Ares did not sleep after Garrow left.
He spent the next hour walking through the depot, checking the damage, the water tanks and the broken sections of fence.
Then he remembered the bunker.
He had seen the bunker when he first found the depot.
Ares remembered the sealed hatch in the floor of the smaller storage bay, the one he’d tried and failed to force open on his first night here, back when both arms still worked and his strength had still felt like his own.
He had left it then.
There had been nothing urgent enough to justify the noise.
There was time now.
He crossed to the hatch and knelt beside it, favoring his left side.
The wheel lock had rusted solid, the same as the one at the old supply point, but this one hadn’t been touched by anyone in longer.
He set his good shoulder against it, braced his boots, and pushed.
The metal resisted.
He put more of his weight into it, ignoring the pull that reached across into his right side no matter how carefully he tried to keep it out of the effort, and felt something give not smoothly, but all at once, the wheel jumping half a turn before locking again.
He kept turning.
The lock broke on the fourth attempt, a deep grinding crack of rust letting go all together.
The hatch swung down and back, revealing a straight steel ladder disappearing into dark.
Ares climbed down one-handed, testing each rung before trusting it.
The space below was not what he expected.
He had pictured a bunker the way the word suggested one ammunition racks, a command table, bunks stacked three high, the same grim military efficiency he’d found at the other depot.
Instead a long corridor stretched ahead of him, lit by a scattering of emergency strips still glowing faint green along the base of the walls, doors set into both sides at regular intervals.
He moved down the corridor slowly, spear in his left hand, checking each room in turn.
A cold storage unit, the compressor still audibly running somewhere behind the wall, though when he opened it the shelves held only a scatter of long-expired cans and one vacuum-sealed pouch that had split at the seam years ago.
A water treatment room, pipes and filters he didn’t recognize the function of but understood the shape of well enough to guess.
Sleeping quarters, rows of bunks under thin blankets gone stiff with dust.
A room with low tables and small chairs, faded alphabet letters still taped along one wall at exactly the height of a child’s eyeline.
One drawing remained pinned beside the board four stick figures standing beneath a yellow square labeled HOME.
Ares looked at it for a moment.
Ares’s fingers tightened around the spear.
He looked at the drawing again.
For a moment he saw his father’s hand on his shoulder before school.
His mother’s voice through the kitchen doorway.
His sister’s hand gripping the back of his shirt in a crowded street.
He looked away.
A room beyond that lined with shelves of books, a chalkboard, more small chairs.
Something that might have been a clinic, glass cabinets empty, a single examination table bolted to the floor.
This had not been built only for soldiers.
He found the growing room near the end of the corridor and stopped in the doorway.
Plants filled it, row after row of them under a ceiling of dead grow-lights, growing out of long trays built directly into the floor.
Some had died back to brown stalks.
Others had kept going anyway, spreading in directions the original planting had never intended, vines reaching for a light source that no longer worked.
He stepped inside.
The room ran roughly fifteen meters by ten, humid air pressing close around him, the smell of wet soil and green growth stronger than anything he’d breathed in weeks.
He recognized a few of the plants.
Most he didn’t.
Some still had green fruit hanging from their stems.
He touched one leaf between two fingers.
Nothing happened.
He let it go.
He knew how to eat what grew.
He did not know how to keep it alive on purpose.
He left the room as he’d found it and kept moving.
The machine room sat at the corridor’s far end, a low hum coming from behind a reinforced door that hadn’t rusted the way the others had.
Inside, a bank of equipment he only partly recognized ran along one wall, dials and gauges under a thin film of dust, all of it clearly still drawing power from somewhere.
He traced a cable conduit along the ceiling back to a junction box, then out through a sealed port in the far wall.
Not solar.
There were no panels anywhere above, and even if there had been, this deep underground he wouldn’t have found the wiring running down instead of in.
The cable ran the other way, down and out, toward the river he’d crossed twice already without giving it a second thought.
Hydroelectric.
A line tapped from something upstream, buried deep enough that no one walking the surface would ever find it by accident.
That explained the ground he stood on now.
Forest for cover.
Water close enough to draw from without a visible line running to a visible source.
No solar panels glinting on a rooftop for anyone with eyes on the horizon to notice and wonder about.
Whoever built this had built it to never be found.
The last door, just past the machine room, opened onto something closer to an office than anything else in the corridor a metal desk, a chair with the stuffing gone from one arm, a bank of filing cabinets rusted shut along the back wall.
A single folder sat squared on the desk, cover facing up, undisturbed by however many years had passed since anyone last touched it.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.
Ares opened it.
CONTINGENCY SURVIVAL PROGRAM.
The header sat above a short block of text and a hand-drawn map marking three locations across three different regions, one of them circled in the same faded ink as the header itself.
He read the paragraph beneath it twice.
In the event that international coordination under Red Sea Command ceases to serve the interests of United States personnel and citizens, designated staff are to withdraw without notice to one of three independent facilities not listed in any shared operational record.
He set the folder down.
There was no Red Sea designation on the folder.
No shared access code.
No reference to the Command Center.
Ares closed the folder.
Whatever this place was, it had been built to operate without Red Sea.
Ares did not know what to do with that yet.
He set it aside the way he set aside most things that didn’t help him survive the next hour, and climbed back up into the light.
He stood outside the depot and looked toward the broken fence line.
The bunker sat below him now, quiet and waiting.
Water ran nearby.
The power still worked.
The growing room was still alive, however badly it needed hands that knew what they were doing.
The freezer still worked.
There was almost nothing left inside it.
The rest would take work.
He picked up the length of steel pipe he’d dragged out of the depot earlier and carried it to the nearest gap in the perimeter wire.
He drove it into the ground.
Once.
Twice.
A third time, until it held on its own.
He stepped back and looked at it.
It would not stop a wolf.
It would not stop anything large enough to want in badly enough.
It didn’t need to do either of those things.
It needed to tell him, before anything reached him, which direction to look.
Ares picked up another length of pipe.
The second one was heavier.
He tried to lift it with both hands out of habit, and the pain that shot through his right shoulder answered before his mind caught up.
He released his right hand at once and carried it the rest of the way in his left.
He drove the fourth post into the ground and stopped.
There were tracks on the other side of the fence.
Not human.
Too large for a dog.
Four deep impressions in the wet soil, leading from the treeline toward the depot.
Ares crouched beside them and touched the edge of one print.
Fresh.
He looked toward the forest.
Then toward the unfinished fence.
He picked up another pipe.
And drove it into the ground.
Ares did not sleep after Garrow left.
He spent the next hour walking through the depot, checking the damage, the water tanks and the broken sections of fence.
Then he remembered the bunker.
He had seen the bunker when he first found the depot.
Ares remembered the sealed hatch in the floor of the smaller storage bay, the one he’d tried and failed to force open on his first night here, back when both arms still worked and his strength had still felt like his own.
He had left it then.
There had been nothing urgent enough to justify the noise.
There was time now.
He crossed to the hatch and knelt beside it, favoring his left side.
The wheel lock had rusted solid, the same as the one at the old supply point, but this one hadn’t been touched by anyone in longer.
He set his good shoulder against it, braced his boots, and pushed.
The metal resisted.
He put more of his weight into it, ignoring the pull that reached across into his right side no matter how carefully he tried to keep it out of the effort, and felt something give — not smoothly, but all at once, the wheel jumping half a turn before locking again.
He kept turning.
The lock broke on the fourth attempt, a deep grinding crack of rust letting go all together.
The hatch swung down and back, revealing a straight steel ladder disappearing into dark.
Ares climbed down one-handed, testing each rung before trusting it.
The space below was not what he expected.
He had pictured a bunker the way the word suggested one — ammunition racks, a command table, bunks stacked three high, the same grim military efficiency he’d found at the other depot.
Instead a long corridor stretched ahead of him, lit by a scattering of emergency strips still glowing faint green along the base of the walls, doors set into both sides at regular intervals.
He moved down the corridor slowly, spear in his left hand, checking each room in turn.
A cold storage unit, the compressor still audibly running somewhere behind the wall, though when he opened it the shelves held only a scatter of long-expired cans and one vacuum-sealed pouch that had split at the seam years ago.
A water treatment room, pipes and filters he didn’t recognize the function of but understood the shape of well enough to guess.
Sleeping quarters, rows of bunks under thin blankets gone stiff with dust.
A room with low tables and small chairs, faded alphabet letters still taped along one wall at exactly the height of a child’s eyeline.
One drawing remained pinned beside the board four stick figures standing beneath a yellow square labeled HOME.
Ares’s fingers tightened around the spear.
He looked at the drawing again.
For a moment he saw his father’s hand on his shoulder before school.
His mother’s voice through the kitchen doorway.
His sister’s hand gripping the back of his shirt in a crowded street.
He looked away.
A room beyond that lined with shelves of books, a chalkboard, more small chairs.
Something that might have been a clinic, glass cabinets empty, a single examination table bolted to the floor.
This had not been built only for soldiers.
He found the growing room near the end of the corridor and stopped in the doorway.
Plants filled it, row after row of them under a ceiling of dead grow-lights, growing out of long trays built directly into the floor.
Some had died back to brown stalks.
Others had kept going anyway, spreading in directions the original planting had never intended, vines reaching for a light source that no longer worked.
He stepped inside.
The room ran roughly fifteen meters by ten, humid air pressing close around him, the smell of wet soil and green growth stronger than anything he’d breathed in weeks.
He recognized a few of the plants.
Most he didn’t.
Some still had green fruit hanging from their stems.
He touched one leaf between two fingers.
Nothing happened.
He let it go.
He knew how to eat what grew.
He did not know how to keep it alive on purpose.
He left the room as he’d found it and kept moving.
The machine room sat at the corridor’s far end, a low hum coming from behind a reinforced door that hadn’t rusted the way the others had.
Inside, a bank of equipment he only partly recognized ran along one wall, dials and gauges under a thin film of dust, all of it clearly still drawing power from somewhere.
He traced a cable conduit along the ceiling back to a junction box, then out through a sealed port in the far wall.
Not solar.
There were no panels anywhere above, and even if there had been, this deep underground he wouldn’t have found the wiring running down instead of in.
The cable ran the other way, down and out, toward the river he’d crossed twice already without giving it a second thought.
Hydroelectric.
A line tapped from something upstream, buried deep enough that no one walking the surface would ever find it by accident.
That explained the ground he stood on now.
Forest for cover.
Water close enough to draw from without a visible line running to a visible source.
No solar panels glinting on a rooftop for anyone with eyes on the horizon to notice and wonder about.
Whoever built this had built it to never be found.
The last door, just past the machine room, opened onto something closer to an office than anything else in the corridor a metal desk, a chair with the stuffing gone from one arm, a bank of filing cabinets rusted shut along the back wall.
A single folder sat squared on the desk, cover facing up, undisturbed by however many years had passed since anyone last touched it.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.
Ares opened it.
CONTINGENCY SURVIVAL PROGRAM.
The header sat above a short block of text and a hand-drawn map marking three locations across three different regions, one of them circled in the same faded ink as the header itself.
He read the paragraph beneath it twice.
In the event that international coordination under Red Sea Command ceases to serve the interests of United States personnel and citizens, designated staff are to withdraw without notice to one of three independent facilities not listed in any shared operational record.
He set the folder down.
There was no Red Sea designation on the folder.
No shared access code.
No reference to the Command Center.
Ares closed the folder.
Whatever this place was, it had been built to operate without Red Sea.
Ares did not know what to do with that yet.
He set it aside the way he set aside most things that didn’t help him survive the next hour, and climbed back up into the light.
He stood outside the depot and looked toward the broken fence line.
The bunker sat below him now, quiet and waiting.
Water ran nearby.
The power still worked.
The growing room was still alive, however badly it needed hands that knew what they were doing.
The freezer still worked.
There was almost nothing left inside it.
The rest would take work.
He picked up the length of steel pipe he’d dragged out of the depot earlier and carried it to the nearest gap in the perimeter wire.
He drove it into the ground.
Once.
Twice.
A third time, until it held on its own.
He stepped back and looked at it.
It would not stop a wolf.
It would not stop anything large enough to want in badly enough.
It didn’t need to do either of those things.
It needed to tell him, before anything reached him, which direction to look.
Ares picked up another length of pipe.
The second one was heavier.
Ares reached for it with both hands out of habit.
Pain shot through his right shoulder.
He released the pipe immediately and carried it with his left.
He drove the fourth post into the ground and stopped.
There were tracks on the other side of the fence.
Not human.
Too large for a dog.
Four deep impressions in the wet soil, leading from the treeline toward the depot.
Ares crouched beside them and touched the edge of one print.
Fresh.
He looked toward the forest.
Then toward the unfinished fence.
He picked up another pipe.
And drove it into the ground.