Page 45 of 13 Nights

The horse veers. The Ride's path hasn't deviated in centuries, but the light pulls at it like a hook in deep water, dragging the trajectory toward something that shouldn't be here.

The loop resets to cannon and field, but this time it stutters, catching on the image of the figure like fabric snagging on a nail. The charge reaches the point of impact. The cannonball arrives. The severance begins, and the cycle stalls.

A voice reaches me from the present road, not from the battlefield. A voice I know better than the sound of the guns that killed me.

"Severin von Brandt."

The Ride fractures. The word hits the reenactment like the correction hit the cottage on Night Eight: light and heat and the violent expansion of something too large to contain. My name, spoken at the convergence point where centuries of anniversary routes end, where the boundary folds outward and touches the battlefield on which Severin von Brandt was killed.

The horse rears. The cannon fire dissolves into static. The blue-coated column scatters like smoke in a sudden wind.

She says it again. Louder, steadier, with the precision of a woman who has tested this name twice before and measured the results.

"Severin von Brandt."

The Ride doesn't break gently. It shatters. The horse dissolves beneath me, not gradually but all at once, the massive body disintegrating into dark mist that the October wind shreds away.

My boots hit modern asphalt. The saber is gone. The field is gone. The cannon smoke clears. The road is a two-lane county highway bordered by woods on both sides, lit by a single car's headlights and the flashlight in Ashley Caldwell's hand.

My head returns. The cold absence at the top of my spine fills with weight and warmth and the sudden flood of sensory input that comes with having a skull. I feel wind on my face, hear the sound of my own breathing, catch Ashley's heartbeat reaching me from across the road, rapid and fierce and alive.

The modern road is beneath me. My uniform is real. The leather at my calves is real. My hands are real when I raise them in front of my face and watch the fingers contract. Ten of them. All present.

The ground is wet. The air tastes like autumn. I'm corporeal in a way I've never been after the anniversary, as though the Ride's destruction released something the cycle had been holding back.

Ashley lowers the flashlight. She's positioned at the edge of the car's headlight beam in a jacket and heavy shoes, her phone in her other hand, her face white and set and utterly controlled.

She came prepared with flashlight, phone, and the car positioned for extraction. She mapped the location, calculated the timing, and drove to the exact stretch of county road where every anniversary route ends.

Tom Hadley waits a few paces behind her, gripping a single piece of paper against his chest.

"Are you hurt?" My voice comes out raw, as if the Ride scoured my vocal cords along with everything else.

"I'm fine."

"Are you certain?"

"I'm standing in front of you talking. Yes, I'm certain."

I close the distance between us in four strides and take her face in my hands. Her skin is cold from the October air, her pulse pounding beneath my palms where they bracket her jaw.

I tilt her head, inspecting for damage with a soldier's precision, because the Ride kills anything in its path and she stood in front of it and called my name.

"You were on the road," I say. "The Ride's trajectory runs directly through this position. If the name hadn't worked, the horse would have struck you."

"The name worked."

"If it hadn't⁠—"

"I tested the hypothesis twice before tonight. The data supported the intervention. Tom arrived with his document before the Ride reached us, and it confirmed what I'd already calculated."

I look over her shoulder at Tom. He's ashen, white-knuckled around the page as though it's the only thing keeping him vertical.

His car is parked behind Ashley's, which means he followed her here. Whether he came to help or to stop her, the result is the same: a Hadley stood on the boundary on the anniversary night, defying every inherited rule his family has maintained for two centuries.

"What document?" I ask.

Tom holds up the page. His grip is firm enough, though his voice is thin. "After I brought the confession to Ashley yesterday, I went back through the cabinet. My father sealed more than the accession number." He turns the paper so I can see the marginal note, handwritten in ink that predates the Civil War: The Ride answers to the name it was denied. "I found it taped to the back panel, behind the filing. He didn't just hide it. He buried it."