AVERY’S POV
My blood ran cold.
“This is Sector grid 7?”
No one said anything.
The look Derek gave us was enough to confirm the question hanging in the air.
We were around the vicinity where HAVEN had specifically said not to be.
Shit.
My fingers tightened around the handle of my gun.
“Stay alert.”
Everyone looked around consciously, shifting on their feet.
Joel looked at me, dark hair falling into his eyes.
“Do you think it’s those men by the bridge?”
Hannah stood up from where she was crouched low beside Joel.
“Could be. They were coordinated enough and had rifles.” She paused.
“And they clearly weren’t above taking from people.”
“No.” I said it before I’d fully formed the thought, but the more I turned it over, the more certain I was.
“Those men were opportunists. Taking from whoever crossed their path because it was easy. A HAVEN broadcast doesn’t warn about opportunists.” I looked at the radio sitting on the counter.
“They warn about organised threats, it’s a military outpost, they don’t care about scavengers, it’s about people with a strategy.”
Derek shifted.
He’d been quiet since I said his name, still absorbing it.
“So you think it’s someone else entirely.”
“Yes.”
“Who?” Nadia asked.
I didn’t have an answer for that so I didn’t give one.
“We move faster. Starting now.”
Hannah looked at the window.
“It’s barely dawn, Avery.”
“Which is exactly why we move now.” I was already reaching for my backpack.
“We put distance between us and this sector. Head north, stay off the main road, cut through the residential blocks the way we mapped it. We push hard today.”
Joel said nothing.
He just watched me the way he’d been doing since the broadcast, then he picked up his bag, his arm already treated.
Good.
“Two days,” I said, looking at all of them.
“We push hard for two days. Distance over caution.”
Derek made a sound low in his throat.
“You good?” I asked him.
“Yeah.” He looked like he wasn’t.
“Let’s go.”
We went.
*********
The first day was brutal.
Not because of the Fractured— we saw them, avoided them, moved around them the way we’d learned.
The brutality was just the distance.
The sheer relentless forward motion of it, hour after hour, until the light shifted and my legs ached from the thighs down and Nadia hadn’t complained once which meant she was either doing better than any of us or she had decided complaining was pointless.
Derek struggled.
I clocked it around mid-morning— the slight lag in his step, the way he breathed through his mouth when he thought no one was paying attention.
He’d been stationary for days before we found him.
His body wasn’t ready for this kind of sustained movement and I think part of him knew that and was furious about it, because every time I glanced back he was already straightening up, already adjusting, already pretending.
There was nothing useful I could say that wouldn’t embarrass him.
By early afternoon we’d cleared the main residential sprawl and pushed into a stretch of the city I didn’t know as well— narrower streets and older buildings.
Half the blocks here had been partially collapsed, not from the Rigs directly but from the fires that followed.
Some of the buildings were still smoldering, thin grey threads of smoke rising from rubble that must have been burning for days.
We moved through it quietly.
“There.” Joel pointed.
A supermarket, side wall partially collapsed but the structure mostly intact.
A loading bay at the back still sealed.
I looked at it and looked at the sun and made the call.
“Ten minutes. Grab what you can carry and nothing you can’t.”
Nobody needed to be told twice.
We went in through the loading bay, Joel crowbarring the door in two attempts.
The inside was dim and ransacked with shelves pulled down, half the stock gone, the floor a mess of packaging and broken glass but not entirely stripped.
Whoever had been through here first had taken the obvious things and left the rest and the rest was still enough for us.
Tinned goods pushed to the back of lower shelves.
A cardboard box of protein bars that had been kicked under a collapsed display unit.
Water— not much, maybe four bottles, but good enough.
Hannah found a first aid kit in the staff room that still had antiseptic and a roll of bandage in it.
Derek sat down heavily on an overturned crate while the rest of us moved through the aisles and I let him.
I put a protein bar next to him on my way past and didn’t look at him when I did it.
Eight minutes in, Nadia appeared at my elbow.
“There’s a door at the back,” she said, keeping her voice low with the instinct she’d developed in the last few days.
“Locked but there’s light coming under it. Battery light, I think.”
I looked at her.
“Show me.”
She shuffled to the place.
The door was a utility closet, padlocked from the outside, which was strange, and there was indeed a faint yellowish strip of light at the base of it.
I crouched down, listened but heard nothing.
I stood up and broke the padlock with the crowbar.
The closet had been someone’s shelter.
A sleeping bag rolled out on the floor, a torch propped in the corner with its beam aimed at the ceiling, a neat stack of tins against the wall, a child’s backpack— small, red, dinosaurs on it— sitting next to the sleeping bag.
Empty.
Whoever had been here was gone recently.
The torch batteries were still strong.
I took the torch and left everything else.
“Move,” I said when I came back out, and we left.
We sheltered that night in a townhouse three streets past the edge of the old commercial district.
Right on the second floor, windows on two sides, stairwell we could hear if anything came up it.
We ate sitting on the floor of what used to be a child’s bedroom and nobody commented on the drawings still taped to the walls or the small bed we shifted to make room for our bags.
Nadia looked at one of the drawings for a moment— a crayon family, four figures, the tallest one holding hands with the smallest — and then she sat down with her back to the wall and ate without saying anything.
I set the watches.
Joel first, then Hannah, then me.
I tried to sleep when Joel settled into his watch.
Sleep didn’t come.
I felt uncomfortable.
My finger kept straying to my gun.
Sometime around the middle of the night I heard Derek shift and cough and shift again, trying not to make noise about the fact that he couldn’t get comfortable, and after a few minutes it stopped and his breathing evened out and I let myself relax a little further. Visit novelping dot com for the full chapter.
Three hours, maybe.
Then Hannah was touching my shoulder as it was my watch.
The second day was harder.
Derek’s pace dropped by mid-morning and this time he couldn’t fully hide it.
His jaw was set and he kept moving but the gap between him and the front of the group kept wanting to open and Joel kept hanging back to keep it closed without making it obvious, which I appreciated.
“We can slow down,” Hannah said to me quietly, falling into step beside me.
“We can’t.”
“Avery—”
“Two days. I said two days before we slow down. We’re out of the main city.” I looked at her.
“He’s keeping up.”
She didn’t look entirely convinced but she didn’t push it.
We pushed through a section of the city that had clearly seen heavier Rig activity in the first days— the destruction here was more complete, buildings sheared open at their upper floors, whole facades collapsed across the road in these enormous grey drifts we had to pick our way through.
Cars on their roofs.
A bus on its side across an intersection, windows gone, its interior open to the sky.
The bodies here were older.
Whatever had happened, happened in the first forty-eight hours.
I made sure Nadia was looking at me and not at the ground as we crossed the worst of it.
By afternoon we’d cleared the worst of the damage and were moving through quieter streets— residential, long, flanked by terraced houses that were mostly intact.
The Fractured here were sparse and slow.
Older ones, maybe, or ones that had been moving for days without stimulus.
We went around them without incident.
Joel caught up to me on a long straight stretch.
“How much further today?”
I checked our position against the map in my head.
We’d made better time than I’d expected, even with the pace drop.
“Another two hours. Then we find somewhere for the night.”
He nodded then paused.
“What are you thinking about?”
I looked at him sideways.
“The secondary group.”
“Yeah.” He looked ahead.
“Me too.”
I didn’t say anything else and he didn’t push it.
The thing I kept coming back to— the thing I couldn’t put down no matter how hard I tried to focus on the next corner, the next block, the next decision— was the specific language of the broadcast.
Secondary armed group.
Not hostile survivors or looters or threat to civilians.
Armed.
Organized enough to rate a specific sector warning.
Which meant whoever they were, they’d already done something that HAVEN knew about.
That meant contact.
Recent contact.
And if HAVEN had made contact with them and still flagged them as a threat worth broadcasting, it meant the contact had not gone well.
I thought about the checkpoint men — the easy confidence of them, the way they’d stood there with their rifles and talked about the end of the world like it was something that was happening to other people.
They were dangerous but they were small.
A handful of men on a bridge taking what they could from people passing through.
This wasn’t that.
And something told me we’d find out soon enough.