CHAPTER 28: BACK TO THE TERRITORY AGAIN

Two days later, the Global Hawk went back.

Harker had spent the night prior refining the route: same northbound track, but with an offset dogleg to pass west of the lava-scarred zone, then a lazy arc back east to cut straight across the hot fissures. Fuel reserves: conservative. Comms: solid. Weather: clear enough that the stratosphere looked like polished glass on the MET readout.

"Global Hawk, Tower. Cleared for takeoff."

The HALE bird rolled, lifted, and vanished into the blue. By the time it hit sixty thousand feet, the base felt small again—just tents, steel, and men under a sky that now belonged to a machine.

"On station," Harker reported, knuckles white on the GCS trackball. SAR swept, stitching a clean, high-contrast ribbon across the north. The first hour returned the expected: the cut-stone city (quiet), the marsh villages (cooking fires at dawn), a pair of caravans on the plains (orderly, guarded). Then the land turned harsher, colder, broken by black seams that pulsed like a heartbeat beneath ice.

"Approaching anomaly grid," Harker said. "Switching EO/IR to continuous."

The main screen filled with volcanic fissures glowing like veins of ember dragged across snow. Around them: shapes that weren’t quite buildings and weren’t quite natural. Spines. Arches. Ribbed cylinders like the shells of things that had never been alive, grown out of rock by hands that hated straight lines.

"Get me angles," Albert said from behind Harker’s chair. He’d walked in without a sound and folded his arms, eyes on the feed.

"Copy." Harker slewed the gimbal. "Panning... hold... magnifying x12."

Something else glittered on the horizon.

At first it looked like cut obsidian—too regular to be natural. The closer the zoom, the taller it became until it dwarfed the fissures below: a tower of night metal thrust up from a caldera like a spear, ridges of black stone rising into horns that cupped a burning sigil—an unblinking eye of molten color that roiled without smoke.

"New structure," Ward said, stepping to Albert’s shoulder. "That’s... not a city."

Harker tagged it: UNIDENTIFIED FORTRESS — WP-07. The SAR overlay refused to behave near it, as if the tower ate signal and gave nothing back.

Inside that tower, the world was a different temperature.

A hall of basalt and iron ribs arced like the inside of a beast. Firelight guttered in troughs along the walls, but the shadows moved as though they had their own intent. On a dais beneath the blazing eye, a figure sat the way an avalanche sits—inevitable. Armor like nightmoss, a mantle of scales that breathed open and shut with more than breath, a crown that grew wrong angles toward the burning sign above.

A brazen bell tolled once, and the creatures waiting at the hall’s edge dropped to their knees. One alone came forward, boots whispering on glass-black stone. She knelt and bowed her head, wings folding like the hood of a storm. Her hair fell like silver poured from a foundry. Metal traced filigree across dark silk and darker skin, shaped to both armor and ornament, and her eyes—when she raised them—held a pale ember light that seemed to choose its target before it looked.

"Summoned, my lord," she said, voice soft as a blade drawn in velvet.

"The Eye of Tiamantara wakes," the thing on the throne replied. The words did not echo; they simply arrived in the room and arranged the air. "It has seen a bird without blood. A watcher that carries no life, no scent, no soul. Above our lands. Above my tower."

The demoness tilted her head. "A craft?"

"A riddle," the lord said. The burning sign above flared, painting the hall in furnace color. "Go. Follow its shadow. Learn what gazes. Break it if it can be broken. Return if it cannot."

She rose in a single motion, as fluid as smoke taking a new shape. "As you command."

The hall’s far doors opened like pupils dilating. Wind struck in. The demoness stepped out onto a balcony carved over a valley of ash and light, spread wings that ate the sun, and fell forward into flight. Flame wrote thin script along the edge of her feathers and then vanished; what remained was speed and a line of disturbed snow beneath her as she climbed.

At sixty thousand feet, air is thin. For most things, it is lethal. She did not seem to belong to that category. Ice formed along the edges of her coronet and cracked away in glittering dust as she ascended. The volcano field became a pattern under her, then a memory. The tower’s burning gaze dwindled to a star on a black thorn.

On the Global Hawk’s feed, a mote appeared.

"Motion," Harker said. "High, fast, closing."

"Bird?" Ward asked.

"Negative radar cross section for a bird at this altitude," Harker said. "No transponder. IR signature is—" he blinked— "organic. But it’s spiking and dropping like... like it’s making its own heat."

"Put it up," Albert said.

Harker switched EO to narrow FOV and locked on. The screen filled with a figure against cold blue: a woman’s shape at impossible height, wings slicing air that should not hold her, hair streaming like banners in vacuum. Circlet. Horned shadow. Eyes like banked coals that flared brighter when she turned.

For a beat, no one spoke.

Then Ward: "Well, that’s new."

Harker’s thumb danced. "She’s closing. Relative speed high. I’m initiating drift right—small offset, see if she tracks."

He tickled the inputs; the Global Hawk eased five degrees starboard. The figure adjusted without effort, correcting as if it could feel the turn.

"She’s tracking the drone," Harker said. "Not the sound—there is none at this altitude—not the heat... It’s like she’s looking at the lens."

"Maintain distance," Albert said. "Don’t provoke. I want eyes, not contact."

"Copy." Harker fed a climb command. The jet eased to 61,500. The demoness rose after, not straining, not even pretending to work for it. Frost wreathed her and then fled.

"Global Hawk, execute lazy S," Harker muttered, plotting. The drone obeyed, swinging wide. She rode the arc as if the air were a river and she had always known it.

"Specialist," Albert said, voice even, "you will inform me of anything that looks like a weapon cue."

"Yes, sir."

Harker toggled the mic to the command-net. "Be advised, we have visual contact with unknown airborne entity at angel six-zero. Humanoid female, winged. IR hot, EO clear. Tracking us precisely."

"Unknown entity?" the TOC duty officer asked, somewhere between disbelief and professional calm.

"Unknown and angry-looking," Ward offered.

"I heard that," the duty officer said.

"Record everything," Albert said, eyes never leaving the demoness on the monitor. "Full-rate video, stills every second. Telemetry stamp. If she breathes on us, I want to know what it smells like."

On the screen, the demoness slowed. She settled into a parallel course, twenty meters off the port wing—an absurdly small separation at this height. The Global Hawk’s camera was not designed for eye contact at handshake distance. It did it anyway.

She turned her head and looked straight into the optics.

Harker felt the hair at the back of his neck lift.

Ward swore under his breath.

Her mouth did not move. Her eyes did.

"Sir," Harker said carefully, "if she tries to touch the drone, I can command a dive rate she won’t match."

Albert’s jaw worked once. "Not yet."

The demoness extended a hand—no claws, not in this moment—fingers splayed as if feeling rain that wasn’t there. Her palm hovered inches from the drone’s fuselage. Frost feathered the air between skin and composite. The IR tracker jittered with heat spikes at her wrist, elbow, throat—as if all the warm parts of a person had been tuned to a setting marked weapon and then forgotten to turn back.

"She’s searching," Ward said softly.

Harker swallowed. The Global Hawk did not flinch; it could not. He eased in a micro-yaw to keep her centered. Her head followed as if the yaw had been hers.

"Actual, this is Duty," the speaker crackled. "Recommend contingency. If we lose the bird, we lose eyes over the entire north."

"She hasn’t attacked," Albert said. "She’s curious. Let her look."

The demoness frowned—tiny, precise. She leaned closer, the coronet’s black metal almost touching the nacelle. Her breath—if that was what the fog was—wreathed the intake without entering. The EO zoom found her pupils; they were not human. They were rings of thin crimson glyphs turning slowly around a dark center that did not reflect the sun.

She spoke a word.

No mic caught it; no sensor tagged it. Harker didn’t hear it with his ears. He felt it under his sternum like a plucked string.

"Uh... sir?" he said. "We just got a non-RF, non-acoustic... something."

Albert’s hands tightened behind his back. "And the bird?"

"Still flying. All systems nominal."

On the screen, the demoness drew her hand back. She tilted her head, as if deciding whether to break a toy to see its pieces. Then—she smiled. It wasn’t friendly. It wasn’t cruel. It was the expression of a scientist who has found a new rock to turn over and a larger hammer.

"Time on station?" Albert asked.

"Fuel at sixty-two percent," Harker answered. "We’re in the green, but I don’t want to play tag at this height all afternoon."

"Agreed. Begin slow retreat on the original arc. Don’t spook her. If she follows past the lava fields, we have a decision to make."

"Roger." Harker plotted the turn. The Global Hawk banked—gentle, a polite bow—and began to slide away on a long, shallow vector.

The demoness kept pace for three breaths.

Then she rolled in front of the nose, wings a dark gate against the sun, and looked into the world’s most expensive camera one more time. Up close, the filigree across her throat resolved into sigils that hurt to scan. The IR feed pulsed once with a heat bloom at her ribs, like a heart deciding something.