After breakfast, they were back in Rinn’s ship. After only a few days, this was becoming familiar.

Philipe didn’t seem to know he was being followed. At least, he wasn’t taking great pains to hide his trail. He was talking to people, asking his seemingly innocent questions. Nothing would have seemed out of place, except that only a few days ago they’d found evidence that he’d summoned—or tried to summon—a demon.

That was becoming its own question. Rinn was still convinced that a demon had been pulled through to this side. Tafari had, from the start, been confident if there was a demon they would have seen hard evidence of it. Valentin had been open to the possibility of a demon, but seemed to relax a bit more every day, which told Satsu xie was coming around to Tafari’s point of view.

Satsu was leaving her mind open on the subject of the demon, but she was seeing rifts form, as Rinn and Tafari argued, each seeing the other as being intractably blind to the obvious.

One thing Philipe was doing was switching out ships as he travelled, which was the main thing slowing the hunt. Once they had a ship ID, they could track it, but every time Philipe switched it took time for Tafari to sort through the traffic, to figure out which ping the new ship might be. A couple times, now, they’d had to backtrack when they’d tried to follow the wrong one.

Long days and short nights were only adding to everyone’s sharp edges.

Satsu had snagged extra coffee before they’d taken off, and now she brought it to Rinn in the cockpit. Rinn was not a morning person, and had become even less so as the hunt went on and their sleep debt racked up.

Satsu handed the cup to Rinn, who took it with a grumbled thanks and then wrapped her hands around it like it was some sort of magic talisman. Without invitation, Satsu took the co-pilot seat next to her. Max nosed his way in. The small cockpit wasn’t really large enough for two people and one very large dog, but he squirmed between the seats, finding a way to half-curl on the floor between them.

Instead of complaining about the dog that really didn’t fit, Rinn reached down absently to stroke his head, and his tail thumped hard against the floor. Max liked Rinn and Rinn liked Max and these two facts made Satsu like Rinn even more.

Rinn was churning on the inside this morning. Like Tafari had been. Frustration. They were all frustrated. “Want to talk?” Satsu asked.

Rinn shot a look back over her shoulder, at the passenger space behind. It was a small ship. There wasn’t any privacy. “I’m fine.”

So Rinn’s frustration was with Tafari, and probably Valentin too. Unsurprising.

No one had really talked about it since the news report, but Satsu wondered how much everyone—including herself—was also that much more on edge because of the loss of the Executor? Just because they were as far removed from Imperial politics as a person could get here, didn’t mean it hadn’t been a shock.

For the good of the mission, Satsu needed to find a way to build team cohesion. She was the empath here. If only—

“Ah ha!”

That had come from the passenger space, from Tafari. A moment later, he was standing in the cockpit door, waving his tablet. “Look at this. Look what I found.”

Satsu and Rinn twisted around as best they could, especially with Max making it so there was no place to put their feet, while Valentin wedged xerself into the doorway next to Tafari. It was cramped, but the ship was small and it wasn’t as though they had a better space to meet.

Tafari held his tablet low so everyone had a view of what looked like a heat map, with Philippe’s path imposed over it.

It was as though Philippe was working from the same map, whatever this was Tafari had found. Each town he visited was the highest intensity red, and even the places where Philippe’s journey had led him out into the wilderness, it turned out he was following yet another bright contour. “What is this?” Rinn asked, her words overlapping with Valentin’s, “Where did you find this?”

“It’s history.” Tafari tapped at the brightest points. “Weissberg, Stone Falls, Springdale—these are some of the oldest settlements on Cradle. This trail, this is following the path of the first Wolves to live here.”

“Sure, that makes a lot of sense,” Rinn muttered. “Take a little trip through history; summon demons along the way.”

Satsu looked up at Valentin. “You said he stole artifacts from the Swan.” That information had been reluctantly shared after they’d left Weissberg. “Historical artifacts.”

Valentin gave a tight nod. “Journals, mainly. Some correspondence. From the early days of the Empire.”

“How early?” Tafari asked.

Valentin threw up xer hands. It was a testament to Swan grace that xie managed to do that without knocking xer elbows into the wall of the ship. “Do I look like an historian? They were old. They were valuable. At the time, we simply thought he meant to sell them.”

Satsu could see how that would have been a reasonable assumption. It still might have been, just looking at this map. Possible Philippe was a thief, a smuggler, digging up antiquities to feed to whatever black market existed for such things.

All that would have made sense if they hadn’t found the cave. “He’s looking for something. Something specific. The question is, what?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rinn said. “Look at this map. How closely he’s following it. We know where he’s going now. No more back-tracking. No more chasing our tails.”

It did still matter. The why of a hunt always mattered. But Rinn had a good point. “Do you think we can get ahead of him?”

Rinn’s smile was almost wolf-like. “We’re in a better ship, and we know his path. We can absolutely get ahead.”

“Here.” Tafari pointed to an intense red splash on the map with the large town of Brandenburg at the center. More lines of deep red radiated out, reaching to smaller villages and springs. “This is where we should go. This is where we’ll set our trap.”