The rain began as a fine, greasy mist that beaded on his armor like sweat. It washed the ash from the air, leaving behind the raw scent of wet rust and ozone. Gareth followed the line of a shattered mag-lev track, a raised spine of twisted metal that offered a vantage over the nanodust below. He was a gray ghost moving through a gray world.
A flicker of color. Not much—a faded blue tarp stretched over a gap in a crumpled transport hauler's fuselage. It was the most vibrant thing he'd seen in weeks.
Instinct, honed over months of solitary survival, screamed at him. Turn around. Go another way. Beacons draw attention.
He kept walking. But his path angled slightly toward the transport.
He moved like a shadow, using the carcasses of other wrecks for cover. From twenty meters away, he stopped. His senses, always heightened, strained.
He heard it first. A low, ragged moan of pain. Human. Then a hushed, frantic whisper. A woman's voice. "Just hold on, Jax. Please. The bleeding's slowing, see?"
A child's whimper answered. "Mama, he's so cold."
Gareth closed his eyes for a moment. The ghosts stirred. Not L-02 this time. The ghosts of his own unit, of field dressings during their simulation trainings.
He should leave. He would leave. His presence was a curse. A magnet for the metal plague. To stay was to sign their death warrant.
His feet carried him forward anyway.
He didn't announce himself. He simply stepped into the dim shelter of the tarp. Three faces snapped toward him, etched with identical masks of pure terror.
A man—Jax—lay on a makeshift pallet of shredded insulation, his face pale as chalk. A crude, blood-soaked bandage was tied around his lower leg, the fabric dark and wet. A woman crouched over him, a jagged piece of metal in her hand like a pathetic knife. A boy, maybe six, with huge eyes, hid behind her.
The woman scrambled up, putting herself between Gareth and her family. "Take what you want!" she hissed, voice trembling with a fear she tried to coat in defiance. "Take it and go! We have nothing!"
Gareth didn't move. He held his hands up, palms out, slowly. A universal, fragile signal. No weapon. See?
"I'm not here to take," he said, his voice rough from disuse. It sounded foreign to his own ears.
He looked past her, at the man's leg. The bandage was wrong. The tourniquet was tied over the wrong artery. He'd bleed out in an hour, two at most.
"Your bindings," Gareth said, nodding at the leg. "They're killing him."
The woman's defiance faltered, replaced by confusion and a desperate, blooming hope. "You... you know medicine?"
"Enough." It was an understatement. Arcadia field medicine was brutal, effective, and comprehensive.
He waited. A silent permission. The woman stared into his eyes, looking for the trap, the cruelty. After a long, silent battle, she gave the smallest nod and shuffled back, pulling her boy close.
Gareth moved. He didn't kneel with compassion. He knelt with the efficient purpose of a mechanic assessing a broken engine. His fingers, calloused and scarred, probed the wound. A deep gash from rusted rebar, fouled with God-knew-what. Infection was already setting in, the skin angry and hot.
From a pouch on his belt, he produced a small field kit—alcohol wipes, a suture gun loaded with synthetic thread, a vial of broad-spectrum nano-antiseptic. Arcadia issue. He worked in silence, his movements precise and swift. Clean the wound. Flush with antiseptic. The nano-mist hissed as it sterilized. Align the flesh. Apply the suture gun. Click-whirr. Click-whirr. The sound was absurdly loud in the quiet shelter.
The man, Jax, groaned, his eyes fluttering open. He saw Gareth and panic seized him.
"Shhh," Gareth said, not looking up from his work. His voice was low, flat. "Almost done. Scream if you need to. Won't change anything."
The absurd, blunt honesty seemed to calm the man. He sank back, watching with dazed eyes.
Throughout it all, the boy stared. Not at the blood, but at Gareth's face, at the focused intensity there.
When the wound was sealed under a clear, flexible derm-patch, Gareth re-tied the bandage properly, applying the right pressure. He checked the man's pulse. Thready, but stable.
"He needs real antibiotics and Clean water. The rest, he won't get here," Gareth stated, packing his kit away.
"We have... we have these," the woman said, offering a crumpled packet of nutrient paste—the cheap, gritty kind given to Burrow slaves.
Gareth looked at it, then at their hollow cheeks. "Keep it."
The woman, tears now streaking the grime on her face, tried again. "Please. Share a meal with us. It's... it's the least."
He almost refused. The word was on his tongue. But he saw the boy's eyes, wide with a hope he hadn't seen since... since before. A hope he knew was foolish. Dangerous. But he chose to at least engage the boy's folly.
He gave a single, stiff nod. But a nagging question played at the back of his mind filling him with an indomitable sense of unease. He just had to ask.
"What happened to him?"
The woman sighed "We managed to escape from THE BURROW. A fortress city about four hundred kilometers from here."
Gareth frowned. There was another fortress city besides Aeria. He had heard the rumors but had dismissed them as just that.
"The burrow?"
"Yes. It was a fortress that was built in a crater of unknown origin from long ago. We lived in peace for a while but then a particularly fearsome zombot known as chaos infiltrated the city and sealed it from the inside. And established itself as the overlord. Ever since that day. A variety of atrocities became rampant. The men were taken and experimented on to create new ZOMBOTS. A different kind. They were ruthless...The women...."
She shuddered.
Gareth was silent.
"The women were forcely impregnated to produce new males for their experiments.... After we escaped, we were hunted by these new ZOMBOTS. We escaped by jumping off a cliff and burying ourselves in the nanodust. My husband Joran had broken his leg in the jump."
Afterwards, the meal was silent, apart from the patter of rain on the tarp. They reconstituted the paste with a few drops of precious, murky water from a cracked canteen. It tasted like chalk and despair. Gareth ate his small portion mechanically. The boy, whose name was Eli, eventually fell asleep against his mother, clutching a ragged cloth dog.
As full dark fell, Gareth spoke. "I'll take first watch. You sleep."
"You don't have to—"
"I do." He cut her off, his tone leaving no room for argument. He wasn't being noble. It was tactical. They were exhausted, useless as sentries. He was not.
He sat with his back to the torn metal of the transport, facing the opening. The rain whispered secrets to the ruins. His ability was quiet, sensing no immediate threat. Only the low-grade, perpetual threat of the world itself.
He didn't sleep. He listened. To the family's shallow, exhausted breaths. To the distant, echoing moan of the wind through a thousand broken windows. To the memory of his peaceful days, with people who trusted him with their lives.
A hour before the false dawn, he moved. Silently. He took his canteen of purified water—a prize from a long-dead Arcadia cache—and poured half of it into their nearly empty one. He left it beside the sleeping woman.
He looked at them one last time. The man breathing easier. The boy curled in innocent sleep. The woman, her face finally relaxed from its mask of terror.
You're welcome, he thought, the old, leader's thought. And then the darker, truer thought followed: Now get as far from me as you can.
He slipped out from under the tarp and melted into the pre-dawn gloom, a ghost granting a temporary pardon, already feeling the weight of their fragile lives added to the chain of ghosts he dragged behind him. The compassion had been real. It had also been a liability. A brittle, dying thing he could no longer afford to test.
As morning came, the winds picked up and brought with it the distant scream of agony coming from the direction he had left behind. And just like that, something in him seemed to fracture.
The Wastes had given him its first lesson, and he had, for a moment, foolishly tried to unlearn it. He wouldn't make that mistake again.