Page 186 of A Warrior's Fate

Isla moved with little thought, inching her way along the decline to it.

“Goddess, Kai was right,” she heard Ameera mumble behind her, though still, she followed.

After nearly losing her footing, Isla reached it and squinted as she observed its surface.

Different.

She didn’t understand a single letter or symbol, but she’d looked at the piece they’d found in the Hunt so many times, that she could write it out from memory.

Only one of those characters was on here.

But markers, these markers, were from the Ares Pass, according to Lukas.

So, this was it? This was the pass? The grand hierarchy secret that she'd been standing on during the Hunt?

They were underground.

“What’s wrong?”

Isla’s brows furrowed. “If this is the way it’s supposed to be, embedded in the tunnel’s wall like this…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “Lukas found that marker in the middle of the Wilds just sitting in the dirt. It’s not like I was looking, but it’s the only one I remember passing.”

Ameera could see her train of thought. “You’re wondering how it got there?”

Isla hummed in affirmation.

The messages, the book, and the marker—they’d always spun around her head in unison, the mess of characters they were made of swirling with them. Two, she’d known, had the same source. One that seemed to lurk at every corner since they’d emerged from the Wilds.

But what if they’d been around before that?

What if they'd been trying to tell her something, Kai something, anyone something, since during the Hunt. When the marker breached the surface.

Isla lifted her blade and ground her teeth as she jammed it into the rock beside the sphere. The clang and scrape of metal against stone reverberated through the pitted walls, along her bones.

“What are you doing?”

Isla answered Ameera with a grunt, too busy pushing and wrenching and prying until the ball finally came loose, a crater left in its wake, as it nearly evaded her grasp.

If Jonah could figure out one marker and the other, maybe he could figure out the distance between them. They'd know the exact location of where the first had come from.

“They’re trying to tell us something,” Isla said, peering at the wood between her fingers. “They’ve been trying to get Kai to see…something, since the night of the murders. Me to see something since I got here or since we emerged.”

“Like what?”

Isla glanced down at her arm, trailing down the symbols until she reached—

Deimos.

She swallowed, the word slamming around her mind in the same cursed tone she'd heard it twice now. “Traitor.”

CHAPTER 39

Somewhere in between the bustling morning of the early-rising Surles and the barren boardwalks of the turned-in Abalys, the cobblestone streets of Mavec held a modest crowd, a few rolling through the daylight minutiae. Shop owners opening their doors. Pack members indulging in breakfast. Isla’s stomach growled as she passed one eatery, but it soured promptly after. Though it wasn’t for the family—a father, mother, their two children happily munching and chattering away—it was the danger that lurked around them. That they didn’t realize.

If that bak had gotten out…

If those tunnels ended anywhere else…

They had to get to Kai and figure out what the hell they were going to do.

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