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Alex had stopped expecting MI6 extractions to arrive on time sometime after his fifteenth birthday.
By now, at nineteen, he was almost insulted by how predictable they were.
He crouched in the shadow of a collapsed stone wall and checked his watch for the fourth time in twelve minutes, less because he thought the answer would change and more because the motion gave his hands something to do besides shake. The digits glowed faintly in the dark. Twenty-three past midnight.
The extraction window had opened forty minutes ago.
He’d had a satellite phone once. It had died somewhere in the Călimani Mountains two days earlier after an argument with a concrete floor, a burst pipe, and one of General Vaduva’s men deciding that smashing communications equipment was a reasonable substitute for competence. Alex had managed to destroy the listening post, copy most of the files he’d been sent in for, and leave the facility in a state MI6 would probably describe as “unfortunate but strategically useful.”
He’d also taken a knife to the side, landed badly jumping a perimeter wall, and spent the last six hours hiking through wet forest on three hours of sleep and adrenaline that had given up pretending to be renewable.
His side hurt every time he inhaled properly. So he wasn’t inhaling properly.
His right ankle wasn’t broken, which was the sort of good news that only mattered when the alternative was worse. It still protested every step with a sharp pulse that climbed the back of his leg and settled somewhere behind his knee. His jacket stuck damply to the wound at his ribs. He didn’t think he was bleeding heavily anymore. He also didn’t particularly want to check.
The rendezvous point was an abandoned shepherd’s hut on a slope overlooking a narrow road that counted as infrastructure only because Romania was being generous with the definition. Mrs. Jones’s people had told him to get there by midnight and wait for a vehicle. They had not specified how long. They rarely did. The omission had once annoyed him. Now it merely confirmed what he already knew: if the car came, it came. If it didn’t, he walked until he found something else.
Alex leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes for three seconds.
Not sleep. Just a pause.
Wind moved through the trees below, carrying the smell of pine, damp soil, and old snow somewhere higher up the mountain. The clouds had thinned enough to let a slice of moonlight over the ridge. It silvered the broken stones of the hut, the rough ground, the line of the road below.
Then the sky tore open.
Alex’s eyes snapped up.
Something burned across the darkness from east to west, not high and distant like an ordinary meteor, but low enough that, for one disorienting second, it looked as if it were skimming the tops of the trees. White-gold at the edges, blue at the center, it crossed far too fast and at entirely the wrong angle. There was no fragmentation, no trailing scatter of debris. Just one hard line of impossible light.
It vanished beyond the ridge to his left.
A second later, the ground jumped.
Not a long rolling tremor. One sharp, contained impact that shivered through the stones under Alex’s boots and sent a brief flock of night birds up from the trees. Somewhere down the slope, loose rock rattled and settled.
Alex stayed very still.
He listened.
No second impact. No distant explosion. No spreading firelight through the forest.
He let out a breath that caught halfway in his chest and made the wound at his side flare. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered.
His options rearranged themselves unpleasantly.
Ignore it and stay at the rendezvous, hoping MI6 had only decided to be late rather than incompetent.
Or investigate the thing that had just fallen out of the sky less than a kilometer away and risk missing extraction entirely.
Under ordinary circumstances, he might have stayed put. Under ordinary circumstances, there also would not have been an unidentified atmospheric event landing near his exit route in the middle of nowhere.
Unknown variables were bad. Unknown variables that landed nearby were worse.
Alex pushed himself upright, swallowed against the dizziness that followed, and started moving.
He didn’t go directly. That would have been stupid even if he hadn’t been tired enough to mistake stubbornness for strategy. Instead, he cut across the slope, keeping above the likely impact point so he could approach with a view of the surrounding ground. The terrain did him no favors. Wet needles slid under his boots. Rocks shifted where he trusted them not to. Low branches clawed at his sleeves. Twice, he had to stop and brace a hand against a tree while the pain in his side narrowed his vision into something small and sharp.
The closer he got, the quieter the forest became. The night should have been full of sound—wind, insects, something. Instead, there was pressure in the silence, as if the air itself had decided to wait.
By the time he reached the edge of the clearing, his breathing had gone thin and shallow. Sweat chilled at the back of his neck despite the cold.
The crater wasn’t what it should have been.
For something that had hit with enough force to shake the hillside, the damage was wrong. The clearing had once been a patch of stunted grass and scattered stone bordered by trees; now the ground dipped inward in a near-perfect circle, maybe eight or nine meters across. The earth hadn’t exploded outward. It looked pressed down, compressed neatly into itself, as if something had driven straight through the surface and persuaded the rest of the world to get out of the way.
No scattered debris. No broken metal. No flames.
Heat shimmered faintly at the center.
Alex scanned the tree line, then the sky, then the crater again. Nothing moved.
He could still leave.
That was the sensible choice. He had no support, limited mobility, and no particular obligation to investigate alien nonsense in rural Romania on behalf of a government that couldn’t manage the revolutionary task of showing up where it said it would.
He knew all of that.
He went anyway.
The slope of the crater gave under his boots in soft, warm soil. He descended slowly, conserving balance, every muscle tense enough to hurt. At the bottom, the air smelled faintly metallic, with an edge of ozone he associated with electrical fires and laboratories that had gone very wrong.
There was something kneeling in the center.
At first, his exhausted mind refused to categorize it. Human shape, yes, broadly. Two arms. Two legs. Head. Shoulders. But the lines were wrong—too seamless in some places, too deliberate in others. It was on its knees, hands braced against its thighs and head angled slightly forward, as if whatever had brought it down had not quite finished letting go. Its surface was dark, almost matte black, but caught the moonlight in muted blue at the edges. A rifle rested across its back. A sidearm sat holstered at the hip. There was also a sword, or what Alex thought was a sword, though he couldn’t immediately tell how it was attached.
Armor, he thought.
No.
Not quite armor.
He couldn’t see where it opened. Couldn’t see how it was worn. No visible seams. No catches. No signs of a human body wearing it.
Alex took one careful step to the side, trying to find a better angle.
The figure moved.
Just a fraction—a tightening through the shoulders, a minute shift of the hand against the soil—but it was enough. Alex stopped immediately, every remaining thread of fatigue burning away under instinct.
The head lifted.
He saw no eyes. He still had the distinct and deeply unwelcome impression that it was looking directly at him.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then the figure rose in one fluid motion.
No hesitation. No adjustment for weight or balance. It came to its feet with the kind of economy Alex had seen only in very well-trained fighters and very expensive machines, and even then never quite like this. The rifle stayed on its back. The pistol remained holstered.
Its right hand was empty.
Alex’s weight shifted slightly on the uneven ground.
Gravel clicked under his boot.
A blade appeared in the figure’s hand.
Not drawn. Not unsheathed. Appeared.
Alex didn’t trust his eyes enough to decide whether he had missed the movement or whether the movement had genuinely not happened in any human way. Either option was bad.
The sword was straight, narrow, and without ornament. It should not have been the most dangerous thing in the crater with him. Somehow it was.
“Don’t,” he said, because sometimes saying something bought you half a second more than silence did.
The figure didn’t respond.
It held the blade low and angled, not threatening so much as prepared. The stance was defensive, but only in the sense that a panther lying still was defensive. There was nothing passive about it.
Alex kept his hands visible and his voice calm. “You understand English?”
A pause.
Then—
“Yes.”
The voice wasn’t broken. It was clear. Young. Female.
Yet somehow, wrong. The accent didn’t belong anywhere Alex could place. Not European. Not American. Not anything he’d heard before, and he’d heard a lot.
“Good,” he said. “That saves time.”
The blade didn’t lower.
“Want to tell me what you are?”
Another pause.
“Unlucky,” she said.
Alex huffed a quiet breath that might have been a laugh on a better day. “That makes two of us.”
Silence stretched between them.
Then—
“Call me Drifter,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
That sounded like an explanation. It wasn’t one.
“Where were you supposed to be?” Alex asked.
She didn’t answer that.
He studied the figure again. Up close, the surface was stranger than before—organic in contour, mechanical in precision, the shape of armor if armor had been grown instead of built. The rifle on its back was real enough, though, and so was the pistol.
A flicker crossed the surface of the suit—thin lines of light that sparked and died too quickly to study.
She went still.
“Problem?” Alex asked.
“I’m running out of energy for this frame,” she said.
That sounded like a bigger problem.
“And?”
“And this place doesn’t have what I need.”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
A breeze stirred across the crater and died. Alex belatedly realized that his legs were beginning to shake from overuse and that the effort of standing still was no longer significantly easier than walking.
He should leave. He knew that. He should back away, get to the road, find transport, and let somebody else discover the impossible armored thing in the forest after dawn.
He also knew exactly what MI6 would do if they got to it first, and the thought turned his stomach in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss.
The figure’s stance shifted again, minutely. Not aggression this time. Instability.
Alex shifted slightly to ease the pressure on his ankle. Pain flared, sharp and immediate. He ignored it.
“Can you move?”
“Yes.”
“How far?”
A beat. “Not far enough.”
That was honest.
“Can you keep standing?”
Another blue-white flicker passed across the frame.
“For now,” she said.
Alex considered his increasingly terrible options. “All right. New question. Are you planning to kill me?”
The head turned a degree to the left, then back.
“Not currently,” she responded.
Somewhere in another life, Alex might have laughed.
Instead, he said, “That’s almost reassuring.”
The figure did not appear to recognize sarcasm. Or perhaps it recognized it perfectly and chose not to care.
Alex drew a careful breath and regretted it. His vision blurred at the edges for half a second, then cleared. Not ideal.
She noticed.
That much was obvious from the way the blade lowered by exactly three centimeters, and the head angled toward his left side. “You are injured.”
Alex ignored the statement. “You’re stranded.”
“Yes.”
There was something grimly satisfying in the flat certainty of that answer. Two facts, then. Him injured. The stranger stranded. Neither of them in a position to do much about the other.
“Wonderful,” Alex said softly. “We’re both having a terrible night.”
The Drifter stood motionless for another second, then the sword vanished from her hand.
Again: no visible draw, no movement he could track. One moment, it was there. The next, it wasn’t.
That was somehow worse.
Alex suppressed the reaction. “Are you able to get out of that?”
For the first time, he got the sense he had asked a genuinely unexpected question. She seemed to think about refusing. Then another static ripple crossed the frame, stronger this time, and whatever calculation she made shifted.
“Yes, I can leave the frame,” she said. “Briefly.”
“Leave how?”
“Transference.”
That explained absolutely nothing.
Alex made a small, impatient gesture with one hand. “In English.”
A beat.
“I am inside,” she said. “I can exit. But re-entry is difficult. Expensive.”
Her choice of words was odd, but the meaning was clear enough.
“Should you?”
“No.”
Alex considered that. “What happens if you do?”
“I won’t be able to get back in,” she said. “Not for a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“About a day.”
“And if you try anyway?”
She looked at him.
“Then I will regret it.”
Fair.
Alex glanced back toward the ridge, toward where the road cut through the trees. Nothing visible yet. No sound.
He weighed the information against the pain now crawling up his side and the lateness of an extraction that had probably ceased to exist outside somebody’s optimistic paperwork. Somewhere down the road, morning would eventually happen. Morning would bring farmers or hunters or whoever else used this stretch of mountain. The crater would not remain hidden. Neither would the thing in it.
“We need to move,” he said.
The Drifter did not argue. “Yes.”
Alex turned slightly, scanning the rim of the crater and the trees beyond. There were abandoned villages scattered through this region—houses left empty when winters got too hard or roads too poor or people too old to keep pretending the mountains were worth the effort. He’d passed one on the approach to the Vaduva facility three days earlier. Half-collapsed barns, one habitable roofline, a well that might or might not still function. Two kilometers, maybe three, downhill from here if he had his bearings right.
Normally, that would not be impossible.
Currently, it felt insulting.
He took one step toward the slope.
His ankle rolled on the warm, loose earth. The motion was small, but pain flared up his leg sharply enough that his balance slipped. He caught himself before he fell—barely—and his hand went automatically to the crater wall.
For a single, humiliating second, everything tilted.
When he straightened, breathing carefully through clenched teeth, the Drifter was watching him with a level of focus that suggested she had just revised her own calculations.
“I can walk,” Alex said before she could say anything.
“Not efficiently.”
“I wasn’t aware efficiency was the standard.”
“It is if we do not want to be found at dawn.”
Annoyingly fair.
Alex looked up at the tree line again. Distances stretched unpleasantly in his head. Terrain, injury, darkness, exhaustion. He could eventually make it to the safe house. He was less certain he could make it before collapsing or leaving enough blood on the route to be helpful.
“I’m getting out,” she said. “If I reset the system, it might hold together a little longer.”
Another flicker ran across the suit’s surface—stronger this time, jagged rather than smooth.
“Now,” she added.
“That sounds like a terrible plan.”
“It’s the only one,” she said. “It is necessary.”
“You just told me re-entry would be a problem.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re doing it anyway.”
“Yes.”
Alex, who was too tired for this conversation to maintain its full absurdity, only said, “Right.”
The Drifter inclined her head once. “Do not approach.”
“Believe me, that wasn’t high on my list.”
For the first time since he had seen her, she moved without martial precision.
The change was subtle but immediate. She straightened through the shoulders, hands opening at her sides, head bowed slightly. The air around the frame seemed to thin. A faint, colorless distortion rippled outward from her like heat off stone, except the clearing had gone abruptly colder.
Alex felt the hairs lift along his arms.
There was no flash. No theatrical burst of light.
The impossible thing happened quietly.
One moment, the frame stood occupied. The next, a second figure existed where no second figure had been—a girl, around the same age as Alex, slipped out of the frame in a movement his eyes couldn’t quite hold onto. She landed unsteadily on the crater floor, caught herself on the unmoving frame, and stayed there a second with her head lowered.
The frame remained standing beside her.
Inert.
That was somehow the worst part. Without her in it, it was not dead but emptied, like a body that had decided to wait.
Alex stared despite himself.
The Drifter looked up.
She was human. Entirely, unmistakably human. Dark hair stuck damply to one side of her face. Her expression was tight with effort and badly concealed pain. The clothes she wore under—or instead of—the frame were unlike anything Alex had seen outside a fever dream of military procurement: layered, fitted, practical in a way he couldn’t quite place, with materials that caught the moonlight wrong. There was a band at one wrist, glowing faintly and then not at all. Her eyes fixed on him with suspicion so direct it almost counted as familiar.
“Happy?” she asked.
“Not remotely,” Alex said.
That got the faintest edge of a smile.
She pushed herself to her feet more slowly than the frame had, one hand briefly pressed to her temple. The effort it cost her was obvious enough that Alex didn’t comment. She glanced once at the inert frame, then at him, then toward the trees.
“We’ve gotta go now.”
Alex let out a short breath that almost turned into a laugh, but hurt enough to kill the idea. “You can barely stand.”
“You are bleeding.”
“That doesn’t answer the criticism.”
“It does if we are comparing.”
She had a point, which he disliked on principle.
They climbed out of the crater together.
Or rather, Alex climbed, and the Drifter moved with the careful focus of someone operating on limited reserves. Outside the frame, she was less intimidating, but only in the way exposed wire was less intimidating than the machine it came from. Nothing about her suggested harmlessness.
Halfway up, she paused and went very still.
Alex stopped too. “What?”
She raised one hand for silence.
He listened.
At first, he heard only the wind shifting through the trees. Then, faintly, somewhere downslope, came the sound of an engine.
Vehicle. Distant but climbing.
Alex swore under his breath.
The Drifter’s head turned toward him. “Yours?”
“No.”
“Problem?”
“Yes.”
The road below the shepherd’s hut connected to the service route for the Vaduva compound. He had assumed the facility’s men would be occupied for the next several hours with fire suppression, structural failure, and discovering that their files had been replaced with insulting photographs of geese. Apparently, he had overestimated the power of chaos to slow down determined idiots.
“Can they track you?” the Drifter asked.
“I’m hoping they’re too busy bleeding from the ego.” Alex adjusted his weight and immediately regretted it. “But they know roughly where I’m supposed to leave from. If they saw the crash—”
Another engine note carried up through the trees, closer now.
The Drifter looked toward her frame.
Alex followed her gaze.
“No,” he said immediately.
“It is the fastest option.”
“It’s also the option you told me was catastrophic.”
“It is now the least catastrophic.”
The logic was appalling and, given the sound of the approaching vehicle, probably correct.
She had already made the decision. He could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she squared herself toward the waiting frame despite whatever strain the exit had cost her.
Alex said, more sharply than he meant to, “You don’t actually have to do this.”
She glanced back at him. There was something dry and almost incredulous in her expression, as if his objection had arrived a little late to be useful.
“You cannot move quickly,” she said. “I cannot carry you like this. The frame can.”
“That expense you mentioned—”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still—”
“Yes.”
Alex stopped arguing because there was nothing else to do with the answer.
The Drifter stepped back to the frame.
The re-entry was not quiet.
Where the exit had been precise and nearly silent, this looked like force applied to something not designed to forgive it. The same colorless distortion gathered, but this time it shuddered visibly through the air. The Drifter’s jaw tightened. For one second, she half-doubled over and caught herself. Then the waiting frame jerked—an abrupt, involuntary motion that would have looked mechanical if not for the sheer violence of it.
The world seemed to blink.
When Alex’s vision cleared, the frame stood occupied again.
Its posture was wrong.
Not unstable, exactly, but strained. Too rigid through the shoulders. The faint blue along its edges pulsed once, twice, then subsided into a much dimmer glow than before.
“That,” she said, “was unpleasant.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“It will be worse later.”
“Another excellent review.”
The frame turned toward him.
There were no human eyes. Alex still had the same impression of being studied.
Then, without warning but with absolute control, she stepped forward and bent.
Alex realized what she was doing half a second too late to object in any useful way.
“Don’t—”
The frame picked him up as if he weighed nothing.
Not over a shoulder. Not in the undignified, practical way he would have chosen himself. Princess style, one arm under his knees and the other across his back, with insulting ease and infuriating stability. His hand caught automatically at the dark curve of her shoulder to keep the movement from wrenching his ribs.
“This is humiliating,” he said through his teeth.
“It is efficient,” the Drifter replied.
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
“Correct.”
Then she started moving.
Alex had spent enough time being carried by unwilling adults when he was younger to know that there were levels of bad. This was, in a technical sense, not bad at all. The frame absorbed terrain shock so cleanly that even his battered side suffered less than it would have on foot. That did not improve his mood. He was tired and injured; armed men were somewhere behind them, and he was being transported through a Romanian forest by a biomechanical swordswoman he had met fifteen minutes earlier.
He decided not to think about that too closely.
“Downhill,” he said instead. “Keep left when the ground splits. There’s an old village about two kilometers from here.”
The Drifter adjusted direction immediately.
She moved fast, but not at the impossible speed he’d half expected from the way the frame fought gravity. There was restraint in it, and effort too. Once, as she leaped over a fallen trunk, Alex felt a brief shudder go through the arm under his knees, as if some deeper system had reached for power that wasn’t there.
He looked up. “How bad?”
“Manageable,” she said, which in his experience usually meant the opposite.
Branches blurred overhead. The forest opened and closed around them. Behind, the engine noise grew louder, then faded as the vehicle chose the road rather than the slope. Voices carried once through the trees—Romanian, angry, too far away to make out.
“Friends of yours?” the Drifter asked.
“Very distant.”
“Should I kill them if they find us?”
Alex turned his head enough to stare at the blank face of the frame. “You ask that now?”
“It seems like useful information to have.”
He considered the question with the seriousness it probably did not deserve. “Only if absolutely necessary.”
“Define necessary.”
“I hate that I need to.” He shifted carefully, ignoring the flare in his side. “Necessary means they are actively trying to shoot us, and you cannot otherwise stop them.”
The Drifter was silent for a beat. “That is a narrow definition.”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“Fine.”
Alex was absurdly relieved.
They reached the village as the sky began to pale slightly at the farthest edge of the east.
The word “village” was generous now. Time and weather had reduced most of the buildings to walls and rubble. Roofs had caved. Doors hung loose or vanished entirely. Brambles had claimed one yard and half a cart. But one house still stood mostly intact on a rise above the rest, stone lower level, timber upper floor, shutters hanging but present.
The Drifter slowed.
“Here,” Alex said.
She stopped in the lee of the wall and listened. Alex did the same. No engines. No voices. Just the soft rasp of wind over dead grass and the creak of loose wood somewhere above them.
“Safe?” she asked.
“No,” Alex said. “But good enough.”
“That will have to do.”
She carried him through the doorway anyway.
Inside, the air smelled of dust, old wood, and mouse nests. The main room had long since been stripped of anything useful. A table lay on its side in one corner. The hearth was cold and choked with ash. Stairs rose along one wall, two steps missing near the top. There was a back room with a door that still closed and one window boarded from the inside.
“Put me down,” Alex said.
The frame lowered him with more care than he expected. His boots hit the floor, his ankle protested violently, and for one dizzying second, his knees considered giving up. He braced a hand against the wall and forced them not to.
The Drifter stepped back.
Up close, the strain in the frame was more obvious now. The faint blue edge-light had dimmed to almost nothing. Static whispered once across the chest and died.
Alex pointed to the back room. “There.”
She moved first, checking corners and doorways with the methodical caution of someone who had learned not to trust empty spaces. When she gave a short nod, Alex followed more slowly.
The room held a narrow cot frame without bedding, a broken chest, and enough unoccupied floor to count as an asset. The window boards left thin grey lines at the edges.
Alex sat carefully against the wall beside the cot and finally looked down at his side. The bandage he’d improvised earlier had held badly. Blood had soaked through again, though less than it might have. Not ideal. Still not immediately catastrophic.
The Drifter watched him. “You need treatment.”
“I need several things,” Alex said. “That’s one of them.”
Without comment, she reached for one side of the frame’s waist and produced a small pack Alex would have sworn did not exist a second earlier.
He looked at it, then at her. “You really need to stop doing that.”
“It is storage.”
“That doesn’t explain anything.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
Despite himself, Alex almost smiled.
She set the pack on the floor and crouched. From it, she produced what appeared to be a roll of clean dressings and a compact device Alex didn’t recognize.
“I don’t suppose that comes with instructions.”
“Yes.”
“For me?”
“No.”
“Of course.”
She extended the dressings instead. “Use these.”
Alex took them warily. They felt normal. Cloth. Sterile wrapping. Human enough to reassure and annoy him at once.
He stripped off his jacket and shirt with care, jaw tightening when the movement pulled at the knife wound. The Drifter turned her head away just enough to imply privacy without entirely abandoning situational awareness.
Polite. That was new.
He cleaned and rebandaged the wound as efficiently as he could manage. The fresh dressing helped. So did sitting down. By the time he finished, the shaking in his hands had eased into something more tolerable.
When he looked up again, the Drifter was still standing.
“You can come out now?” he asked.
The frame’s head turned toward him. “Can’t.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
“That’s vague.”
“It is also true.”
Alex leaned his head back against the wall. Exhaustion settled over him in heavy layers now that immediate motion had stopped. Outside, the pale light at the window edges strengthened by degrees.
The Drifter remained by the door, not quite a guard and not quite at rest.
After a while, Alex said, “They’ll search the roads first.”
“Yes.”
“They may sweep the woods after dawn.”
“Yes.”
He glanced toward the boarded window. “They won’t expect me to stay close.”
“That helps.”
“Some.”
Silence stretched.
It wasn’t comfortable. That would have been absurd. But it was no longer the bright, razor-edged hostility of the crater either. Something more practical had taken its place. A ceasefire founded on shared inconvenience and bad timing.
Alex looked at her again. “You knew that would cost you.”
“Yes.”
“And you still did it.”
“Yes.”
He was not sure what answer he had expected instead.
After another second, she said, “You would have done the same.”
Alex thought about MI6, about missions that turned into losses before anyone admitted it, about choices made because all the alternatives were worse. He thought about the crater, the approaching engines, the blank certainty in her voice when she had said expensive and then done it anyway.
“Probably,” he said.
The frame inclined its head once.
Outside, morning continued its slow invasion of the mountains.
Alex dragged the broken cot closer to the wall with one foot and tested it. It held well enough. He looked from it to the Drifter, who was still by the door, still standing too rigidly to convince anyone she was unbothered.
“There’s room if you want to sit.”
The frame was silent for a second.
Then: “I do not think that would reassure you.”
“That ship’s sailed.”
The Drifter crossed the room and lowered herself against the opposite wall instead, close enough to react if necessary, far enough to make a point of it.
Reasonable.
Alex closed his eyes for one second, then opened them again. “If anyone comes through that door,” he said, “wake me before you decide murder is efficient.”
“Fine.”
“And if I try to call MI6 in my sleep, ignore it.”
“What is MI6?”
Alex considered that. “Nothing helpful.”
“Understood.”
He almost let the conversation die there. It would have been easier, and easier was usually safer, but something about the way she had asked the question kept bothering him. There had been no recognition in it. No confusion over an acronym from the wrong country, no attempt to place it in a context she didn’t have. Just absence.
“You said this place doesn’t have what you need,” Alex said. “You didn’t mean Romania, did you?”
The Drifter was quiet for a moment. The frame gave him nothing to read, but the pause was answer enough.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think this is my world.”
Alex let that settle. A day ago, he would have had several practical objections to that sentence. At the moment, he was sitting in an abandoned Romanian village beside a thing that had fallen out of the sky and then produced a human being from inside itself, so he decided his standards for impossible had already been compromised.
“Right,” he said. “That explains why you don’t know MI6.”
“Should I?”
“No. You’ll be happier.”
For a moment, Alex thought the faint sound that followed was another systems glitch. Then he realized it might have been the closest thing to a laugh he was going to get.
The house settled around them with the little noises old structures made when left alone too long. Wind rubbed a shutter somewhere outside. Far below, on the road, an engine passed once and faded. The mountains kept their own counsel.
It wasn’t safe. Alex knew that.
The men from the facility might still be looking. MI6 might still decide to arrive, badly timed as ever, and find an empty rendezvous point plus evidence that Alex Rider had once again complicated things beyond all reasonable expectation. The Drifter was locked in a failing frame in a world that apparently lacked whatever she needed to sustain it. None of this was resolved. None of it had even become sensible.
But the walls were solid enough, the door still shut, and for at least the next few hours, there was a roof over both their heads.
It would hold for now.
That was enough.
Alex woke because the house had changed.
Not loudly. There was no slammed door, no raised voice, no obvious sound that his exhausted brain could immediately categorize as danger. But years of bad sleep and worse training had taught him that buildings had rhythms, and this one had shifted while he was unconscious.
His eyes opened before he was fully awake.
The room remained dim beneath the boarded window. Grey daylight filtered through the cracks in narrow lines across the floorboards. Dust drifted slowly through them. The air still smelled of old wood and damp stone.
The Drifter was no longer in the room.
Alex’s hand moved automatically toward the knife at his side before memory caught up with instinct. Wrong mission. Wrong weapon. Wrong universe, apparently.
He pushed himself upright too quickly and immediately regretted it. Pain dragged sharply through his ribs. The room tilted for half a second before settling again. Across from him, the space by the wall sat empty except for faint scuff marks where she had sat earlier.
The house creaked overhead.
Alex froze.
Another sound followed. Slow movement across old floorboards above the room.
Not careful enough to be sneaking.
He got to his feet anyway.
His ankle complained immediately. The fresh bandages pulled tight beneath his shirt. Somewhere in the process of sleeping, his body had remembered how badly injured it actually was.
Wonderful.
Alex moved quietly toward the doorway, pausing once the hall came into view. The lower floor remained empty. Pale daylight leaked through gaps in warped shutters. Dust and abandoned furniture sat exactly where they had before.
Another creak sounded overhead.
He glanced toward the staircase.
The Drifter sat on the roof outside the upper window.
For one deeply confusing second, Alex only stared.
She was still inside the frame. The dark, seamless shape of it looked even stranger in daylight, crouched on the sloped roof with one knee drawn up and one hand resting against the tiles for balance. It should have looked impossible there, too heavy for the old structure and too alien for the ruined village around it, but somehow it had made itself still enough to belong to the shadows under the eaves.
The head turned slightly when he reached the window.
“You do realize,” Alex said finally, “that most people use stairs.”
“Most people don’t wake up as fast as you do.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“You can say that about a lot of things.”
Alex leaned one shoulder against the warped window frame. “That’s because a lot of things are occupational hazards.”
That earned him the faintest flicker of amusement before her attention shifted back toward the forest.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
The silence felt different in daylight.
Earlier, everything had been sharp with adrenaline and uncertainty. The crater, the engine, the climb through the trees, the strange weightless humiliation of being carried through the forest—too much had happened too quickly for either of them to think much beyond immediate survival. Daylight stripped some of that away. The village looked older now, its ruins clearer beneath the weak mountain sun. Grass pushed through collapsed stone walls. One of the nearby houses had caved inward entirely sometime during the last winter. Beyond the village, the forests stretched dark and endless over the slopes.
Alex followed her line of sight. “See something?”
“No.” She rested her forearms against her raised knee. “That’s the problem.”
“You prefer active danger?”
“I prefer knowing where it is.”
Fair.
Alex studied her for another moment. In daylight, the frame looked less like armor and more like a question no one had built language for yet. It was too seamless to be machinery, too deliberate to be biology, too still to be mistaken for anything harmless. In the crater, adrenaline had made it easier to think of her as a threat first and everything else afterward. Now, with the weak morning light catching along the dark curve of one shoulder and the village empty beneath them, he could see the exhaustion in her anyway. There was no face for him to read, but it showed in the careful economy of movement, in the way she held herself, as if every adjustment cost more than it should, and in the rigid patience of someone who had learned to endure discomfort without expecting relief.
“You sleep like someone expecting to be attacked,” she said, her attention still on the forest.
Alex considered denying it and decided he was too tired. “I get attacked a lot.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
He looked at her more sharply then.
The Drifter’s head angled toward him, and Alex had the uncomfortable sense of her attention settling fully on him. “You wake before fully conscious. Your hand moves toward a weapon before you open your eyes. You position yourself facing exits even asleep.”
Alex stayed quiet.
“In my experience,” she continued, “people only learn that young if they have to.”
The matter-of-factness in her voice made the observation land harder than sympathy would have.
Alex looked away first.
The upper floor smelled faintly of rain-damp timber and old dust. Somewhere below them, wind shifted through the empty house with a low hollow sound.
“You say that like you learned too,” he said eventually.
The Drifter went still in a way that had nothing to do with rest. The frame gave him no face to read, none of the small human betrayals most people couldn’t stop from showing, but Alex had spent half his life learning to read what people tried to hide in the rest of their bodies.
“Yes,” she said.
The answer sat between them quietly.
Alex had spent years around adults who treated information like currency and affection like operational weakness. He knew evasion when he heard it. This wasn’t quite that. The Drifter wasn’t avoiding the subject so much as touching it carefully enough not to disturb something underneath.
Oddly enough, that felt more honest.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“When?”
“When they started using you.”
Alex laughed once under his breath before he could stop himself. There wasn’t much humor in it. “That’s a difficult question.”
Her head angled a fraction more toward him. “You don’t know?”
“I know when they officially started.” Alex leaned his head back against the window frame behind him. “I’m less certain about before that.”
The Drifter waited.
Alex wasn’t entirely sure why he kept talking.
Maybe because she had fallen out of the sky in the middle of nowhere wearing something impossible, and still somehow understood certain things faster than anyone else ever had. Maybe because exhaustion wore holes in defenses he usually kept intact. Or maybe because she hadn’t tried to make him feel better about any of it.
He was quiet for a while after that. The words sat too close to things he usually kept locked away, but exhaustion had already done more damage to his filters than the knife wound had done to his side.
“My uncle raised me,” Alex said eventually. “He worked for MI6. I found that out after he died.”
The Drifter’s head angled toward him, attention sharpening without any visible change of expression.
Alex rubbed absently at the edge of one bandage beneath his shirt. “Apparently, he’d been training me for field work most of my life without bothering to mention it.”
The frame gave no expression away, but the silence sharpened.
Alex shrugged one shoulder. “Languages. Combat. Surveillance awareness. Pain tolerance. Observation exercises disguised as games. He called it preparation.”
“For what?”
“He didn’t live long enough to explain.”
The wind shifted again across the roofline. Somewhere farther down the mountain, a bird called once through the trees.
The Drifter’s stillness changed. It was subtle, but Alex caught it anyway; the silence after his answer had become too careful.
“That was legal here?” she asked carefully.
Alex almost smiled despite himself. “You say that like legality has ever stopped intelligence agencies from doing anything.”
“That,” she muttered, “sounds familiar.”
He looked at her again then, more carefully this time.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
The question settled heavily between them.
For the first time since the crater, the Drifter looked genuinely uncertain.
Not defensive. Not hostile. Uncertain.
Alex suddenly had the distinct impression that whatever answer existed was too large to fit cleanly into words.
Finally, she said, “Do you know what the Void is?”
“No.”
“Good.” A faint sound escaped her, dry enough that Alex almost took it for amusement. “I wouldn’t know where to start otherwise.”
Alex waited.
The Drifter rested her elbows against her knees, staring out toward the forest again. “Where I come from, people tried to travel somewhere they shouldn’t have.”
“That sounds familiar too.”
“This was worse.” Her voice remained calm, but something underneath it tightened briefly. “A ship got stranded there. Children survived. Most adults didn’t.”
Alex felt something cold settle quietly in his chest.
“How old were you?”
“Younger than you.”
The answer arrived flatly enough that he understood immediately she no longer measured that time in exact numbers.
“We survived,” she continued after a moment. “Sort of. The Void changes things. It doesn’t always do it kindly.”
Alex thought about the crater. About impossible movement, failing energy, and a person who could step out of a body that was not quite armor and not quite machine. He thought about the way the empty frame had stood when she left it, waiting without breathing, and how quickly she had forced herself back inside when there had been no better option.
“You changed.”
“Yes.”
“And people used that.”
The Drifter was silent for several seconds, still enough that even the frame seemed to be holding its breath.
Not because he’d guessed correctly. Because he’d guessed quickly.
“Yes,” she said more quietly.
Alex nodded once.
Of course they had.
People found useful things and weaponized them. Governments. Militaries. Intelligence agencies. Apparently, entire interstellar civilizations, if her version of reality was deranged enough to contain those.
Different worlds. Same instincts.
“You know the worst part?” Alex said after a while.
“The child soldier part narrows the options.”
He huffed a brief laugh despite himself. “Fair.”
The Drifter leaned her head back against the roof behind her. “So what’s the worst part?”
Alex thought about it longer than he expected to.
The missions came to mind first, then the injuries, then the deaths that had attached themselves to his life one by one and followed him into sleep. None of them felt like the right answer.
“The adjustment,” he said eventually. “You spend enough time in danger, and eventually you stop expecting anything else.”
The Drifter went still beside him.
Alex kept his eyes on the trees below the village. “At first, you notice it. The paranoia. The hypervigilance. The fact that you can’t sit with your back to doors anymore. Then eventually it just becomes normal.” His mouth twisted faintly. “You stop thinking of yourself as someone temporarily surviving bad situations and start thinking of yourself as someone built for them.”
He hadn’t meant to say that much.
The realization arrived a second too late to matter.
The Drifter studied him silently for several seconds.
“That,” she said quietly, “also sounds familiar.”
Neither of them seemed to know what to do with that after.
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward exactly. Just tired.
Below them, the village remained empty. Wind moved through dead grass between ruined houses. Somewhere farther uphill, water dripped steadily from melting snow.
Eventually, the Drifter said, “Your organization abandoned you.”
Alex blinked once. “That wasn’t subtle.”
“You expected them to.”
He shrugged. “Experience.”
“That is worse.”
Something about the blunt certainty in her voice made him glance at her again. Something in her posture went hard and quiet. Not dramatic anger. Not loud. Just a hard, quiet sort of fury that sat very still beneath the surface.
Alex frowned slightly. “You’ve known me for less than twelve hours.”
“That seems sufficient.”
Despite everything, he laughed.
A real one this time. Short and rough from exhaustion, but genuine enough to surprise both of them.
Her head tilted, suspicion somehow obvious despite the lack of a face. “What?”
“Nothing.” Alex rubbed tiredly at one eye. “You just sound like someone who’s spent a long time deciding most systems are fundamentally stupid.”
“They are.”
“Again,” Alex said, “strangely familiar.”
That finally earned him a quiet sound that might have been amusement, brief but unmistakably real, before she turned back toward the trees.
For a little while longer, they sat in the weak morning sunlight above the abandoned village, two people from entirely different universes quietly recognizing pieces of themselves they would have preferred not to understand.