The moonlight was the only source of illumination. Below it stretched a vast wilderness, mostly swallowed by dense forest — a darkness so complete it had texture, weight, presence.

  In the heart of that forested region, two travelers moved in silence.

  Each woman carried two suitcases, one strapped to her back and another to her front. Both wore dark green hooded robes in the Celtic fashion, the fabric the color of shadow between trees. They had been crossing the wilderness for the past two nights.

  One woman glanced down at the suitcase strapped against her chest. She wrapped her arms around it. The gesture was brief, unconscious, the way a person might touch a wound to confirm it had stopped bleeding. She looked at her companion’s matching case and rested her hand gently on it.

  “May the stillness of this moment last until daylight,” she said quietly.

  Her companion scanned the treeline. “The silence in this forest has been our camouflage.” A pause. “It won’t last much longer.”

  It hadn’t been a peaceful journey. They had risked everything to enter this wilderness, trusting it to shelter them. For two nights, it had. But that night felt different — a particular kind of stillness that precedes rupture rather than rest.

  One of them stopped walking and looked up.

  The other stopped too. Neither spoke. Then a bird fell from the sky.

  It hit the ground a few feet ahead of them, wings splayed at wrong angles, beak opening and closing in the dirt. It gasped. It went still.

  “They’re here,” her companion said. Not a question — a confirmation of something they had both prepared for and hoped to avoid.

  They looked at each other. No hesitation. The plan had always existed. It simply hadn’t been needed until now.

  “I’ll be expecting you at the nearest tunnel,” her companion said. “Be safe.”

  “May the Holy Origin guide us.”

  They sprinted in opposite directions and the forest swallowed them both.

  From the center of the forest, birds began to fall like heavy rain. First one, then a dozen, among them, birds of prey tumbling from branches, gasping as they struck the forest soil. Then the larger animals came, four-legged beasts bursting from between the gigantic trees, some fleeing, others collapsing mid-stride, sides heaving, mouths frothing. The wilderness that had sheltered two women for two nights was now tearing itself apart, attacked by something invisible, something in the air itself.

  The woman in the hooded robe ran.

  She pulled her mask up over the lower half of her face without breaking stride, her two suitcases riding her body like counterweights she had long since learned to ignore. A panicked canine beast cut across her path. She sidestepped it without slowing. A collapsing mammoth like creature — she vaulted it cleanly. She moved through the chaos the way water moves through a broken dam, finding the open spaces, filling them, gone before anything could close around her. She increased her speed. She could easily sense what direction to take while running in the dark.

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  With her senses heightened, she knew she was being followed. She had known for several minutes — the angles of it, the pattern of sounds that didn’t belong to fleeing animals.

  Then she heard the fighter jet.

  The first shots came a half-second later. Long, needle-like projectiles cutting through the dark. Cyanide rounds. She bent backwards at the waist without stopping, watching three of them slice the air where her torso had been.

  More incoming — multiple angles simultaneously. She drew her gladius and moved the blade in a tight arc, deflecting the shots. The containers burst. Liquid became gas almost instantly, a pale shimmer spreading through the undergrowth. She noted, with cold regret, that each broken round she could have otherwise dodged was another measure of poison released into the air around her — and around everything else still alive and breathing in this forest. For her, a sufficient dose meant paralysis. For any creature without immunity to it, death is inevitable.

  She had to be careful. She couldn’t afford to be taken or else, all her sacrifices and hardships will end in vain.

  She pressed her back against the trunk of an enormous tree and waited. In her stillness she listened, and in listening she confirmed what she had suspected, they were in the branches above her. She stepped out from cover in a single fluid motion, drew her silenced pistol, and fired five shots in rapid sequence at five different trees. Five sets of branches cracked. Five bodies fell. The cyanide fire stopped.

  Then the silhouettes emerged from the tree line.

  Women in armored black suits and helmets, moving in formation, weapons raised. Military black ops. She counted quickly and stopped counting.

  “As much as I’d want to cooperate,” she said, keeping her voice level, “you’re making it impossible for me to do so.”

  They circled her without answering.

  Several came at her from behind — a coordinated surge. She turned into it, redirected the first attacker’s momentum, drove a second into a third. She moved with an economy that wasn’t performance, it was simply the difference between someone who fought to survive and someone who had been trained to fight.

  One attacker tried to take her from behind and lost her footing, stumbling hard into a massive tree root. Her helmet cracked. Her mask shattered. She inhaled the cyanide gas scattered in the air and began to choke.

  The soldier who’s in panic and trying to cling to life removed her helmet. The woman watched her gasped for air. It took less than a minute. Bubbling at the lips, convulsing, then death.

  Every gun in the formation found her at once. Red laser points crawled across her body like insects.

  “Fire,” she said, “and the gas does your work for you — on them, on me, on everyone still breathing in this forest.” She gestured toward the unconscious soldiers on the ground around her. “That’s the math.”

  A pause in the formation. Then someone new stepped forward.

  She wore the same black suit but with a short cape, and a mask that covered only the lower half of her face. She moved through the circle of soldiers with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never needed to hurry.

  The Lieutenant.

  “Then give us the bags,” the Lieutenant said. “That’s all. Your death isn’t necessary — unless you insist on making it so.”

  The woman studied her surroundings in one slow sweep. Then she looked back at the Lieutenant and spoke carefully.

  “I mean no harm to any of you. I have no interest in fighting, and none whatsoever in causing further damage to this forest.” She shifted her weight slightly. “What I carry doesn’t belong to the state. It never did. I’m not your enemy. I’ve harmed no innocent people, committed no treason. I have nothing to answer for.”

  The Lieutenant’s expression didn’t change. “From the moment of your existence, you have belonged to the state. What you carry belongs to the state. Your refusal to acknowledge that is itself a declaration of enmity.” A beat. “Nothing you say tonight changes that. The only choice you have is whether you walk out of this forest or don’t.”

  The woman said nothing.

  She knew this woman. Had known of her, precisely — what she was capable of, how she reasoned, what she valued and what she didn’t. Of every person who could have been waiting at the end of these two nights, the Lieutenant was the one she had most hoped to avoid.

  The laser points hadn’t moved.

  The stillness that had felt like safety an hour ago had become something else entirely — a trap she hadn’t seen closing around her until it had already closed. Where there had been relief, now there was something colder. Something that tasted, if she was honest with herself, very much like despair.