No one moved for a beat after Morita said it.
Good.
Now the real pursuit begins.
He did not sound excited.
That made it worse.
Men who enjoyed hunting could be distracted. Angered. Provoked into mistakes.
Morita sounded like a man who had just received the missing page of a document and was already thinking about where to file the next one.
Serou broke the moment first.
"Take the weight."
Yukari did not hesitate. She wrapped the broken comparison weight in a strip of old shelf cloth and slid it inside her outer layer. Sato gathered the three slips. Eizan moved to Kanai before anyone had to say his name aloud.
Kaito kept his eyes on Morita.
The station still carried the aftertaste of confession. The censor line was gone. The relay had spoken. The room had spent itself to do it.
That meant one thing: if they stayed here, the station would not protect them again.
Morita knew it too.
He stepped back once, as if giving them room to understand the shape of the next minute.
"I won't stop you here," he said.
Eizan snorted.
"How generous."
Morita glanced at him.
"No." He looked back at Kaito. "Only practical."
That one sentence carried a simple truth:
if he attacked now, he would be fighting five people in a station that still disliked him. If he let them leave, he could read the road ahead with the White Scar now in hand.
Kaito understood that immediately.
"He wants us moving."
Serou nodded once. "Yes."
Kanai, pale and sweating now, muttered, "Then let's disappoint him."
But they couldn't. Not completely.
Because they had to move.
White Scar west of Fire.
A real destination.
The first clear line in a long time.
Yukari looked at Morita one last time.
"You heard enough."
Morita's face barely changed.
"You gave me enough."
That was the real danger of men like him.
They did not need everything.
Only enough.
Sato came to Kaito's side. "We go now."
He nodded.
Then Morita said, almost casually, "You should be careful with the White Scar."
No one answered.
Morita went on anyway.
"The old western lines do not only preserve unfinished things. They preserve the shape of people who failed to finish them."
Yukari's eyes hardened.
Kanai went still.
Even Serou's face changed by a degree.
Interesting.
So Morita knew something else.
Not enough, maybe.
But enough to place pressure.
Kaito asked, "You've never been there."
Morita looked at him with mild interest.
"No."
"Then you're quoting someone."
A pause.
Good.
That touched something.
Then Morita smiled, small and unpleasant.
"Perhaps."
No more.
No name.
No extra word.
Serou made the decision.
"Move."
This time they did.
Fast.
Eizan and Sato handled Kanai between them.
Yukari stayed near Kaito.
Serou covered the rear for the first hundred paces until the station dropped behind them and the stone folds began swallowing lines of sight one by one.
Only then did Kaito look back once.
Morita had not followed.
He was still standing in the station doorway, one hand resting against the split frame like a man thinking in a library, not a hunter standing in the ruins of a comparative room that had just betrayed part of his plan.
Kaito hated him more for that.
They crossed broken stone until the station roof disappeared completely. The ground here rose and fell in long cracked shelves. Dry grass caught around their ankles. Old white mineral scars ran through some of the stone like healed cuts.
White Scar.
Not yet.
But the land was beginning to remember its approach.
Yukari noticed him reading it.
"You feel the pull already."
"Yes."
"The relay line?"
"Not only that."
She waited.
Kaito looked ahead.
"The seal isn't pulling me." He frowned. "It's listening forward."
That made her go quiet.
Good.
Let her think on that.
Kanai stumbled hard twenty minutes later and nearly went down even with Eizan taking most of the weight.
Serou moved in at once.
"We stop for one minute."
"One minute?" Eizan said. "How kind of you."
"One minute," Serou repeated.
They lowered Kanai beneath a slanted stone lip. Sato pressed a hand to his side and hissed through her teeth.
"He's burning up."
Kanai tried to answer, failed, and settled for glaring at the sky.
Kaito crouched near him.
"How bad?"
Kanai looked at him, then laughed once without humor.
"You're asking the wrong man. Ask my body. It quit trusting me hours ago."
That was bad enough.
Yukari knelt too, but not near the wound. Near Kanai's left hand.
She watched his fingers.
Not the skin. The shake.
Then she said quietly, "He's not only losing blood."
Serou looked at her. "What else?"
Yukari met his eyes.
"He's carrying unresolved pressure from the lower branch."
Silence.
Kaito understood first.
Not poison.
Not exactly.
Residual structural stress.
Kanai had spent too long too close to unfinished logic, trapped in rooms built to read and compress people. Now his body was paying the price.
Kanai closed his eyes for a second. "Wonderful."
Sato looked at Yukari. "Can the White Scar help?"
Yukari answered slowly.
"If the relay was true, the White Scar is not just a destination. It's a processing site." A pause. "Maybe."
"Maybe," Eizan muttered. "A lovely word."
Kaito looked east-west into the darkening line of land.
They could not go slower.
But they also could not drag Kanai into the White Scar already half-broken if the place required clean recognition conditions.
Morita had not followed them physically.
That bothered Kaito more than pursuit would have.
Because careful enemies only let distance grow when they are building something ahead.
Then the seal in his wrist pulsed once.
Sharp.
Not from behind.
Ahead.
Not danger.
Not structure.
Presence.
Kaito's head lifted.
Serou saw it immediately. "What?"
Kaito listened.
One person.
Still.
Waiting.
Not Morita.
Not Desk Nine.
Different.
Someone was already sitting on the road to the White Scar as if they had known this group would eventually be forced into it.
Kaito stood.
"Someone's ahead."
"How many?" Serou asked.
"One."
"Armed?"
Kaito listened harder.
"Yes."
A beat.
"But not hiding."
That changed the silence around them.
Yukari rose slowly.
"Can you read intent?"
Kaito stared into the deepening dark.
He could.
Barely.
Not trap-first.
Not capture-first.
Not bureaucratic.
Old.
That was the strongest word he got.
Old patience.
Old injury.
Old waiting.
He looked back at the others.
"The White Scar knew we were coming before we did."
And far ahead, in the dark line of the western scar-land, a single fire was already burning.