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John and the merry-men sleep for three or four hours and then finish the last mile to Maelport before sunrise. His nanites have come back high enough that his emergency services are running again, and the relief is bigger than he expected — he had felt almost naked without them.

They reach a sheltered patch of forest at the city's edge as the sun comes up. Ryan climbs a tree to glass the place with his optical augments; John, Ealstan, Thokk, and Sefawynn crawl to the treeline. By the measure of modern Seattle, Maelport is small — a couple hundred cottages inside an eight-foot stone wall — but for this dimension, with its docks and its packed-earth roads, it is a real city, and the early-morning fog breaking just shy of the wall lets them see all of it.

What they see on the north road is a slow column of refugees: hunched shoulders, dragged feet, bundles and carts and children. Thokk identifies them as victims of Hordamen attacks up and down the coast. Ealstan takes it grimly — the ships John and the others have already met were not isolated, the way he had feared. Sefawynn asks what the point of any of this is if they stop Ulric only to fall to the Hordamen anyway. John squeezes her shoulder and notes silently that the decay of her people predates any aelv meddling — leaving cannot fix it on its own.

Ryan drops down from the tree with a plan upgrade: the refugee column is cover. The bait party can walk in among them. Hend will stay at the rendezvous with the horses and the gear they cannot carry. Godric unwraps a bundle of stave-and-string shortbows from the pack and the men brace them; magazines of arrows and axes go under cloaks. Ryan tries to leave Thokk with Hend for her safety. She tells him he is not very bright. He tells her these men are practiced killers and will not honor her age the way the Weswarans do. She tells him that the possibility of dying is part of the fun, threatens a curse, and calls him an *aers* — which John finally parses, with absurd pride, as *arse*.

Ryan checks his bait party one last time. Don't take risks beyond the mission. If it goes badly, retreat. When Ulric or Quinn appears, let John handle them — this is about the beacon. Disable that, and the rest of Ulric's organization is locked out of the dimension. John, a little surprised at himself, finds that taking orders from Ryan does not chafe; part of him has been waiting for this — for the day he gets to be the partner Ryan always thought he could be.

Then Ryan gets specific. Internal chronometers — both reading 6:03. Start the distraction at exactly 7:15. He leans close and asks, almost begging, *promise me, Johnny.* John tells him this matters to him more than Ryan can know, and to worry about the beacon and not him. Ryan draws his P-330 sidearm — loaded with antiplating rounds — and reassigns its signature-lock to John's nanite signature with a voice code, then warns that Ulric is bound to have a thug or two beyond Quinn: Janice for one, he is fairly sure. John hugs him instead of shaking his hand and they part — Ryan for the sally port and his inside man, the rest for the bait approach.

The bait party hike back, then step into the refugee road with their hoods up and their backs bowed. John feels lethally exposed and then remembers being seen is the entire point. He takes Sefawynn's hand and tries one more time to talk her out of it — she is not a warrior, what about Wyrm — and she answers without looking back that Yazad will care for Wyrm, that she is no warrior but she is a skop, and that she will not be useless to him. He drops it. He doubts Ulric's crew respects skops, but she has made her choice.

He paces them to arrive close to seven. Every refugee around them feels like a witness. He runs the escape routes in his head — back down the road, or cross-country to the trees — and then forces himself back to the only useful instruction he has ever lacked: *follow through.* For once in his life, stay with a thing until it ends. Near the wall he fakes a coughing fit to burn a few minutes. He checks his chronometer, looks at the others, nods. At 7:15 exactly, the four of them walk through the gate of Maelport. *My last fight had begun.*