"Are you going to meet them?" Elias asked, staring at the old fortress marked on the enlarged map. "They are waiting for you."
Arion did not answer immediately.
The question itself was simple enough.
Everything surrounding it was not.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the faded military survey projected across the wall, where the abandoned fortress sat deep inside territory Alamina had treated as effectively lost for almost a century. If Elias was right, there were transformed humans inside that forest in numbers none of their current monitoring systems had ever identified properly, and at least some of them might have retained fragments of themselves beneath the infection.
Which meant leaving them there without investigation was difficult to justify.
Bringing them out blindly was worse.
"What happened to you could have killed you," Arion said.
Elias looked toward him.
"We don't know that."
"That is exactly the problem."
