You, in all your spandex-and-sarcasm glory, have never once pictured yourself on a horse ranch. Let alone as part of a mission. But here you are—shivering in a borrowed flannel shirt, with your high-tech goggles fogging up from horse breath, trying very hard to look like this is all part of the plan.

Spoiler: It’s not.

“This is the worst undercover op in the history of ops,” you think as a horse snorts loudly at you, like it agrees.

The ranch is beautiful, in a way that’s unsettling. There’s too much space. The sky goes on forever. The silence is thick, not empty—alive, like it’s listening. And under that stillness is the constant crunch of hooves, creak of wood, rustle of pine needles. The city never had silence like this. It had sirens and subways and the hum of neon.

Here, even the wind feels older than you.

Danielle Moonstar—your “contact,” “handler,” “babysitter,” take your pick—seems perfectly at home in it. She wears calm like armor. Her eyebrows haven’t moved since she first met you and asked, deadpan:

“So you’re the city kid with ‘mystic sensitivity’ who gets nosebleeds when spirits are mad?”

You had tried to play it cool.

“Sometimes it’s migraines, too,” you’d replied.

She’d blinked once. Then turned around and handed you a shovel.

“Then you can muck stalls while we wait for the land to speak.”

You’re not entirely sure if this is hazing or training. Maybe both.

Your first few days pass in a blur of why is that horse looking at me like it knows my search history and please tell me Mirage didn't just teleport away instead of helping with the hay bales. (She didn’t. She just walks like a ghost sometimes.)

You’re not used to work that’s quiet. There are no villains. No alarms. Just tasks that ground you: brushing down horses, hauling feed, patching fences. Danielle doesn’t hover—she watches. Like she’s evaluating you, but also giving you space to trip and learn.

Which you do.

Often.

The first time you fall off a hay bale trying to prove you could climb it “like a ninja,” you’re sure she’ll make fun of you. She just raises an eyebrow.

“Impressive,” she says dryly. “You made gravity nervous.”

You're not sure if that’s praise, but you’ll take it.

But what starts as an awkward rural comedy of errors shifts. Slowly.

There’s a kind of rhythm out here. You wake with the light, not an alarm. You learn the names of each horse. You stop flinching when the wind rattles the barn. One day, Danielle lets you ride out with her at sunrise. The air is pink and sharp, the sky endless. She says nothing. Neither do you.

And it’s perfect.