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John wakes up in darkness with his nanites mid-reboot and immediately recognises the symptom: someone has hit him with a blackout grenade. The thing fires a forced command through every nanite in your body at once and drops you for as long as the reboot takes; at the twelve-percent efficiency his system is running on out here, the jolt has flattened him. Blackout grenades are expensive single-use kit, of the sort his old crew used now and then when they wanted a target alive, and the obvious owner is Ulric. He waits for his optical augments to come back online.

When they do, he finds himself laid out on a mat in a small tool shack. He has no idea where this is, but he is an expert at not knowing where he is by now. The plan is the usual: avoid any boards to the face, and maybe avoid getting drawn into any more emotionally exposing quests to topple interdimensional mobsters. He starts to wonder, with rising panic, whether Ealstan and Sefawynn and Thokk are alive — and reasons, hopefully, that whoever hit him took him alive, so maybe they did the same with the others. Possibly the Weswaran bandits had stolen a grenade and were listening for aelv accents to ransom back to Ulric.

He turns his auditory augments up. He can pick out a crackling fire, low laughter, wind in trees right outside the door. They are deep in the forest — which, the half-remembered story-fragments tell him, is supposed to be bad: hounds, dark powers, the man whose wife the wolf killed. He turns his hearing back to normal, finds a loose board at the back of the shack with his wrist augments, and slips out into the woods. Being a coward, he reflects, teaches you the geometry of leaving rooms.

Outside the shack, the forest stretches away from him in an endless field of quiet monoliths. With his night vision on, trees are just trees — like teenagers, he thinks, daunting only in aggregation. Out of curiosity he flips the augments off, and the wall of dark snaps back into place, and inside it things are moving and skulking. He flips back to night vision. The shadows are gone. Whatever lives out there is invisible to his augments. *That,* he mutters, *is cheating.*

For a moment he considers running. He spent his amnesia constructing a heroic life out of glimpses — the patrol with his partner had really been Ryan picking him up for lunch; the rescues had been academy role-plays. He has always run from his failures the way he runs from everything. He pushes the thought down. He may not be the hero he imagined, but he doesn't have to be the wretch Ulric sees either.

He inches along the perimeter toward a bonfire. A dozen bandits sit around it, laughing in the night. Ealstan is among them, sitting too-straight on a log with his quiet bird-contemplating intensity, eating soup. At least he is alive. A dozen enemies with a hostage is the kind of situation a real cop would call in backup for, but John has no backup, and his wizard trick will not work on people who know to listen for the accent. Standing back-to him at the fire is someone in an ornate plumed hat — leader-ish. John decides that grabbing the leader to trade for his friends is at least *baby steps* toward heroic, and before he can talk himself out of it he takes a deep breath and runs at the fire.

The closer he gets, the more wrong his picture looks. Ealstan is *eating soup*. Sefawynn is sitting nearby, chatting amiably with one of the bandits. And the plumed leader, hearing him coming, turns around.

It is Ryan Chu.