Maaike hugged the dirt on the side of the track where Espur's fields stretched up the delta toward distant Nubia. Tall stalks swayed overhead, not dense enough to hide her from view if anyone looked closely enough or Neme popped out from behind the clouds. She'd picked a spot behind the rim of foot-high grass to maximise her cover, but they didn't get a lot of notice about this caravan so she'd been forced to improvise and hope for the best. Dark clothes were all well and good if she could blend into the soil and she could keep quiet long enough to let the main group pass. Then it was just a matter on sneaking up on the stragglers and taking them out quickly and quietly one by one... The wheat stalks would help with that, too, hiding the bodies from cursory rearward glances. She just had to hope the others could be quiet enough to make this work. Aiden, at least, had proved he could stalk prey, but the youths they'd brought along with them were largely untested outside of the forest and none of them had ever gone up against other people. Maaike worried that they'd hesitate, or balk at killing if they had to, or rush the attack to get to the captives.
The rattle of multiple wheels grew louder and Maaike hunched further into the grasses that hid her, flexing awkwardly to try and see what was coming without giving herself away. One of the cart wheels had an intermittent squeak that made her wince, overloud in the near silence of the night. The awful noise tensed all the muscles in her shoulders and she glanced across the path to one of the youths to see him fidgeting. She twitched her head enough to make him settle; his eyes were too wide, his gaze fixed on her instead of the approaching caravan as if she could explain to him what under Hel had possessed him to tag along. Maaike frowned and jerked her head sideways to indicate the caravan. He grimaced, but turned to watch, shuffling back into his own burst of grass as the slavers drew closer.
Everything in Maaike tensed as the caravan slowly passed, three covered carts surrounded by guards of various size and armaments. She thought she recognised a couple from the Hesian compound, but they tended to look the same after a while: big and brutish, hundred-yard stares as they kept an eye out for predators and the law, a multitude of weapons on display. Maaike could hear whimpers and muffled sobs coming from one of the carts, sounds that the mercs tuned out, noises that seemed withdrawn. People tended to stop wailing after a while, when it became obvious it was going to get them killed or ignored, so the fact that someone was still crying - even quietly - suggested they were recent captures. That tied into their intel on this op well enough, and she twisted her head a little to seek out Aiden's gaze, giving him a minute nod to tell him she was satisfied that they should go ahead with the attack.