Dawn broke like a bad promise, gray and grudging.

  They moved northeast from the coast, Finn navigating by a hand-drawn map that had been folded and refolded until the creases were almost roads in themselves. Southeast England opened up around them — rolling hills, orchards heavy with fruit nobody had picked. Apples rotted on the branches. The smell was sweet and wrong, like something using sweetness as cover.

  “Log entry, Day 93. Crossing into Southeast. Bleed still heavy — purple in the hedgerows, ground-level. Envier variants expected: identity theft, burrowing ambush, rotting mimicry. Keep faces covered if separated. Don’t answer to your own name.”

  Finn glanced over. “Don’t answer to your own name?”

  “They learn it. Use it to pull you in.” She watched a bird land in an orchard tree, cock its head, then land again in exactly the same way. “Stop looking like yourself if you can manage it.”

  He laughed — short, unsure if it was a joke. It wasn’t.

  The trail led them to an orchard where the trees had grown wrong — twisted toward each other like they resented the space between them, branches interlocked in something that looked almost deliberate. Ground pocked with burrow holes. The air smelled of earth and rot and something underneath that was faintly oily.

  “Stay at the edge,” Sable said. “If it gets quiet, move back.”

  She went in low, rifle ready. A cluster of figures sat near a fire pit at the orchard’s center — five, ragged, murmuring. Survivors or copies.

  One turned. Its face was almost Finn’s. Same jaw, same tired set to the eyes — but the proportions slightly off, like someone had described him from memory.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Envier.

  She fired before it could open its mouth. Hellfire hit and it phased, burrowing instantly, gone before the smoke cleared. The other figures scattered — two of them wrong, skin sloughing as they moved, and she took them with her claws before they could copy anything useful. They burst in slime, echoing sounds back in the process — not her voice.

  Finn’s voice. From the treeline: “I know where the nests are.” The exact words. The exact cadence.

  She didn’t let it land. Claws already up, she drove into the burrow mouth with a salt round and the main body surfaced screaming — a longer thing than the copies, with too many limbs, the oily smell now overwhelming. The Anchor chains caught it mid-thrash. Portal opened. In it went.

  Residue. A shard — this one reflective, mirror-surfaced, showing her face back at a slight angle. She pocketed it without looking at it directly.

  Two. The hum in her coat shifted.

  —?—?—

  Finn was at the treeline where she’d left him. He hadn’t heard his own voice used against her, or if he had, he wasn’t saying. She didn’t mention it.

  The real survivors were three — a farmer and two others who stayed behind him. All gaunt, all watching her the way people watched things they’d decided were threats before they got close enough to check.

  “Hellcat,” the farmer said. Not a greeting.

  “The copies are gone. Burrows east and south — smell for that oil-rot before you open any doors.” She paused. “You lose anyone in the last week? Someone acting wrong?”

  The farmer’s jaw tightened. “My brother. Comes round, talks like him, asks for what he always wanted. New boat. More land.” He paused. “He died three weeks ago.”

  The Envier had been in here long enough to learn a dead man’s wants. She filed it.

  As they turned to leave the farmer said, “You cats keep collecting your trinkets. Fixing your hell mess. We’re the ones living in it.”

  Sable kept walking.

  Radio crackled at the orchard’s edge. “Mirror shard’s a good one, kitty — shows you what’s underneath. Useful tool, for an honest enforcer.”

  She killed the feed. Lie number two. There was nothing honest about the use he had in mind.

  The hills rolled east, purple-hazed. Finn walked beside her, close enough that when he glanced at her coat pocket she felt it without seeing it. She didn’t say anything. Neither did he.