Eloy pressed his thumb against his temple and pushed. Deviation Sense fired. The pulse ripped outward through the pre-war channels, and every node it touched echoed back with coordinates. Ten signatures.

The closest two were less than four hundred meters from the creek bank they’d just fled. The others fanned out in a crescent, closing the gap at speeds that turned his stomach.

"They’re still on the creek line." Eloy’s voice came out steadier than his pulse. "Getting out of the water bought us maybe ten minutes."

His hand went to the bandage wrapped around his head. Damp. Warm against his fingertips. He wiped it on his pants and kept moving.

The gully was somewhere ahead. Isolde had said thirty meters, which in this terrain could mean thirty or three hundred. The underbrush clawed at his shins, releasing the sharp scent of crushed loam and rotting bark. His ankle screamed with every step on the uneven ground. Each throb was a reminder of the creek, the ping, the network lighting up like a signal flare he’d lit himself.

"The gully entrance is ahead. Thirty meters." Isolde’s voice cut through the brush from the left flank. "Do not step on the loose stone. It is not on any modern map."

She didn’t turn. Her path through the undergrowth was clean and deliberate, feet finding solid root and packed earth without hesitation. The kind of certainty that came from walking the same ground at twelve years old, alone, because the alternative was being found by something worse.

"Your fish are leaking, Vance."

Maya’s observation landed flat and practical. She’d adjusted the ledgers under her arm without breaking stride, the rolled city map pinned between her elbow and ribs. Her eyes flicked to the treeline behind them, then back to the path.

Eloy glanced down. Water and blood were seeping through the canvas of his pack. The same exploit that had filled his inventory was now leaving a trail of wet and scales across the forest floor.

No time to fix it. Only forward.

The HUD pulsed in his peripheral vision.

[ SURVIVAL MODE — TIMER: 13 DAYS, 21 HOURS, 9 MINUTES ]

The minimap updated. The ten red signatures had reached the creek’s edge. They hesitated there for two seconds, clustering at the point where three sets of footprints emerged from the water. Then they split. Two groups of five, peeling off to flank east and west through the forest.

"They’re splitting up." He hauled the pack strap higher on his shoulder and kept his eyes on the minimap. "Something’s coordinating them."

The underbrush thinned. The ground dropped away into a narrow cut between two hillsides, invisible until you were standing directly above it. A fold in the terrain that didn’t exist on any surveyed map.

Isolde dropped into it without breaking stride. Her boots hit stone. She kept moving, swallowed by the shadow between the rock walls.

Maya followed. Then Eloy.

The gully walls rose on either side, shoulder-width apart, blocking the sky to a thin strip of darkening blue. His ankle buckled on the landing. He caught himself against the stone, fingernails scraping lichen, and pushed forward into the dark.

Above them, through the gap in the rock, the treeline shuddered as something massive brushed against the canopy.

The hollow between the hills was deep enough to hide three people and a sputtering pile of embers. The air smelled of wet stone and cold ash. No smoke. No open flame. Just heat buried under a layer of flat stones, barely enough to warm the skin of a fish.

Eloy crouched over the makeshift hearth, turning the skewer. Four minutes on the embers. The skin on one side was black. The center was still translucent.

Heat and timing. Basic. Tutorial-level content.

He flipped the skewer. The charred side hit the stone and dissolved into black flakes, and the raw side sizzled against the heat without committing to anything.

"I can do this." He said it to the fish, not to the two people watching him fail at basic survival. "It’s easy. Nothing too complicated."

He rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. Mud smeared across his cheekbone. The embers spat once, sent up a tendril of gray, and died back down to a sullen glow.

[King_Of_The_Pirates]: bro skipped the cooking tutorial too

[IsoldeSimp47]: ISOLDE SAVE HIM

[chronobreaker]: he’s going to give them all food poisoning

[DeadPixel_404]: this is what happens when you stay home all day playing games kids

[TrollKing99]: POISON DAMAGE INCOMING

[ POLL: NAME THE DISH? ]

[ A) Carbon Crisp ]

[ B) Regret ]

[ C) Something Something Vomit ]

[ TIMER: FISH IS BURNING ]

[nachtfalter]: C IS PERFECT

[coldfront44]: voted B

[dudefromfloripa]: bro is COOKING cooking

"You’re charring the skin and leaving the center raw." Maya’s eyes moved from the ruined fish to his hands. The tremor in his fingers was visible even in the ember-light. "That will sicken us."

Isolde crossed the hollow in three steps. She crouched beside him, reached past his frozen hands, and took the skewer and the knife from his grip. Her fingers closed around the handle of the blade, and she was already working before he could form a sentence.

"You were going to waste the meat."

The blood on her knuckles had dried brown from the ceiling collapse, but her hands didn’t slow. She laid the fish flat on the stone. Two cuts along the spine, one clean pull: the skeleton came away intact, the flesh stayed on the skewer. The whole process took less than eight seconds per fish.

Maya sat back on her heels, the ledgers balanced on her knees. She watched Isolde’s hands the way she watched account registers.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

The question sat in the air.

"My father’s servants were forbidden to feed me." Isolde didn’t look up from the fish. The knife made another precise cut. "I learned to prepare what I could steal, or I starved."

Her knife hand went still for one second. Then she moved to the next fish.

The leather binding of the ledgers creaked. She said nothing.

"I see."

Eloy said nothing. He watched Isolde’s hands move through the third fish, the fourth. Same grip. Same result. He filed it away.

A piece of fish fat dripped onto the embers and hissed. Isolde caught it before it could flare, her hand steady, her eyes on Eloy’s.

The skewer she handed him was perfect. Crisp skin. Flaking white center.

He took it.

"You were going to poison us."

Isolde’s voice was flat, but she settled back against the rock wall with her own skewer, posture easing off by a degree.

"Probably." Eloy scratched his nape. His shoulders dropped. "I’m tougher now, figured I’d test it on you first."

He bit into the fish. It was good. Really, really good, given the circumstances. Not seasoned, but cooked through and warm.

"The ledgers are dry. The map is intact." Maya’s voice came from the far side of the hollow.

Her eyes moved between Eloy and Isolde. The postures. The fact that neither of them had flinched away from the other in the last five minutes. She catalogued all of it and said nothing more.

They ate in silence.

The embers crackled low under their stones. The survival timer ticked forward in Eloy’s peripheral vision, but he didn’t check it. The hollow was just the sound of chewing and the faint hiss of fat, and for a stretch of time that he couldn’t measure and didn’t want to, there was nothing else.

Eloy’s hand went slack. His head found the rock. His eyes closed.

For three seconds he forgot to listen for pursuit.

The wind shifted.

Smoke. Woodsmoke, carrying the sharp edge of burning pine, coming from the northwest. From the direction of the gully entrance.

"That’s not us."

Eloy was on his feet before he decided to stand. His ankle buckled. Pain lanced up his calf. He locked the joint by force of will. The skewer hit the stone, forgotten.

"The embers were buried." Maya was already rolling the ledgers, the map in her left hand, her body angling toward the exit. "No smoke escaped."

"They are burning the forest."

Isolde stood. She turned toward the smell without being asked, her voice flat, the same as every call she’d made since the creek.

Through the distant trees, an orange glow flickered against the pines. It grew brighter as Eloy watched, spreading from a point source into a line of fire that licked at the canopy. The HUD updated with a proximity warning. The minimap reorganized. The ten signatures, previously scattered in a search pattern, were now forming a sweep line, driving south.

Driving them.

"They’re herding us." He pulled up the minimap. "The fire is the fence."

The survival timer read 13 days, 20 hours, 51 minutes. The minimap showed no safe vector. Every direction was either fire or signatures, and the gap between them was closing.

Isolde turned from the firelight. Her eyes moved across the terrain, calculating, pulling from a map she’d memorized a decade ago. A path that wasn’t on any modern survey. A way out that only existed because someone had needed to disappear through these hills before the war ended.

The orange glow flickered between the pines, reflected in her eyes.