The heavy black steel glinted, aimed directly at her head. Liska stared down the barrel of Daris’s sidearm. Her throat closed. The Brass King was the man who folded his massive frame onto her rickety cot each night, bandaged her burns, and shuffled behind a turnip cart with dull eyes. Time became a viscous syrup. The train’s groan, the distant crackle of burning wood, all faded. Daris’s eyes, normally shadowed and weary, were now sharp, predatory, and fixed on the rebel beneath the hood. She knew he saw only an enemy, another anonymous threat to his hidden empire. The irony was a bitter taste. He did not know the weaver stood under the cowl; he saw only the courier. That mistake bought her half a heartbeat. Her scarred left hand, still tender from the loom fire, twitched upward. She gripped the edge of her hood, pulling it back with a swift, decisive tug. The coarse linen peeled away, exposing her face to the flickering orange light. Her soot-streaked cheeks, the sweat-plastered strands of hair escaping her braid, the direct, defiant gaze from her own green eyes. His forefinger froze on the shoe. The cold focus in Daris’s gaze fractured into raw disbelief. The cylinder wavered off her brow line. A broken choke rattled in his ribs. “Liska?” The name tore out of him like scrap metal. He swayed on the bent floor plates, his knees nearly giving out. But the moment of paralysis was brutally brief. A sudden, sharp retort split the air – the distinct crack of a Gresnian state-issued rifle. Then another, and another. A barrage of heavy-caliber rounds tore through the mangled metal shell of the train car, peppering the interior with whistling lead. The patrol squads had arrived, and they were not asking questions. “Cover!” Daris dropped his weight across her shoulders, shoving her flat against the iron floor as lead chewed the air where her neck had been. Splinters of carriage paneling sprayed across his coat. Liska scrambled behind a sheared support girder. Daris levered himself upright, muzzle tracking the breached doorway. He threw a quick, wild glare toward her collarbones, his shoulder rigid. “You!” he barked, his voice raw. “Can you move?” “Of course,” she snapped back, a tremor of fury mixing with the adrenaline. She pulled out her own silenced Kestrel-pattern pistol, checking its magazine. “Can *you*?” He offered no reply, only a grim nod. Troopers poured into the breach, ribbed soles crunching over twisted siding. Black canvas coats and rubberized snout masks advanced through the gray fog, carbines spitting bursts into the shadows. “South exit,” Liska hissed, pointing to a gap in the ruined wall. “It leads to the old timber line. We can lose them in the undergrowth.” Daris didn’t question her. He moved with a brutal, practiced efficiency. He fired two clean rounds, dropping the foremost stormtroopers through their breastplates. Lunging ahead, he cracked the pistol's heavy steel frame into the visor of a third man lunging from a pantry partition, caving the mask inward. Liska moved in tandem, a phantom in the smoke. Her Kestrel was almost silent, spitting rounds that found the unarmored joints of the Inquisitors’ suits. She weaved between the wreckage, her small frame an advantage in the tight spaces, while Daris used his bulk to clear paths. Each anticipated the other without a word. He cleared her flank as she slid under a bent girder, and her brass casings clattered off the iron plates while he vaulted a crushed crate. A corporal squared his sights on her spine as she darted toward the tear in the hull. Daris pivoted on a boot heel, hammer dropping in a single fluid crack. The trooper folded backward over an axle with a clean puncture between his goggle lenses. They reached the shattered opening, a jagged maw leading into the biting night air. Beyond, the dense, ancient pines of the Krovosky Forest loomed, their branches like skeletal arms against the moon. They burst out into the scrub, sprinting headlong into the shadows while boots stamped on the siding behind them, drowned out by whistle blasts and the baying of wire-muzzled hounds. The forest floor was a treacherous mix of moss, exposed roots, and slick mud. Daris, despite his size, navigated it with surprising agility, his powerful legs eating up the ground. Liska, lighter and smaller, flowed through the undergrowth like a ripple on water. They ran in silence, the only sound their ragged breaths and the distant, increasingly urgent howls of the dogs. “Down here!” Liska gasped, spotting a barely visible entrance to an old smuggler’s passage, hidden by a curtain of thorny brambles. It was a route she knew well, one of the many arteries of the underground. As Daris pushed through the thorns, a sharp, metallic *thwack* echoed from above. A high-velocity round whizzed past Liska’s ear, kicking up dirt next to her boot. A sniper. She dipped her head, but Daris threw his shoulder across her chest. The slug intended for her collar struck the meat beneath his left shoulder blade with a wet punch. He let out a strangled groan and pitched forward into the dirt. “Daris!” Liska seized his collar to arrest the fall, but his dead weight dragged her down. He hit the muddy mouth of the drain, grease and dark seepage spreading across his wool coat as his lungs wheezed for purchase. The howls of the tracker dogs were closer now, a chilling chorus echoing through the trees. Voices barked through the timber line, closing fast. Liska frantically pulled him deeper into the tunnel, dragging his dead weight through the muck. His head lolled against her shoulder, his eyes half-closed. He coughed, a wet, rattling sound, and a trickle of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. “Who are you?” he rasped, his voice barely a whisper, his gaze fixed on her with an intensity that cut through the pain. “Really, Liska? Who the hell are you?”

Masks in the Rubble