Norok and the rest of his squad sat in the dusty conference room, the morning light streaming through the domed sun roof overhead. Will arranged the table of pegs into a carefully laid out map of Base Alpha’s civilian district, including the interior of the sprawling arena and training campus they had been in the night before. Norok recognized the long hall of display cases, and the marked divet where the storage closet he had hid in before stood.

  He hadn’t told anyone about the thieves. By the time he returned, Will was already filing his squad out promising an early meeting in the morning. Norok would’ve told Daimona, looped her into the revenge plot boiling on the backburner of his mind, but the smug, dirt-eating grin she would have worn burned into his retinas had created smoldering holes in his ego.

  “First you get tricked by Bash and now robbed in a closet?” He imagined her saying. “Is there anything you can do by yourself?”

  It didn’t help that the self-pitying inner monologue he had played himself to sleep to began with, “I need to stop getting cornered by cowards,” and ended with “If I was just a little faster, I could have smashed them into wallpaper for that stupid closet.” The voice that normally guided his rationale remained eerily silent as he fumed. Norok could only assume he had disappointed him too.

  As Will placed the final peg, he stood up straight and folded his arms. “Last night, I saw something in the arena. While Simon was giving me a tour of the lower levels, there were these crates tucked up in their weapons room.”

  “Guns?” Kell asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “I'm not sure,” Will replied. “They weren't marked with the Fable rune. Instead, they had this scrawled on the corners.”

  Will pulled a notepad out of his jacket and passed it around the table. Norok looked over the drawing curiously. It was a cartoonish hammer, with an oversized head and a handle far too thin to realistically handle the weight attached to it. Layered in the center of the mighty head was a handprint over a pawprint.

  Irina traced the drawing with the tip of her fingernail. “It is foreign weaponry. So what? Fable takes from outsiders all the time, it is no surprise.”

  “But this logo isn’t from any of the main countries,” Will said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I’ve seen it in several reports. This is from The Court.”

  Daimona looked helplessly to Norok, who only shrugged back. She sat forward, clearing her throat loudly. “And for those of us who don’t know what that is…”

  “They’re a group of terrorists from the Herald Kingdom,” Kell explained. “They believe magic should be used as an equalizer, to unite animals and humans under one banner.”

  “And they do it by gunning anyone who questions them down. Rumor has it they’ve got a gunsmith in their ranks with an affinity for creating weapons that can raze whole cities,” Will added, crossing his arms and leering down at the map.

  “Is that what this is about? Competition for mommy and daddy?” Irina asked, and Norok didn’t detect the usual air of annoyance with the comment.

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  “No,” Will answered without hesitation. “If The Court has a connection here at Base Alpha, that can only mean something terrible is about to happen. For the good of the civilians and the personnel on base, it’s up to us to figure out the who and what before anything escalates. It’s our duty as an FCOT squad in the making.”

  “I’ll tell Corporal Simon,” Daimona said, but Will raised a hand and cut her off.

  “She didn’t seem to have a reaction to the crates, but it doesn’t clear her of suspicion. Either she’s in charge of the whole operation, or she’s being manipulated by someone who is. No matter what, she has to know something about it.”

  He drew a line with his finger down the map towards the arena. “I’m going to see her tonight, see if I can’t chat her up a bit and get a proper look at the merchandise. Smirnov, Daimona, I want you both to get information from inside the ring. Anything you can get out of the challengers, especially about the high betters in the audience.”

  He trailed his finger back out, leading it around the streets and alleys of the civilian district. “Prodikor, Norok, I want you to canvas the district. These shipments have to be coming in from somewhere, and I want to know who’s transporting them.”

  “How’re we supposed to find that out?” Norok sighed.

  For the first time since calling the meeting, Will smiled, eyes illuminated with determination. “A little elbow grease never killed anyone, Norok.”

  …

  The night air was cold against Norok’s neck. He sank further into his uniform collar, holding back a sneeze. He and Kell had followed the patrol teams for hours, tracking their relentless loops around the district until Norok grew dizzy from the monotonous patterns. Their terrorization of the hidden Blems was unfortunately routine, Norok had learned, struggling to hold Kell back every time he wanted to throw himself into the fray.

  “It’s sick,” Kell spat viciously, clenching his fists. “They hold up the Cyngor’s declarations but buy from The Court… There’s no morals to it.”

  “Not all of them,” Norok tried, wincing as Kell shot him a death glare. “You said it yourself, it’s the way of the world. Some of them are just following orders.”

  “That’s not an excuse to act without thinking,” Kell replied firmly. His gaze softened as Norok shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “I hear you, I do,” Norok said sympathetically. “Look, maybe exposing this thing with The Court will get us higher up in the system, you know? Maybe if we show people that the system isn’t right, we can show them more and more of what’s wrong with it.”

  “It doesn’t work like that, you can’t just blow over centuries of hatred,” Kell sighed.

  “Why not?”

  They stared at one another for a long time. Kell’s face flicked from frustrated to confused, then he let out a steady exhale. He broke out into laughter, the kind that felt like there was nothing to laugh about but nothing more to say. Norok joined him, a low rumbling chuckle of sympathy.

  “I’m serious, Kell,” he said. “If it matters that much to you, we’ll take every opportunity by storm and fix things until they change. If anyone can do it, we can.”

  With a dazed, doe-eyed expression, Kell lowered his head, the brim of his cap hiding his expression. “When you say it like that, turning you down just makes me seem like a wuss…”

  “You are a wuss,” Norok jabbed. “If you don’t agree, that is.”

  “You sound like Daimona.”

  “She has her moments,” Norok replied, his eyes catching a flicker of movement just ahead of them. One of the soldiers leaning against the alleyway had speckles of red sequins dusting the back of his black uniform. Norok recognized his boisterous laugh, a wheezing sound he had heard just a few feet away from him near the ring. It would be a long-shot, but Norok had long grown bored with waiting.

  “Follow my lead,” he whispered to Kell, nodding towards the soldier.

  “Wait, what’s the plan?”

  “You’ll see,” Norok said with a smirk, striding towards the man while Kell sputtered his protests from behind.