Mara ducked in first.
Leon followed.
The shelter was small enough that all three of them had to think about where their knees and elbows went. Toma had arranged the interior well. Loose stones had been pushed into a low inner lip near the entrance. A torn pack had been folded under one corner to keep it off the cold ground. Two lengths of sharpened scrap metal rested beside his good leg within easy reach.
Not helpless, then.
Never had been.
Mara took the left side, close enough to the entrance to react quickly. Leon settled near the back wall where he could see both of them without making it obvious that he wanted to.
Toma kept the spear across his lap and finally let some of the strain show in his shoulders.
"You really did come out of the surf?" he asked Mara.
"Yes."
"Alone?"
"Not anymore."
His eyes moved to Leon again. "And him?"
Mara said, "He was about to die."
Leon nodded. "That remains the general pattern."
Toma looked at the tear across Leon's back, the salt-stiff fabric, the sand still caught at the hem of his clothes, and then reached for the small water skin beside him.
He hesitated only once before tossing it.
Leon caught it on instinct.
"Two swallows," Toma said. "Then pass it."
That was not strategy. Not entirely. There was no reason for Toma to offer it first except that Leon looked worse than Mara, and some part of him had not fully given up being decent.
Leon took the water and hated how much that mattered.
He drank once, then once more, careful and measured, and passed it to Mara. The moment the water settled in his stomach, the pressure in his chest shifted again, pulling tighter for half a second before settling deeper.
Another debt.
Of course.
Mara drank and returned the skin.
Toma watched Leon over the motion. "You look annoyed every time somebody gives you something."
Leon considered several possible lies and rejected them all.
"I'm complicated," he said.
"That's one word for it."
Mara said, "He reacts strangely to help."
Toma glanced between them. "That so?"
Leon leaned his head back against the stone. "I preferred it when only I noticed."
Silence settled for a few seconds.
Outside, the wind moved over the rocks in low bursts. Farther away, something clicked once near the coast, then stopped.
Toma's hand tightened on the spear shaft.
Mara noticed too.
Leon said quietly, "How long until this place decides whether it wants us?"
Toma looked toward the entrance. "Not long."
He adjusted the binding on his injured leg, and Leon saw now that the cloth had been done well, tight and clean despite the lack of proper supplies. Toma caught him looking.
"Looks worse than it is," he said.
"That's a useful skill," Leon replied.
"It's not a skill. It's necessity."
There was something very ordinary in the way he said it. Not dramatic. Not self-pitying. Just tired truth.
That unsettled Leon more than he wanted to admit.
Mara asked, "Did you see others?"
"A few. At distance. Two running west. One body after that." Toma paused. "And something in the rocks near dusk that I didn't stay to study."
"What kind of something?"
Toma looked at her for a second. "The kind that made leaving feel stupid."
That was answer enough.
The light outside thinned further.
It didn't darken all at once. It drained. The pale color left the stone first, then the edges of the grass, then the detail in the ridges beyond the shelter until the whole outside world became flatter and harder to trust.
The wind dropped.
All three of them felt it.
The surf was still there in the distance, but now it sounded farther away than it should have, as if the space around the shelter had closed in and pushed every other sound back.
Toma lifted one hand for silence nobody had broken yet.
Then, somewhere outside and to the right, something moved across the stone with slow, deliberate care.
Not rushing.
Circling.
The sound stopped.
Started again.
Closer.
No one inside the shelter spoke.
The thing outside moved to the left side now, still patient, still dragging or stepping in a rhythm too careful to belong to anything mindless.
Leon felt his pulse climb.
Not because of the noise itself.
Because whatever was out there was not testing the shelter like a beast. It was learning it.
The sound passed across the front opening once more and then disappeared into the growing dark.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then something brushed lightly against the stone above them.
And all three of them understood at once that night had truly begun.