For a moment, she was transfixed, fear, shock, and amazement all piling together into a paralysing cocktail that rooted her to the spot. The citykin in the carriage looked broken—glassy eyes and vacant stares—not meeting the ferocious gaze of their captors. Young and old, big and small, they formed a dismal cross-section of Wildhearth.

Her eyes widened as a quillkin, barely more than a child, rose from his seat, face pinched with fear and confusion. His mother grabbed for him, but he slipped free, letting out a yowl muffled by the carriage door.

Jett tensed as the nearest wolfkin guard stepped forward, but to her surprise, the grey-coated male used neither claws nor truncheon. He simply took a step forward from his position and gently caught the youngster by the scruff of his neck. The quillkin struggled for a moment, but the guard turned him around, dropping down on his haunches to face the captive. He spoke words Jett couldn't hear and then put both paws on the quillkin's shoulders and directed him back into his seat with a gentleness she found shocking.

The child slumped back in his seat, and as though nothing had happened, the guard straightened up. His eyes flickered down the carriage.

"Down!" Rapid whispered harshly.

Jett bit back a filthy curse as she dropped out of sight, squeezing her body against the door frame, willing herself to become smaller and praying to the Peace and Fire that they hadn't been seen. Heart-testing seconds thumped by, and her pulse hammered in her ears, her tail bristling with tension. Opposite her, Rapid mirrored her movements, his pink eyes wide and one paw already clutching the haft of his axe in readiness.

They waited.

No one came to the door. No voices rose over the rumble of the tram engine. No wolfkin came crashing down upon them. Jett looked back at the others, holding out a paw to stop them from coming any closer; mouthed don't move. When their baffled gazes met hers, she formed the silent word: company.

Slowly she began to unfreeze, the motion returning to her limbs. Staying crouched on all fours, Jett edged backwards, motioning the others to do the same, moving as gently and quietly as possible. The closer they drew to the exit, the quicker she began to shuffle, rising onto two legs and frantically motioning Karno to open the door.

It slid open, and they piled through in a frantic jumble. Only once the door shut again did Jett finally suck in a fortifying gulp of air and slump against the nearest pile of crates, sweeping her headfur back out of her eyes with both paws.

"What happened?" Karno murmured, glancing back to the carriage they'd just vacated.

"Found a prison carriage," Rapid spat.

"What?!"

"He's right," Jett confirmed, straightening up. "That carriage through there, it's filled with citykin...and wolfkin guards."

"By the Peace," Bronco muttered, shaking his big head in frustration. "So now what do we do? The otterkin said we needed to get to the back of the train."

"I haven't figured that out yet!" she snapped back.

Karno peered back through the window in their door, trying to see for himself, but at this distance, there was nothing to find through those tiny slivers of glass. With a snort of annoyance, he gave up and turned to them, brow crunching as he thought.

"They must be fresh from 'relocation,'" Gallant said bitterly. "Makes sense they would ship people on this tram. They couldn't take them all straight to Belforra without raising suspicion."

Jett nodded, still wracking her brain for a solution to the new obstacle. There was no prospect of sneaking through that carriage—the door was the only way in or out. Even if they could somehow turn off the lights, it would be a melee with no guarantees of escape, not to mention alerting the wolfkin to the fact that they had stowaways.

She glanced back at the door, claws drumming against her thigh. Outside the tram carrier would be the only option. Could they get to an external exit? She hadn't seen any roof hatches, but perhaps they could force one of the side doors and make their way to the roof from there. Too many unknowns, too many risks. For all she knew, popping one of those side doors would set off alarms up and down the tram. Jett cursed inwardly. They couldn't have come this far to be thwarted by one carriage full of prisoners.

"We're slowing down," Gallant said quietly, breaking the silence. "We must be getting close."

"There's a hatch here," Rapid grated, pointing at the oblong rectangle of dark metal planted in the floor. "I like sightseein' as much as the next guy, but let's all keep our heads twisted on, eh? Rear of the tram or not, we can't sit here spinning our tails. I say we take our chances and just get outta this thing from here; deal with whatever comes next."

Jett stepped over to the window, claws drumming on her thighs as she craned her neck, trying to get some sight of their destination. She could feel the faint shift in vibrations beneath her paws. Gallant was right—their journey was coming to an end. No matter how hard she looked, however, she couldn't see anything more than the broken world of Belforra beyond the glass.

They cleared the mess of buildings with a suddenness that made Jett jerk back from the window instinctively before she eased herself back into place. The tram carrier rails sloped downward, plunging them out of sight of the rest of Wildhearth but unveiling something much, much more important.

Jett's eyes widened as she finally saw the Belforra facility, nestled in a crater-like basin in the guts of the district. Shattered factories hemmed it in on all sides, hiding it from anyone or anything more than a few hundred meters away, but the vantage point of the lone tram-carrier track let her see the nucleus of the wolfkin project.

At first glance, the spareness of what she could see felt strangely anti-climactic. Embedded in the crater base was a trio of long, low humps of bland, fire-darkened stonework that faced inwards like three sides of a square, their fronts tepidly lit. She could make out unlit guard towers camouflaged in the surrounding ruins, their structures a little too angular and firm to be part of the original buildings. Shadowy shapes moved atop them. As they drew closer, she could see that the doors to each piece of the structure lay open, revealing downward-sloping ramps.

"This is just the front door," Jett murmured. "The main facility must be underground."

"Down there," Karno said, pointing to the eastern bunker entrance. She followed his pointing claw, and a low growl rumbled in the back of her throat at what she saw.

Long lines of dark silhouettes were being fed into the bunker's gaping maw, shuffling along like livestock. A twinge of anger pricked the back of Jett's mind when she realised they had to be more 'relocated' citykin. She could make out the different shapes of those unfortunate souls, unmistakable antlers of male deerkin, the dumpy forms of beaverkin, slight-framed foxkin like her—to her amazement, she could even pick out the occasional wolfkin in the sad processions.

Deserters? Civilians who refused to stay silent? She couldn't say, but there didn't seem to be a single walk of life that the wolfkin hadn't dragged kicking and screaming into their power games.

"Hellfangs," she swore through gritted teeth.

"It's like they're herding them." Karno shook his head, disbelief in his voice.

Gallant thumped a paw against the wall in frustration. "My family is in there somewhere. We have to get inside."

"And we will." Jett nodded to herself, a plan already forming as she looked at those mournful lines of the downtrodden. "We'll have to ditch the heavier gear, though."

"Well, that don't sound good," Rapid said. "What's your play, girl?"

"They're sending kin of all shapes and sizes into this place. I think we'd blend right into one of those lines."

The albino foxkin looked at her for a moment, and then his shoulders slumped. "Aw, you're yanking my tail."

"Jett..." Karno shot her a dubious look.

She flicked a thumb over her shoulder. "Those kin on the train, that's where they're heading. If we want to get inside that place, we should get back to the adjacent carriage. We pop the access plate there and just pretend we were in there all along. For all we know, there are a dozen carriages packed to the seams—they won't notice the five of us."

"She's right," Bronco agreed. "The perimeter of this place is swarming with guards, and those big doors look like the only way in. We'd get snatched easily trying to sneak in any other way. I say we take our chances."

"We wait, pass the second checkpoint and act the good little prisoners." She glanced around at her companions. "Everybody strip it down—only weapons you can conceal. Doesn't look like they're checking people at the entrance, but we can't take chances."

For a moment, no one moved. They just glanced at one another, then back towards the prison carriage, then out to the gutted carcass of Belforra district.

Then Rapid snorted in resignation, and she watched in amazement as he slid his axe into a series of hooks in the lining of his coat and pulled a stretch of loose fabric over it, covering the weapon completely. To the casual observer, he was nothing more than an unarmed foxkin in an overcoat. He spread his paws wide.

"That do ya?"

"I'll take it."

With his snout crunching with discomfort, Bronco reluctantly unbuckled the armbow from around his wrist and slid his heavy truncheon down beneath the lining of his kilt. Then he looked at her and nodded once.

For her part, Jett hitched the sheath for her longclaw up high to the centre of her back, the hardness of the blade pressing vertically up and down her spine. She tugged her jacket down and pulled the straps of her small pack tight to conceal it completely. It left the blade virtually inaccessible in a quick fix; Jett hoped they could get inside the compound before she needed to get at it. Taking a deep breath, she beckoned her companions to follow.

Moving low and silent, the group made their way back into the empty carriage, keeping down on all fours to remain out of the eye line of a casual glance from the next carriage. They gathered around the floor hatch in the middle of the carriage, tension sizzling in the air. Jett sidled up to the nearest window and east herself up, just high enough to look out.

She took a deep breath. The entrance to the facility loomed larger now, a gateway to a world that could change the course of Wildhearth's history forever. If Jett had any say in it, that history would not look favourably on Hera or her plotters. She could see on the southern edge that they approached a semi-circular arc of dark metal that curled out of the shattered buildings. A row of soft lights blinked on the tip of the arc, and she could see the faint glint of the tram carrier tracks beneath: the final stop was coming.

"Alright, get ready!" she hissed, darting over to the floor hatch and hooking one paw through the release hoop. "Once we stop, just follow me."

Silence descended upon them as they waited, the vibrations in the deck beneath growing fainter as the engine gradually wound down on its approach to the Belforra station. Every muscle in Jett's body coiled in readiness, and she braced herself for the ordeal to come. At last, with a gentle jolt, the train came to a halt, and hydraulics hissed as the main doors prepared to open and disgorge their cargo.

Jett ripped the hatch open and dove out into the night.