound like invitations until you notice how urgently they’re written.
Ophel’s eyes track the phrasing the way they track vitals. A line is too smooth. A word is too carefully chosen. A paragraph is trying not to panic.
There.
The tone shifts, just slightly. The diplomatic insulation thins.
-Given prior experience in Victorian theatres,
the mission lead is to be: Doctor Ophel, Rhodes Island.-
Of course.
They call it experience when what they mean is survivor.
Her name sits on Victorian paper like a foreign object. Black ink, official weight. She doesn’t know if she likes the way it looks. She doesn’t know if she likes that it looks like it belongs.
She keeps reading.
-A liaison from local intelligence will be assigned to assist with navigation,
noble protocols, and internal security risks.-
She already knows.
The skin between her shoulder blades tightens, an old warning written in nerves, the kind that flares before memory catches up. Her body always remembers first. Her mind follows later, resentful.
She reads it anyway.
-Designated liaison: “Puzzle” (Fischer), Victoria Intelligence Division,
current attachment: Rhodes Island collaborative operations.-
The room tilts.
Not enough to worry anyone but her.
For a moment there is no paper, no desk, no neatly stacked dossiers and neutral Rhodes Island lighting. Just a hot flash of memory: winter stone, breath fogging in bad air, the echo of a shouted order that did not care if she lived, the hiss of metal leaving air.
She blinks once.
The briefing room returns, whole and indifferent.
Puzzle.
They’ve sent her Puzzle.
Of course they have.
Rhodes Island likes to talk about trust in careful, rational paragraphs. It talks about transparency and cooperation and healing as if the right words can keep blood off the floor.
Victoria doesn’t bother.
Victoria just keeps shoving the same knife in until you either get used to the taste of metal or you die.
“Liaison,” Ophel murmurs.
The word is too soft to be mocking and too hard to be neutral. It sits in her mouth like a pill she refuses to swallow.
She flips to the next page.
There are addenda. A joint operations schedule. Names of local contacts. Supply recommendations for extended field work. Lists of armored transport access codes. A section on “community relations,” written by someone who has never had to convince a starving village that Rhodes Island isn’t a second invading force with better manners.
And threaded through all of it, the reason they’re being invited at all:
Victoria’s institutions are failing in ways the nobility refuses to admit aloud.
Hospitals are overloaded, understaffed, or quietly bought. Infected communities are being pushed into the margins and then blamed for the disease they were abandoned with. Entire rural districts are cut off when a mobile city decides it no longer wants to share roads. Trade routes have become battlefields. The moment you run out of antibiotics, you start losing wars long before you lose territory.
Rhodes Island is not a country. It is not an army. It is not bound to Victoria’s bloodline logic.
That is why they want it.
Neutrality is useful when your factions can’t agree on who’s allowed to bleed.
Rhodes Island can move medicine where local authorities refuse to.
It can treat the Infected without making a political statement simply by existing.
It can provide logistics and triage and expertise without swearing fealty to a duke whose banner might change tomorrow.
It can be blamed when things go wrong.
That, too, is a kind of usefulness.
Ophel keeps reading until she reaches the bottom. The paper has grown heavier without changing weight.
Kal’tsit’s handwriting sits there like a scalpel: clean, exact, and too sharp to mistake for kindness.
-Doctor.
I understand your reluctance.
He has proven useful. We require him.
So do you.-
The sentence stops just short of apology.
Below it, three words, smaller:
-You will not be alone.-
Ophel folds the letter slowly.
Her fingers tremble once and then stop, as if they’ve been trained out of the habit.
She sits with it in her lap for a moment, just long enough for the first wave of anger to pass and the second wave to arrive, colder and more controlled.
Anger is easy. Anger has direction.
It points at Victoria.
It points at Puzzle.
It points at Kal’tsit for thinking that usefulness is the same thing as safety.
But beneath anger is something worse: the knowledge that, tactically, they’re right.
Victoria is a maze built by people who like watching outsiders get lost.
The front is fluid. Borders are performative. Half the “governments” are men with rifles and good stationery. The noble houses speak in codes layered over codes. If you don’t know which name to say in which room, you get someone killed by accident and then called irresponsible for it.
Rhodes Island doesn’t just need medicine in Victoria.
It needs translation.
Not language translation. Culture translation.
It needs someone who can read an invitation and hear the threat inside it.
Someone who can tell the difference between a road and a path.
Someone who can walk into a noble estate and know which hallway is a courtesy and which one is a trap.
Someone like Puzzle.
Ophel’s hand tightens on the folded letter until the paper complains.
She exhales.
Then she stands.
– – – – –
Packing feels like assembling a confession and pretending it’s logistics.
The first trunk receives the standard field kit: portable terminal, encrypted comms equipment, ammunition rolls, operator dossiers, maps that will be useless in three days when the front shifts again. Spare coat. Second spare coat. Victoria is fond of weather that punishes optimism.
She moves efficiently, not because she isn’t rattled, but because efficiency is how she stays intact. She is not the Doctor who forgets things. She is not the Doctor who hesitates. Hesitation is how people die around you.
The second case comes last.
It’s half the size and twice the weight, dull metal with reinforced corners and a lock that clicks closed with the small, decisive sound of something that has heard too many secrets and intends to keep them.
She sets it on the desk and opens it.
Inside: order.
Vials lined in dense foam. Ampoules with handwritten labels and color-coded bands. Blister packs arranged into doses. Glass syringes in padded sleeves.
Ophel checks each one, lips moving silently through names and quantities like a prayer she doesn’t believe in but keeps reciting anyway.
One week’s worth. Two. A month, if she stretches, if she’s careful, if nothing happens that shouldn’t.
Her fingers hover above one particular vial, the liquid inside catching the light in a way that makes it look thicker than it is.
She doesn’t take it.
Not yet.
She closes the lid.
The motion is steady. Her breath is not entirely.
A knock sounds against the half-open door.
“Doctor Ophel?” A medic leans in, coat half-buttoned, eyes sharp behind professional weariness. “You left this on the counter.”
He holds up a small amber bottle. The label is blank except for a neat, tight code only someone from Medical would decipher at a glance.
“So I did,” she says.
He steps inside and passes it to her. His gaze flicks to the metal case, lingers a heartbeat too long.
“Are you expecting trouble?” he asks, tone light in the way medics use when they’re trying not to sound like they’re prying.
Ophel doesn’t look up. She slots the bottle into its exact foam cutout.
“I’m going to Victoria,” she says. “I would be foolish not to.”
The medic huffs a breath that isn’t quite a laugh. “If you need additional supplies routed along, send word. We’ll prioritize.”
“I know.” Her voice softens by a fraction, not warmth, exactly, but recognition. “Thank you.”
He hesitates in the doorway, as if there’s something he wants to say and knows better than to voice. In the end, he settles for a simple:
“Stay alive, Doctor.”
“I’ll make an effort,” she replies.
When he’s gone, Ophel locks the case and threads the key onto the chain already around her wrist. It sits there with three other small, unremarkable things that could unlock far too much.
She flexes her fingers.
The ache that answers is familiar, old, and not yet explained to anyone who writes mission reports.
- - - - -
Travel tastes like metal and reheated air.
Rhodes Island takes her as close as it dares. After that, transfer to a smaller, leaner landship. Then armored transports that smell of oil, sweat, and the resigned patience of people who know they are heading toward a field where someone else has already died.
Ophel spends most of it not sleeping.
She reads. Annotates. Redraws routes until the lines blur. She marks not only roads but likely ambush points, choke points, places where a mobile city can shut down access with a single bureaucratic decision.
Each time Puzzle’s name appears in the briefing documents, she steps around it with the practiced ease of someone avoiding a crack in the floor.
He is everywhere in the paperwork and nowhere at all: liaison, consultant, attached intelligence asset. His codename sits in bullet points like a piece of shrapnel lodged too deep to remove.
Outside the slit windows, Victoria passes in muted grays and tired greens.
Abandoned farmsteads with doors swinging loose, like someone left quickly and never came back. Fields trampled into mud by transport treads. Smoke from something burning slow in the distance, not necessarily battle, sometimes just people making the decision to destroy what they can’t carry.
Once, they pass a line of refugees moving along a parallel road. Too far away to speak to. Close enough to see: bundled shapes, uneven pace, someone carrying something that might be a child or might be all they own.
Ophel watches until the transport bumps and the scene stutters out of frame.
The medical case rides strapped beneath her bench, weight a constant pull against the floor.
When the transport hits a rut, her body answers with an electric jolt up her left side.
She slides a hand down to the latch, fingers resting on the metal.
Not opening it. Just touching.
The pain flares, bright and hot, then ebbs back, leaving familiar numbness along her ribs and down her arm. Her fingers go faintly clumsy for a breath.
She breathes through her teeth until the world sharpens again.
No one asks.
Her operators are trained. They see everything and comment on nothing unless invited. One of them, a young Guard, new enough to still look concerned, offers her a canteen afterward.
“Water, Doctor?”
She takes it. “Thank you.”
The rest of the ride shakes itself out in miles and unsaid things.
- - - - -
The rendezvous point is an old estate no one loved enough to defend properly when the front rolled past.
Half the outer wall is gone, teeth of stone chewed away by artillery. The remaining structure hunches against the landscape like it’s hoping the war will forget it by accident.
Victoria never forgets its own.
Rhodes Island’s colors hang from a broken balcony, fluttering in a wind that smells of wet soil and cordite. The temporary command post has been set up in what used to be a receiving hall: long table, maps pinned with knives, operators moving like chess pieces someone finally taught how to argue with the board.
The transport doors hiss open.
Ophel steps down, boots crunching on gravel and fallen plaster. The air is cold enough to bite her lungs. She rolls her shoulders and feels the familiar tug and burn along her left side beneath coat and layers, an old injury complaining in a new climate.
The medical case comes after her, carried by two operators who pretend it weighs less than it does.
Amiya is waiting at the hall’s entrance, expression composed, ears tipped forward in that subtle way that means she’s worried but refusing to let worry become leadership.
“Doctor,” Amiya greets. “You made good time.”
“Depends on who you ask.” Ophel scans the estate automatically, exits, sightlines, cover points, habitual traffic. Her brain runs threat assessment the way other people run small talk. “Where are we on liaison status?”
A flicker of something crosses Amiya’s face. Not quite discomfort. Not quite apology.
“He arrived an hour ago,” she says. “I briefed him on general parameters. He’s reviewing local intelligence now.”
Of course he is.
“Is he in the main hall?” Ophel asks.
“In the side room. Less… distractions.” Amiya pauses. “Do you want time before-”
“No.” Ophel cuts that off gently, because Amiya is trying to be kind and kindness is a trap when you can’t afford it. “If he’s part of the mission, I want him in the room before we start dividing responsibilities. The longer we pretend he’s not here, the worse it will get.”
Amiya nods, relief mingled with concern. “All right. I’ll send someone to-”
“No.” Ophel adjusts the strap of her satchel, ignoring how it presses into the sore point beneath. “I’ll go.”
- - - - -
The side room is smaller, quieter.
Once it might have been a study; now it’s storage for extra maps, crates of supplies, and the kind of conversations that don’t belong on official logs.
He’s at the table with his back partly turned, coat unbuttoned, shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms in the universal language of men who intend to work instead of posture. Papers fan out in a careful mess around him, weighted at the corners by stray cartridges and a chipped mug.
He is leaner than she remembers.
Or maybe the last time she saw him, she was too busy bleeding to notice the details.
“Any significant changes in deployment since the last report?” a comms officer asks from the doorway, hovering like someone who knows better than to get too close.
“We have a window for an update in fifteen.”
“Send them the roads,” the man at the table answers without looking up. His voice is the same: low, precise, more velvet than stone. “Not the paths. They won’t respect the difference yet.”
The comms officer hesitates, as if he wants to ask what that means and senses it’s a question with teeth.
“Understood,” he says, and slips away, leaving the door slightly ajar.
Ophel shifts her grip on the frame and steps in.
“Agent Puzzle,” she says.
He doesn’t startle. Of course he doesn’t. He turns in one smooth, contained movement, like someone who has spent a lifetime teaching his body to never betray surprise.
Up close, the changes are more obvious. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes, exhaustion’s signature. Hair a little longer, braided back at the nape. The polite neatness of a man who knows he’ll be judged for disorder. His tail flicks once behind him, controlled, a metronome that skips a beat and immediately corrects itself.
For a heartbeat, neither of them speaks.
Then he smiles.
It is not an apology. It is too careful for that. It’s the kind of smile men in Victoria wear when they want you to underestimate how many knives are currently in reach.
“Doctor,” he says, and the word lands somewhere between greeting and test.
Ophel’s spine straightens on instinct.
“Ophel,” he adds, quieter.
Like an afterthought.
Like a dare.
The sound drops straight into the hollow of her chest, where something tightens in protest.
“Fischer,” she returns, equally soft, equally sharp. “I see you’re still choosing the worst possible assignments.”
A flicker in his eyes, amusement or recognition, or both wearing the same mask.
“Likewise,” he says.
He takes her in the way he takes in a map: head tilted a fraction, gaze moving in measured sweeps, cataloguing posture, tension, what she’s hiding and how hard she’s working to hide it.
“You’re late,” he observes.
“Blame the roads,” she replies. “Victoria’s in pieces.”
“It usually is,” he says. “We just notice more when we trip.”
His gaze shifts, briefly, to the reinforced medical case the operators set down near the door earlier. His eyes linger on the lock, on the corners, on the way Ophel stands subtly between it and him without thinking.
“New toy?” he asks.
“Old problem,” she answers.
Their gazes meet and hold.
Silence stretches, thinning until it threatens to become fragile.
Ophel lets it.
If it breaks, she wants him to be the one holding the shards.
Puzzle exhales first, small, controlled. Not surrender, exactly. A deliberate step back into professionalism.
“You’ve read the mission parameters,” he says, voice settling into the safe cadence of work. “Local factions. Unstable fronts. The usual game of who owns which ruined building this week.”
“I have,” Ophel says. “I assume that’s the sanitized version.”
“That’s the version they were willing to put in writing.” He taps one of the papers. “The real version is-”
“Messier,” she finishes.
“Always.” A corner of his mouth lifts. “That’s why they sent me.”
“That,” Ophel says, “is exactly why I objected.”
His eyes sharpen.
“And yet,” he says softly, “here we are.”
“Here we are,” she echoes.
There are a dozen things she could say. She can feel them behind her teeth like splinters:
You don’t get to stand near me again like nothing happened.
I still wake up tasting what you taught me to fear.
What did Victoria make of you after that day?
Instead, she picks the only line that keeps her upright.
“Let me be perfectly clear,” she says, voice calm enough to pass for cold. “You are here because this operation needs your knowledge of Victoria. We are not here to resolve anything.”
“Anything?” he repeats mildly. “That’s a broad category.”
“I’m confident you can infer the contents.”
His gaze lingers on her face a moment too long, long enough to register the effort it costs her to keep herself smooth.
Then he nods, slow.
“As you wish,” he says. “I have no intention of making your life more difficult than necessary.”
“Good,” Ophel replies. “It’s already complicated enough.”
She turns as if to leave, then stops with her hand on the doorjamb, the gesture casual only if you don’t know her well enough to see it as restraint.
“Briefing in twenty minutes,” she says without looking back. “You’ll be there.”
It isn’t a question.
“Of course,” Puzzle says. “I’d hate to disappoint you.”
Ophel’s fingers tighten on the wood.
“You already did,” she says, and walks out before he can answer.
Behind her, the old study breathes in the dust of their words and lets it settle into the cracks.
Outside, war continues without caring who they used to be to each other.
The medical case waits in the corner of the command hall, metal dull in thin light. No one asks what’s inside.
For now, it’s just another box in a building full of them.
The story of why she travels with enough medicine for a small infirmary will have to wait its turn.