Moments later,

Author

The camp didn't look like a prison from the outside.

It looked like a logging settlement. Wooden walls, smoke rising from cookfires, the distant sound of axes against timber. The kind of place travelers passed without a second glance, nestled in a valley where the Western foothills met the old forest roads.

Aria knew better. She had studied the thermal signatures from two kilometers out, mapped the guard rotations through Aquarius's drone network, and counted the number of wagons that entered full and left empty. Twenty-three in the past month. None of the cargo had been timber.

"Twenty guards on the perimeter," Leo murmured through the comms...