The preparation took two hours.
There was nothing hurried in the way the Hunter moved through the cabin.
No rush, no hesitation, none of the chaotic motion of someone reacting.
It was the movement of someone who had packed to leave many times before and who had developed, through repetition and consequence, a system.
Every object had an order.
Every order had a reason.
Every reason had been tested in the field and either survived the test or been replaced by something better.
Morgan watched without immediately offering help.
He had learned, in the four years since Day 0, four years, three months, seventeen days, though the word years had lost part of its weight once years began to be measured not in achievements or celebrations but in the people who were still there at the beginning and gone by the end, he had learned that offering help without being asked inside another survivor’s space was a form of intrusion.
Everyone’s systems had become personal in a way tools had never been in the old world.
So he watched.
And by watching, he learned.
The .44 revolver was cleaned before being holstered.
Not because it was dirty, but because it was protocol.
A specific cloth, a specific motion, the visual inspection of every chamber with the attention of someone who knew there were situations where one second of malfunction came with no correction available afterward.
Then it was secured into the inner holster, the holster checked, the shoulder strap tightened by a buckle Morgan noticed being fastened two clicks beyond the standard point.
The Hunter was expecting intense movement.
Ammunition: one and a half boxes of .44 rounds, plus three preloaded speedloaders, each carrying six specific bullets Morgan did not recognize.
They were not standard rounds.
The lead had been replaced by something darker, denser, marked at the tip with an engraving that could have been a symbol or could have been the imperfection of handcrafted manufacturing.
Probably not an imperfection.
The gas mask was checked last.
The filters were replaced with two fresh ones taken from a sealed pouch inside the backpack, the procedure performed with the care of someone who knew that, in certain places, air was no longer just air. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“What are the filters for?” Morgan asked.
“For places where the atmosphere isn’t entirely on this side anymore.” The Hunter never stopped moving as he answered.
“There are regions between here and Bó where the boundary is thin enough for atmospheric composition to be affected.
Not immediately lethal.
But with prolonged exposure…” He stopped.
Looked briefly at Morgan and Eliot.
“Do you have any masks?”
“No.”
The Hunter returned to the backpack.
He pulled out two smaller masks.
Not gas masks, but industrial half-face respirators with replaceable filters on both sides.
Old, with dry elastic straps, but functional.
He handed one to Morgan and the other to Eliot.
“When I tell you to put them on, you put them on.
No questions.
No hesitation.”
“Understood.”
Eliot took the mask and examined it with the seriousness of someone learning a new object, identifying each component, building an understanding of how it worked before he ever needed it to work.
“You have a bigger one,” the boy said, looking at the Hunter’s gas mask.
“Ours is different.”
“Mine filters things yours don’t need to filter yet.”
“Yet.”
The Hunter looked at him. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“Yet,” he confirmed, without softening the word.
Eliot nodded.
He stored the mask in the front pocket of the jacket the Hunter had set aside for him.
It was too large, made for someone with an adult build, and the sleeves had been folded and tied at the waist with a strip of fabric by someone experienced at solving clothing problems in situations where clothing genuinely mattered.
Morgan stepped outside to the bathroom, an exterior structure built five meters from the cabin, equipped with a rudimentary but functional composting system, and stood there for a moment with his back against the wooden wall, looking at the morning sky.
It was blue.
Simply, completely, offensively blue, with the kind of clouds that meteorology gives technical names to but ordinary language just calls clouds.
White, high, without intent.
The day still belonged to them.
Morgan thought about the forty-one.
Not as an abstraction.
As people.
Mrs.
Haverford with her clipboard.
Petrov Junior, ten years old, who had inherited his father’s habit of measuring things and measured everything with a handspan and a little notebook.
The entire Réus family, the three children, the two parents, the grandmother who had arrived in Crest with only one shoe and had never explained what had happened to the other.
Old Dantès, seventy-two, a former fisherman who claimed the sea before Day 0 had changed three days in advance, had gone quiet in a way the sea never did, and no one had listened.
Forty-one.
Inside a space that was being absorbed.
On a deadline.
Morgan went back inside.