Semua Bab The Alpha's Regret: His Secret Hybrid Heir: Bab 91 - Bab 93

Kaelen regained consciousness forty minutes into the deep forest retreat, which was a relief in the specific way that the return of a useful person was a relief when you were short on useful people.He sat up, took stock of himself and his surroundings with the speed of someone whose system knew how to come back online quickly, and said: "The valley."Xander looked at him."There's a limestone valley two kilometers northeast. Dense iron deposits in the walls — the kind that create permanent resonance static. The Council's been trying to map it for six years and their instruments read it as solid rock because the static interferes with the depth scanning." He was already on his feet. Slightly unsteady. Waving off the hand Marcus offered with the particular pride of a man who was going to do this himself. "The drones can't see into it. Nothing that reads frequency can read into it. It's the only place in the Ridge where you can stop and not be found.""How far is two kilometers," Xander

The darts came first.Three of them, from three different directions, landing in the water within a meter of the column's leading edge with the specific precision of people who knew exactly how close close enough was and wanted the message received accurately. Not attacks — warnings, calibrated to the centimeter.The column stopped.Xander raised his hand, which stopped the people behind him from doing anything that would change the nature of the current situation from warning to engagement. He stayed still and scanned the reeds and found nothing, which meant they were good, which meant this was serious.Then the figures appeared.They came out of the marsh in the way that things came out of the marsh when the marsh was their home — no wading, no resistance from the water, moving over the silt surface rather than through it on the stilts that gave them their profile. Tall, narrow wooden poles with wide base-plates, distributing weight across the soft surface. They moved fast and quiet