I glance toward the cave entrance again, already aligning what I’ve seen with the terrain around us. “There’s a crossing point east of here. Narrow pass. Limited visibility from above, but clear lines of movement through it.”
“You’ve seen them there.”
“I’ve seen them pass through it.”
“Not the same thing.”
“It is when we’re waiting for them.”
He nods once.
“Controlled encounter,” he says.
“Yes.”
I push myself to my feet, the movement steadier now than it was yesterday, though the strain behind my eyes hasn’t eased.
“We don’t approach them as a threat,” I continue. “We approach them as information.”
“And they believe that why?”
“Because we give them something they can’t ignore.”
I move toward the small pack near the wall, kneeling beside it and pulling free the fragments I gathered before we left the ruin. Stone. Markings. Residual traces that still carry a faint, wrong kind of presence if you look at them too long.
I hold one up briefly.
“This.”
Vaedros watches it carefully.
“Proof,” he says.
“Not just proof,” I reply. “Connection.”
“To the artifact.”
“To its origin.”
That matters. His focus sharpens again, aligning with mine, shifting from resistance into calculation.
“They’ll react to this,” I say. “They have to.”
“And if they don’t?”
“They will.”
Confidence matters here. Certainty matters more. I stand again, brushing the dust from my hands as I shift toward the entrance.
“We move before they reach the pass,” I say. “We position ahead of them. We control where the encounter happens.”
“You’re assuming timing we can’t guarantee.”
“I’m not assuming,” I reply. “I’ve seen it.”
He doesn’t argue that. Not this time. I take a step toward the light, then pause just long enough to glance back at him.
“We don’t wait for them to choose involvement,” I say. “We force it.”