The screen's glare burned against Rixa’s retinas, cold blue against the falling dusk. The black sedan churned gravel, its taillights cutting two bloody lines through the haze before vanishing toward the highway. She would slice her own throat before handing over the architecture patents. She stormed back into the barn, the heavy door thudding shut behind her. The router in the rafters blinked a faint, anemic amber. She needed a deep dive, something hidden from public view. Her former boss never moved under his own banner; he used layers of hollow holding companies to mask liability. The land deal felt too clean, too straightforward for his usual operations. Her laptop glowed, a stark contrast to the rustic interior. She targeted the firm registered on the buy-out header: ‘Veridian Holdings’. A quick search revealed it was a newly formed entity, registered in a neighboring district, with an obscure P.O. box as its only address. Too new. Too clean. She began digging into its board members, cross-referencing names, corporate filings, and the whisper networks of financial analysts she still had access to. Hours bled away. The air grew cool, carrying the scent of drying hay and distant woodsmoke. She tracked Veridian Holdings through a series of offshore accounts, each one a dead end, until she stumbled upon a faint digital footprint: a recurring transfer to a minor regional agricultural co-op, ‘Oskra Valley Cultivators’. The amounts were small, regular, and started roughly six months ago. Six months ago—long before she fled the capital, long before anyone knew she had retreated here. Not a sudden raid out of spite, but a methodical buyout already half-finished. But she couldn't yet fathom why a high-density test grid belonged in this dirt. Just as a new lead began to form, a distant, frantic bleating cut through the barn’s quiet. It was the farm’s horned terror of a ram, and the noise echoed from high above the yard. Rixa shoved away from the desk. She walked to the barn doors, pushing them open just enough to peer out. There, perched precariously on the apex of the hay barn’s sloped, weathered roof, was Paxen. His lanky frame was a silhouette against the last sliver of sunset, one leg dangling dangerously, the other bent at an unnatural angle. “Paxen!” she yelled, her voice sharp with disbelief. “What are you doing up there?” “Trying to retrieve the weather vane, Rixa!” he shouted back, his voice thin with panic. “Lord Woolsey chased me! He’s guarding the ladder!” At the foot of the wooden steps, the horned beast stood rigid, yellow pupils locked on Paxen’s boot. Every time Paxen twitched, the brute stamped a split hoof against the clay. Paxen was trapped. “Just… wait there,” Rixa sighed, rubbing her temples. The deadline was fast approaching, and she did not have time for this. She hurried back into the barn, her eyes scanning for anything useful. Her gaze fell on a discarded children’s toy drone, a cheap plastic contraption Toris had been attempting to fix for a local child. Its small camera still worked. A plan, albeit a ridiculous one, began to form. She grabbed a spare length of fencing wire, a handful of zip ties, and a half-eaten sack of cracked corn from a pail. She knotted the feed to the landing skids, rigging a makeshift sling. She needed to lure the ram away, not scare it. She powered up the small controller, the drone’s tiny propellers whirring to life. “Right,” she muttered, her focus narrowing. “Let’s see if corn beats stubborn spite.” She guided the drone out, flying it in wide, cautious arcs above the ram. The ram wheeled backward, nostrils flaring as it locked onto the drifting payload. Snorting, it tracked the drone's low hum away from the wall, trotting toward the open field. Ten paces clear, she snapped the release lever, spilling grain across the weeds. The beast plunged headfirst into the pile. “Go, Paxen, go!” Rixa yelled, keeping one eye on the drone feed and the other on the scrambling farmhand. Paxen dropped down the timbers, hitting the dirt on all fours and scrambling past the threshold before the animal noticed. Rixa was about to bring the drone back when something on the camera feed made her movements freeze. The miniature monitor, panning past the yellow stalks toward the timberline, picked up a figure. Toris. He wasn't walking with his usual easy stride. He was stumbling, his hands outstretched, his head tilted, as if trying to discern shapes from shadows. He was dangerously close to the gully, a deep, craggy fissure that marked the edge of the property, a sheer drop to the riverbed below. He couldn't see the ground. The drop-off was five paces ahead. Rixa dropped the plastic handset and broke into a dead sprint. Coarse yellow heads cracked against her ribs and forearms. “Toris!” Her voice was raw, thin against the rustle of the leaves. He didn't seem to hear her, or if he did, he couldn't pinpoint the sound. He took another step, his boot hovering inches from the precipice. She closed the distance in a desperate blur. She threw her weight straight into his shoulder blades, dragging him backward into the weeds. They hit the loam hard, skidding through dry pine needles until their boots wedged against the roots of an old spruce. Toris lay beneath her, disoriented, his chest heaving. His hands, searching, found her face, tracing the curve of her cheek, the line of her jaw. His gaze drifted past her ear, vacant and dilated. Before she could speak, his mouth found hers. He tasted of copper and salt, the frantic heat of someone clawing back from an abyss. Toris pulled back, knuckles pressing into the dirt as tears tracked through the dust on his cheek. His voice scraped low against her ear. “Rixa, you can’t want me. Not when in six months, I won’t even be able to see your face.”

The Blind Spot