Ares stopped at the edge of a dry streambed and took out the map.
The paper had gone soft at the folds, but the mark was still there a small square he had drawn weeks ago, back when the camp still sent supply runs this far south.
Army Supply Point 4.
He had passed near it once with a hunting party and never gone inside.
He looked at the square for a long moment.
If there was a bunker anywhere out here, it would be there.
He folded the map away and started moving.
The ground rose gently toward higher forest, and he kept low, testing each step before committing his weight.
Twice he stopped and let the wind carry sound to him instead of walking through it.
The second time, something answered a shift in the brush thirty meters back, quiet, followed by nothing.
He did not turn to look.
He kept walking at the same pace for another hundred meters, letting whoever it was believe they had not been noticed.
Then he changed his route.
Ahead, the tree line broke into open, low ground a stretch with no cover, no trees, nothing but flattened grass and the bones of an old fence line.
Ares stepped onto the open ground.
He did not walk in a straight line.
He angled left, then right, unhurried, as if searching for a trail rather than running from one.
Twenty meters out, an old car sat rusted on its axles, half sunk into the grass.
He dropped behind it and stayed low, watching the tree line he had just left.
Nothing moved.
He counted a slow hundred, then rose and cut across at a different angle, toward the collapsed shell of a farmhouse standing alone in the field.
He reached its shadow and pressed against the wall, breathing evenly, eyes on the trees behind him.
There.
At the edge of the forest, two shapes had gone still where the brush thinned.
Not moving forward.
Not moving back.
Watching the open ground the way he was watching them.
They had stopped.
Open ground didn’t only expose him.
It exposed anyone deciding whether to follow him into it.
Ares gave it another slow count before he moved again, angling away from the farmhouse in a line that looked aimless but wasn’t, until the ground began to slope down toward trees again on the far side of the field.
He crossed the last open stretch without looking back, reached the new tree line, and let the forest close around him.
He kept his same pace.
No one came out of the trees after him.
By the time the fence line of the supply point came into view, the sun had dropped low enough to throw long shadows across the cracked lot.
Two collapsed guard towers.
A row of dead trucks with their tires long rotted away.
A low concrete building at the center, doors hanging open, one side of the roof caved into the room beneath it.
Ares moved along the fence until he found a gap and slipped through.
Inside the first building, papers had gone to mush on the floor, and most of what remained had been picked clean by scavengers years before him.
But in a side office, half buried under a collapsed shelf, he found a map case.
The map inside was newer than his, better detail, the kind the military used before everything fell apart.
He knelt and studied it, then transferred what mattered from his own worn paper onto the clean one the camp’s position, a small x.
The clearing east of the orchard where the fire still smoked when the wind was right, and the direction the tracks had come from that morning.
The stretch of forest where the wolf pack ran, marked from memory of the howls.
The place near the ant colony’s old ground, still avoided.
The riverbank where he had watched Doctor Hana’s people work, and the road their vehicle had taken north from there.
When he finished, he folded the old map into his pocket and kept the new one open in his hand.
He moved room to room after that, slower now, checking each doorway before stepping through it.
Movement outside caught his eye through a broken window a shape crossing the lot at a run.
Ares dropped low and watched through the gap in the wall.
A dog.
Not a normal one.
It stood taller than his waist even at a dead run, its shoulders working like something built rather than born, chasing a deer across the open ground toward the tree line.
The deer didn’t make it.
The dog closed the distance in three long strides and brought it down hard, then stood over it, breathing, one paw still pressed against its flank.
It lifted its head and looked directly at the window.
Ares went still.
The dog held the look for several seconds, ears forward, reading him the way it had read the deer’s path across the field.
Ares did not move, did not breathe evenly, did not reach for the rebar leaning against his leg.
Then the dog turned and dragged its kill away into the trees on the far side, without looking back again.
Ares let his breath out slowly and kept working through the building.
The rooms nearest the entrance held nothing but rot and old furniture.
Further back, a stairwell led down, the door at the bottom sealed with a wheel lock rusted solid.
He put his weight into it.
It didn’t move.
He tried again, both hands, and gave up when his palms started to bleed against the rust.
Whatever was behind that door would have to wait.
He turned his attention to what he actually needed something to hunt with.
He had food for maybe two more days if he ate carefully, and no working weapon beyond the rebar, which was good for close work and nothing at range.
He went through the building room by room, checking cabinets, lockers, anything still closed.
He found the cellar behind a door he’d almost passed twice, half-hidden behind a collapsed section of wall.
A narrow wooden stairway led down into the dark.
He went slowly, one hand on the wall, testing each step before it took his weight.
Below, most of the crates had been sealed shut, swollen and warped beyond opening.
But one case near the back had a stenciled marking still legible across the lid: FRONTIER COALITION ARCHERY.
Ares pried it open.
Inside sat a crossbow, heavier than he expected when he lifted it.
The string was already drawn and locked, a scope mounted along the top rail.
He turned it over, checking the mechanism, then searched the rest of the case.
No bolts.
He set it aside and kept searching, and found a second, longer case beneath it a metal spear.
He tested the balance.
Too heavy for him to throw accurately, not yet, not with the strength he had left.
He weighed it in his hands anyway.
Still better than nothing at all.
He took both.
Near the back wall, half-buried behind a fallen shelf, sat three sealed barrels.
He worked the lid off the first one and found beans, dry and packed to the brim, untouched by rot or rust.
He sat back on his heels and looked at it for a long moment.
Three barrels.
More food than he’d had in his hands since leaving the camp.
He looked around the cellar again the narrow stairway, the single door above it, the sound his own boots had made on every step coming down.
Anything coming down after him would announce itself the same way.
No one could reach this room quietly.
It was as close to safe as anything he had found since the gate closed behind him.
Ares carried the crossbow and spear to the base of the stairs and set the spear across the door handle at the top, wedging it tight enough that it would take real force to open from outside.
Then he came back down, opened the first barrel of beans, and ate slowly, methodically, saving the other two barrels untouched at the back wall.
When he was done, he wiped his hands on his pants and reached into his pack.
The case was still there, wrapped in its cloth, exactly where it had been since the camp.
He drew it out, unwrapped it enough to find what he was looking for, and pulled free a thin logbook tucked into a side pocket he hadn’t opened before.
He sat back against the cellar wall, the crossbow within reach, the spear wedged against the door above him, and opened it to the first page.