Blair's head turned. Those blue eyes found the camera lens, and Vanessa caught something behind the Davenport steel. A girl who'd been handed a load no person should carry. A girl who'd carried it anyway because the alternative was letting everyone else drop.
"We were trapped in a Void Gate," Blair said. Flat. Clinical. The voice of someone reading a coroner's report. "Classification was wrong. Entity density was wrong. Everything in the briefing was wrong. We fought for three days against evolved fauna. Pack hunters. Mana-saturated arthropods. A dimensional guardian that killed one of our team members."
The clearing went quiet. Even Reina stopped moving.
"One fatality?" Vanessa's voice dropped.
"Charles Leone. He died in combat with the guardian entity." Blair said the name like she was reading it off a form. No flinch. No hesitation. That told Vanessa more about Blair Davenport's character than any press release her father's office had ever produced. "The rest of us survived."
