Dawn of the Paladin

Madrak has been inside their heads for two months. They just don't know it yet.

The demonstration is over. Mogul walked eleven warriors through the Academy gates and walked them out again, and now Tet stands in the wreckage doing the math on what the enemy learned. The answer is: too much. The Fists of Steel. The Scout network's. The women who power it. Every advantage the Paladin have planned is now a known quantity and the one they haven't revealed, the LL device, comes with a twenty percent chance of permanently locking its user's bones into what can never be reversed.

Then Lena finds the door.

Not a door in a wall but inside her own mind, placed there by Madrak during the overdose. It's open for months, silently receiving every signal the Scout network has carried. Madrak doesn't need to destroy Tet. She just needs him to be afraid enough, at exactly the right moment, and his own biology will do the rest.

The intelligence about Salanan arrives like a gift. It is a credible road made by someone who knows exactly where it leads.

They walk it anyway with eyes open, knowing the trap, believing that what they've built together is stronger than what's been built against them. They are wrong about the cost but about each other.

Dawn of the Paladin: The 10 is the story of what happens when the war stops being theoretical. When the price of closing a door is everything it gave you. When a father holds a gap long enough for the signal to get through. And when a son, kneeling in a corridor on a dark moon with his bones trying to become permanent, discovers that the hands on his shoulders are the same hands they've always been.

The wall has a seam but the question is what grows through it?