Moni Son reached the warehouse at dawn and found it black. The walls still stood, but the roof had caved, and the smell of burned plastic hung in the air. She had come for a ledger the jewel's last courier was said to have hidden under the floor. The jewel itself was the prize at the end of every step she took now — the relic that named the ruler of Planet Kingdom. She wanted it because she wanted the power to decide who got left alone. Three crews chased the same lead. One of them had reached this site two weeks before she had. She did not enter. She read the site first, the way she always did. A toolbox sat overturned near the gap where the door had been. Wrenches, spent power cells, and a cracked meter spilled across the gravel. The crew that burned the building had left their equipment behind, which meant they had moved fast and meant to come back. Moni Son crouched, touched a cell, and found it still warm from the sun but dry of charge. They had been here yesterday, maybe the night before. A low whistle carried from the ridge above the lot. She knew the sound. The rival crew used wolfkin trackers, lean runners bred for pack hunts, and one was already on the slope, nose down, working a scent line. She had minutes, not hours. The open street behind her ran straight for half a mile with no cover. If she took it, the tracker would have her before she cleared the bend. She went the other way instead, down a dry drainage cut, and pushed into a collapse of stone slabs and bent beams she had passed on the way in. The slabs leaned together into a low arch wide enough for one body. She crawled through and waited. The wolfkin passed above her twice. Each time its claws scraped stone and moved on. When the whistles drew off toward the warehouse, she counted to two hundred and crawled out the far side. The drainage emptied into a brush field, and past the field stood an old observatory, its dome cracked into colored panes, vines pulling at the rusted frame. The door hung loose on one hinge. She slipped inside and braced it shut with a length of pipe. From a gap in the wall she could see the ridge, the warehouse, and the road in. No one had followed. She set the burned document's contents in her head again — the coordinates, the dates, the governor's name, the council that took everything from him — and began to plan from a place the rival crew did not know to look. She had bought herself a night. The jewel was still moving, and now she was the only one who knew where to look next.