# PSYCHIC HARVEST

### Chapter 7: Through the Right Channels

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**PART ONE**

Haven's gates were shut for the night by the time Ethan and Dallin made it back, torches lit along the wall in a slow, steady rhythm that felt, for the first time since Ethan had arrived in this world, almost aggressively normal — as if the settlement itself hadn't heard yet that something had gone wrong on the road outside it.

"Security office," Dallin said, already angling that direction without slowing down. "Not the hall. This isn't a council matter yet, it's an incident report."

"There's a difference?"

"There's a difference in how fast it moves." Dallin's jaw was tight in a way Ethan hadn't seen from him before — none of the easy, assessing confidence from the mine entrance or the market road. "Council matters get scheduled. Incident reports are supposed to move tonight."

*Supposed to,* Ethan noted silently, filing the phrasing away the way he filed everything now.

The security office turned out to be a squat, practical building near the eastern gate, lantern light spilling from a single window where a woman Ethan didn't recognize sat hunched over a ledger, her hair a deep, settled brown-green that Ethan's months here now read instantly — earth-Bleed, old and steady, the kind that came from years rather than months.

"Cross." She looked up, taking in both of them, the dust on their clothes, the particular tightness around Dallin's eyes. "This isn't a social visit."

"Contact incident. Two operatives, unknown affiliation, approached us on the Kettholme road. Showed force. Made an offer." Dallin's voice had shifted into something clipped and procedural, a register Ethan hadn't heard from him before — the voice of someone who'd filed reports like this more than once and hated every time he'd had to. "This needs to reach Sato tonight."

The woman's pen stopped moving. "Define 'showed force.'"

"Four creatures. Two revealed themselves, two more implied." Ethan stepped in before Dallin could summarize it shorter than it deserved. "They knew things about me they shouldn't have — my name, my creature's name, a contract I only finished today. That's not local rumor. That's information moving somewhere it shouldn't be."

For a long moment, the woman studied both of them — the same evaluating look Ethan had gotten used to over the last three months, the look of someone deciding how seriously to weigh a story before committing resources to it.

"I'll log it as priority," she said finally, already writing. "Sato's finishing orientation intake tonight — new drops came through two days ago, six of them, and he's the only one who does the first briefing personally. After that he's got the Voltbridge trade dispute at first light." She glanced up. "Realistically, this reaches him by tomorrow evening. I can get it to Okoro faster than that, if you'd rather brief someone who can actually move on it tonight."

Dallin's mouth tightened. "Tomorrow evening isn't—"

"I know what it isn't," the woman said, not unkindly, just tired in the specific way of someone who'd had this exact conversation with someone else's urgency more than once. "I didn't build the queue. I just work it."

---

Okoro, when they found him, was still up — sitting on an overturned crate near the training yard, sharpening something with the unhurried focus of a man who did his best thinking with his hands occupied, his stone-Bleed escort curled nearby like a boulder that had decided to nap.

He listened to the whole account without interrupting, which Ethan was starting to understand was rarer than it should have been — most people, even good ones, wanted to jump in with a reaction before the story finished. Okoro just let it land, whetstone moving in slow, even strokes the entire time.

"Undertow," he said, once they'd finished. Not a question.

"You already think that," Ethan said.

"I've thought that since the word 'Kettholme' came out of your mouth." Okoro set the whetstone down, finally, and looked at both of them with the particular weight of someone who'd delivered bad news enough times to have run out of gentle ways to do it. "They've been circling the trade roads for months. Small approaches. Careful ones. This is the first time they've gone after someone this new, though." His eyes settled on Ethan. "That's worth paying attention to. It means someone decided you were worth the resources."

"Because of the Thistlebound," Dallin said. "The Choir swarm today. Word travels."

"Word travels slow, normally." Okoro's expression didn't change, but something in his voice sharpened. "Vera named the contract before either of you could have told anyone but Kettholme's ledger-keeper. That's not slow word. That's someone with eyes closer to home than a village three hours out."

The silence that followed sat heavier than either of the two before it.

"You think someone here is feeding them information," Ethan said slowly.

"I think it's possible, and I think saying that out loud to the wrong person is exactly how you make sure whoever it is stays hidden longer." Okoro stood, joints cracking audibly, and for a moment looked every bit as tired as the woman in the security office had. "I'll get this to Sato myself, first thing — not through the queue. He needs to hear the 'contract before anyone could've told them' part specifically, from someone he trusts to have gotten the details right." He fixed both of them with a look that carried real weight. "Until then, neither of you repeats this to anyone outside this yard. Not Reyes, not Priest, not the two of you comparing notes over dinner where anyone else might hear. If there's a leak, the fewer people who know we're looking, the better our odds of finding it before it finds us again."

"How many people even move between here and Kettholme regularly?" Ethan asked. "Realistically. Caravan drivers, contract postings, trade runners."

"More than you'd think, and fewer than you'd hope." Okoro rubbed a hand over his jaw, the stone-Bleed creature beside him shifting in its sleep, settling deeper into the dirt with a sound like gravel resettling. "Every village posts its own contracts, keeps its own ledgers, hires its own runners to carry word between settlements. Haven doesn't control that flow — we barely track it. It's the price of the whole unification effort actually working: the more villages talk to each other, the harder it gets to know exactly who's listening in on any given conversation." He looked between them, something almost apologetic in the admission. "Sato's spent years trying to build something that connects people faster than the old free-range villages ever could. It was always going to cut both ways eventually. Fast information helps trade caravans and rescue teams. It helps anyone patient enough to sit at the edges and collect it, too."

Dallin's jaw tightened again, the same procedural tension from the security office settling back over him. "That's not exactly reassuring."

"It's not meant to be." Okoro's voice softened, just slightly. "But you did the right thing tonight — both of you. Most people freeze up around something like this, decide it's easier to pretend it didn't happen than deal with what it means. You reported it fast, and you reported it accurately. That matters more than either of you probably realizes right now."

Ethan filed that away too, alongside everything else — a small, steadying thing to hold onto against the larger unease still sitting cold in his chest.