Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 41 - Chapitre 47

Yara stopped walking before she said anything, which was how Ivy knew it mattered.She crouched at the treeline, two fingers pressed into a patch of churned mud, and read it the way she read everything now — once fast, then again slower, correcting herself out loud before anyone could ask. “Someone camped here. Not us.” A pause, her fingers shifting an inch. “Not more than a day ago. Maybe less.”“Could be anyone,” Sawyer said, but he was already moving toward the ash pit, already crouching beside her.“It’s not anyone.” Yara didn’t look up. “The fire’s banked wrong. Buried, not burned out. Someone wanted it gone fast.”Ivy felt the ground shift under something that wasn’t the ground at all.Petra circled the site without speaking, the way she circled everything — the ledger, the map, now this — turning it over in her attention before she trusted a single piece of it. She stopped at a boot print half-swallowed by the mud, pressed her palm flat beside it for scale, and said nothing for

Ivy woke before anyone else did, which was how she knew it hadn’t worked.Sleep should have felt different after yesterday. It didn’t. Her body ached in the same places, from the same ground, and the sky over the trees was the same gray it had been every morning since they’d left camp. She had said the thing that couldn’t be unsaid, in front of people who would carry it back to Ashworth by nightfall, and the world had not rearranged itself to acknowledge that.Petra was already up, crouched at the edge of their camp reading the ground the way she read everything—turning it over before she trusted it. Yara sat with her back to a tree, eyes open, watching the tree line with the specific stillness of someone counting exits. Roan stood a little apart, and the thing that had been “watchful” in him for days had gone somewhere else now. He looked less like a man on guard and more like one waiting to be given a reason.Sawyer wasn’t with them.Ivy found h

Marrow called the camp together at midmorning, which was itself a kind of announcement. She never called the whole camp together. She sent word through two or three people and let it spread the way water finds the low ground.This time she stood at the fire pit herself and waited until the last stragglers came.Ivy had rehearsed nothing. She'd told herself the night before that she wouldn't shape it, wouldn't soften the parts that made her look reckless or the parts that made Ashworth look worse than reckless. What we saw. What we said. What it might cost. In that order. She'd said the words to herself so many times they'd stopped sounding like a promise and started sounding like a fence.She kept to the fence.She told them about the clearing. About the agent's voice when he said Ashworth would hear about this, and the particular stillness that had followed it, the kind that wasn't calm so much as calculating. She told them what she'd said back,