Chapter 21: The Mountain Town Crisis (5)
They gathered in a circle this time.
Not around the table, around the absence of one.
The chairs had been dragged back, pushed against walls, left unused.
The center of the room was bare except for the object the boss held loosely in one hand: a ward disc, its etched lines scorched black, its surface dull and lifeless. Morning light filtered through the windows, catching on the metal just enough to show how thoroughly it had been emptied.
The room felt smaller with them all standing.
Contained.
No one spoke at first. The city outside had resumed its daytime rhythm, voices, engines, movement, but it felt distant, insulated, like sound coming through thick glass.
Li Wei broke the silence.
“Ordinarily,” he said, voice measured, “an anomaly with a dominating presence localizes.”
He gestured subtly with one hand, as if drawing invisible boundaries in the air. “A locker. A room. A corner of a building. Sometimes a stairwell. Sometimes a specific stretch of street. The more oppressive the manifestation, the more tightly it anchors itself.”
Khalid nodded. “You feel it when you get close. Pressure. Distortion. Sometimes just… wrongness.”
Li Wei continued.
“Conversely, anomalies with a wide area of influence tend to be diffuse. Weak. Their effect spreads thin.”
He paused, glancing at the ward in the boss’s hand.
“They trade intensity for reach.”
Khalid snorted softly. “Yeah. Like the lake.”
Everyone looked at him.
He shrugged. “Local lake. Years ago. Whole thing was technically compromised. You could stand anywhere along the shore and it registered.”
“And?” Lena asked.
“And all it did,” Khalid said, deadpan, “was make the carp taste slightly stale.”
Gorchov blinked. “That’s it?”
“That was it,” Khalid confirmed. “Didn’t hurt anyone. Didn’t escalate. Just ruined a fishing economy for six months.”
Li Wei nodded. “That tracks. Wide influence. Minimal agency.”
The boss hadn’t spoken yet.
He turned the ward over slowly in his hand, thumb tracing the dead etchings, eyes unfocused. When he finally looked up, the humor drained from the room.
“You’re both correct,” he said.
He lifted the ward slightly, holding it out where they could all see it.
“But this,” he continued, “doesn’t behave like either case.”
Silence fell again.
“This ward,” the boss said, “wasn’t overwhelmed. It wasn’t degraded over time. It wasn’t bypassed accidentally.”
He closed his fingers around it.
“It was expended.”
Li Wei’s jaw tightened. “Used.”
“Yes.”
Khalid frowned. “Meaning it took the full load.”
“And survived long enough to do so,” the boss said. “Which means whatever passed through it knew exactly how much resistance to apply.”
Lena felt a chill creep up her spine. “So it’s not just strong or spread out.”
“No,” the boss said. “It’s both.”
He stepped closer to the center of the room.
“Localized presence,” he said, “with distributed effect.”
Li Wei exhaled slowly. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
“It shouldn’t,” the boss agreed. “Which is why we’re standing at what looks very much like an exception.”
He let the ward drop into his other palm with a soft metallic click.
“Ground zero,” he said.
The word landed heavily.
Gorchov shifted.
Up until now, he’d been quiet, watching, listening, expression closed off in a way Lena recognized all too well. When he spoke, his voice cut through the room with unexpected sharpness.
“Then we’re not really being tasked with researching it,” he said.
Everyone turned toward him.
“We’re not here to classify it,” Gorchov continued, the faintest edge creeping into his tone.
“We’re not here to understand its behavior patterns or theorize about edge cases.”
His lips curled slightly.
“We’re here to get rid of it.”
The word rid came out heavier than the others.
For a moment, no one responded.
Then Khalid’s brows knit together. Li Wei looked uneasy. Even Lena felt something tighten in her chest, not fear, but caution.
There was something in Gorchov’s voice.
Not urgency.
Malice.
Not loud. Not uncontrolled. But present, like a blade finally being unsheathed.
“This thing,” Gorchov went on, “walked through our defenses. It hunts people. It leaves them hollow. It tests boundaries and remembers the results.”
He looked at the boss. “That’s not ambient. That’s not incidental. That’s intent.”
Li Wei spoke carefully. “Intent doesn’t always mean hostility.”
Gorchov’s gaze snapped to him. “It does when the outcome is disappearance.”
Khalid held up a hand slightly. “Easy.”
“I am being easy,” Gorchov said. “I can be much worse.”
That did it.
The room went very still.
The boss met Gorchov’s gaze without flinching. “You’re correct about one thing,” he said calmly. “We are not here to catalogue this.”
Gorchov inclined his head slightly, satisfied.
“But,” the boss continued, “we are also not here to rush.”
Gorchov’s jaw tightened. “It’s already acting.”
“Yes,” the boss said. “Which means it wants a response.”
Lena felt the shift then, the subtle realignment of the room’s gravity. This wasn’t an academic discussion anymore. It hadn’t been for a while.
She stepped forward.
“Okay,” she said, cutting cleanly through the tension. “Enough.”
Everyone turned to her.
She looked at Gorchov first. “You’re right. This thing isn’t passive.”
Then to Li Wei. “You’re right. Its behavior breaks established patterns.”
Then to Khalid. “And yes, sometimes anomalies really do just ruin fish.”
A flicker of a smile touched Khalid’s mouth, then vanished.
Lena turned to the boss.
“But none of that matters unless we know what we’re doing next.”
The boss studied her for a long moment.
Then he nodded once.
“That,” he said, “is the correct question.”
He placed the blackened ward carefully on the table.
***
The route was decided in silence.
Li Wei stood at the kitchen counter with the tablet laid flat, satellite imagery glowing faintly against the dim afternoon light. Streets unfolded beneath his fingers, clean lines, elevation markers, alleyways marked in thinner strokes. He didn’t narrate what he was doing. He never did.
The boss watched over his shoulder, arms folded, gaze tracking not the map itself but the gaps between points.
Finally, the boss tapped the screen once.
“This,” he said.
The route appeared highlighted in a muted blue line. It wasn’t short. It wasn’t direct. It curved deliberately, looping through residential streets, skirting open areas, brushing past markets and narrow lanes without fully committing to any of them.
“A controlled exposure,” Khalid said, reading it instantly.
“Yes,” the boss replied. “High visibility without clustering. Daylight throughout.”
Lena leaned in, squinting. “You’re avoiding dead ends.”
“And choke points,” the boss said. “And anywhere you’d be tempted to split up.”
Li Wei nodded. “Signal coverage stays consistent the entire way. Minimal shadow zones.”
Khalid cracked his neck once. “So no hero detours.”
“None,” the boss said. “You walk the route. You don’t optimize it. You don’t improvise.”
Lena straightened. “And if something does happen?”
The boss looked at her evenly. “You note it. You do not pursue.”
She grimaced. “You really don’t trust us.”
“I trust you enough not to lie to you,” he replied. “That’s better.”
Ten minutes later, they were out the door.
The afternoon had settled into that peculiar in-between state Nepal seemed fond of, sun still high, but softened by drifting cloud cover, shadows stretching without quite committing to evening. The streets were active but subdued. People moved with purpose, not urgency. Shops were open. Voices carried.
Normal.
Which made Lena uneasy.
They walked shoulder to shoulder, close enough that she could feel Khalid’s body heat through his jacket, Li Wei’s presence a steady anchor on her other side. No one led. No one lagged. Their pace was measured, deliberately unremarkable.
In the kitchen, the boss watched their progress as three moving dots on the satellite overlay. Gorchov stood behind him, arms crossed, head tilted slightly as if he were listening to something no one else could hear.
“They’re clean,” the boss said quietly.
“For now,” Gorchov replied.
The trio passed the first checkpoint without incident. Then the second.
Lena forced herself to pay attention to the mundane details, the smell of spices drifting from an open doorway, the uneven rhythm of her own footsteps, the way Li Wei adjusted his glasses every few minutes when the glare caught them just wrong.
Khalid scanned reflections more than faces, windows and parked vehicles and polished metal offering distorted views of their surroundings.
“You feel anything?” she murmured, barely moving her lips.
Li Wei shook his head. “Nothing active.”
Khalid grunted softly. “Which doesn’t mean nothing’s watching.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Lena said. “That’d be too easy.”
They reached a wider street, sunlight breaking through clouds in pale bands that striped the pavement. The route guided them straight across, no hesitation. Lena resisted the urge to speed up.
Behind them, unseen, the boss adjusted the zoom level.
“They’re right on schedule,” he said.
Gorchov’s eyes never left the screen. “It hasn’t
reacted yet.”
“No,” the boss agreed. “But it’s aware.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it hasn’t interfered,” the boss replied.
Back on the street, Lena felt it then, not fear, not pressure, but a subtle thinning, like the world had briefly forgotten to maintain itself at full resolution. It passed almost immediately, but her shoulders tensed.
“You felt that,” Khalid said under his breath.
“Yeah,” she replied. “Li?”
Li Wei nodded once. “Transient distortion. Non-directional.”
They didn’t stop.
The route led them past the overlook, the same railed edge where the wards had blacked out that morning. Lena kept her eyes forward, though every instinct urged her to glance toward the mountains. The air felt colder here, despite the sun.
“Stay tight,” Khalid murmured.
They did.
In the kitchen, the boss’s finger hovered over the map.
“There is a spike,” he said.
Gorchov leaned in. “Where?”
“Localized to their position,” the boss replied. “But not originating from it.”
Gorchov’s jaw tightened. “It’s triangulating.”
“Yes,” the boss said. “And so are we.”
The trio moved on, footsteps steady, bodies aligned, three people refusing to give the space between them any room to breathe. Around them, the city carried on, vendors calling out prices, a child laughing somewhere above street level, a motorbike weaving past with practiced ease.
Normal.
Lena hated how fragile it felt.
As they approached the final leg of the route, the light began to shift again, clouds thickening just enough to dull the edges of things. She checked her watch instinctively.
Still daylight.
Still safe.
For now.
Behind them, unseen but unwavering, the satellite feed tracked every step.
And somewhere beyond that, beyond cameras, beyond wards, beyond assumptions, something else was learning the shape of their movement.
Waiting to see if they would ever dare to walk it alone.
