The orchard smelled like cider left too long in the sun.
They picked their way between the skeletal trees in the slanting afternoon light, the ground soft with fallen fruit gone to rot. Half-buried under a drift of leaves, Ellie spotted a flash of color and dug it out: a comic book, swollen with damp, its cover showing a green-skinned warrior with a starfield behind her.
"Savage Starlight," she breathed, wiping the cover on her sleeve. "This one's a classic." She fell into step beside Ethan, flipping pages with her thumb. "You ever read comics?"
"A bit," Ethan said. "Strategy games, mostly. Building things. Figuring out how systems work."
"Like how to outsmart a Griever?" She grinned up at him.
"Exactly like that."
She launched into the plot — the warrior, the betrayal, the war for the star lanes — talking with her hands, and Ethan found himself watching the way her whole face got involved in the telling.
"—and then the warrior finds out the star council sold her whole fleet," Ellie was saying, "and she just takes her ship straight through their blockade, alone, and—" She stopped, suddenly self-conscious. "Sorry. I get loud about it."
"Don't," Ethan said. "I like loud."
She blinked at him, and smiled so wide it changed her whole face, and went right back to the blockade. He hadn't realized how long it had been since he'd just listened to someone be happy about something. The warmth of it sat unfamiliar in his chest, and he didn't try to name it.
Joel walked behind them, shotgun loose, and watched the two of them with an expression he couldn't have explained if asked — something protective and uneasy at once, the way he'd once watched Ellie laugh with Tess. The kid was good for her. That was the part that worried him.
The light went thin and gold through the branches. Ethan stopped mid-step.
The rot-sweet of the orchard had changed. Under it now, sharp as a chemical burn: sickness, acid, wet meat. And beneath the rustle of leaves, a gurgling — almost musical, obscene — with a heavier drag under it.
"Hold it." Ethan's hand came up. "Puker. Bloaters with it, up by the ditch. Don't get hit — the spray eats through everything. We go around."
Ellie went pale. "Around how?"
Ethan was already moving toward the farmhouse at the orchard's edge, a collapsed grey shape with a stone foundation. "Cellar. Under and past them."
The cellar door was half-buried under fallen wall and briar. Ethan pointed at the hinges. "Here — kick it low, hard."
Joel didn't argue. One kick, and the rotted wood gave with a crack like a breaking bone, swinging in on darkness and the smell of deep earth.
They went down into cold black water. Ethan's flashlight cut a weak cone through it: shelves of rotted jars, a floor of black standing water, fungal tendrils glowing faintly along the walls like veins. The layout ran true under his feet — stores, turn, stairs, far wall. Cellars like this were all built the same.
The water pulled at their legs, cold enough to ache. Every few steps the light caught something else — a child's shoe, swollen shut; a calendar curled to pulp, the years unreadable. Ellie didn't look at any of it. She kept her eyes on his back and her fingers on his wrist, and counted his steps under her breath like a song.
"This place is disgusting," Ellie whispered, her voice small in the dark. She stayed close, her hand finding his sleeve first, and then — when a cold draft moved through the black — her fingers closed around his wrist. She didn't let go. He didn't pull away. Her grip was warm and sure, and something quiet bloomed in his chest to meet it, steady as a held breath.
They came up on the other side of the orchard into a stand of pines, the late sun falling gold through the trunks. Joel let out a long breath. "Underneath them all. Didn't hear a peep."
Then the pines moved.
Three figures stepped out from the treeline — men in patched-together gear, rifles slung, and on the leader's sleeve a faded Firefly patch, the colors washed almost white. The leader raised his rifle.
"Packs on the ground," he said. "Nice and slow."
Joel's shotgun came up smooth. "Walk away, son."
The leader's eyes flicked to Ethan, to Ellie — and then his face changed, because the gurgling had followed them out of the orchard, closer now, wet and musical. The Puker crested the irrigation ditch behind the three men, bloated and glistening, its throat swelling.
It spat.
The leader screamed — a short, cut-off sound — as the spray took him across the chest, and he went down, his rifle clattering onto the pine needles. The other two broke and ran, crashing back into the treeline without a backward look.
"Go!" Joel roared.
They ran, the Puker's gurgling fading behind them, and didn't stop until the pines had swallowed the orchard whole. Ellie was breathing hard, her eyes on the rifle where it lay forgotten in the needles twenty yards back.
She went back for it.
Joel caught her arm. She shook him off — gently — and picked it up: a semi-auto, worn but oiled, the stock scratched with tally marks. She worked the action once, the way Joel had taught her with the shotgun, and slung it over her shoulder.
"From the dead," Joel said quietly. "You sure?"
"It's a rifle," Ellie said. "We're keeping it."
They made camp under the pines as the light failed. Joel got the fire going, and the three of them sat close around it, the rifle leaning against the log at Ellie's side.
"It's weird," Ellie said, looking up past the flames at the first stars. "Out here you're just... small. A speck. But then you do something like that — the Griever, those things in the orchard — and it feels like we stand a chance. Like we're not just waiting to die." She turned to Ethan, her gaze holding his in the firelight. "You make me feel like we stand a chance."
Ethan didn't know what to do with the trust in her voice. He held her gaze and gave her the only true thing he had. "We will. We'll find a way. Together."
The fire crackled. Ellie picked up the rifle again, turning it over in her hands, learning its weight — and smiled, just a little, to herself.