Finally, his voice cut the silence.
"We should move."
By this time he was already a few feets away from them. Waiting.
Mara's was torn between rushing to meet him and stepping back.
Darius shifted, a silent exchange between he and Mara.
They sensed no hostility... The uneasy they felt?
Well that would have to wait.
* * *
Hours into their journey>>
They didn't speak again until the city's skeleton bent them into another hollow. A gutted household, its ceiling half-caved,
Mara set their pack down; A crumpled ration bar. A flask with less than a swallow left. One strip of bandage. That was it.
Her stomach twisted. Hana swayed on her feet before lowering herself against the wall. When Mara handed her the ration wrapper, Hana licked the foil for crumbs. The sound of her tongue dragging on the metallic paper made Mara's gut clench.
"This is not enough for a day, let alone a week." Darius muttered. His voice bitter with regret.
If he had killed the second scavenger before he fled, they wouldn't be lacking so much.
Elias' bag landed with a thud, not the empty rattle Mara had grown used to, but the dense weight of something full. He unzipped it;
Food. Sealed packs, not stale scraps. Bottled water, not rust-flavored trickles. Fresh bandages, neatly rolled. A blanket folded sharp as if it had come straight from a shelf.
Hana's face lit with a brightness Mara hadn't seen in weeks. She reached, almost shy, and touched the corner of the blanket like it might dissolve if she pressed too hard.
"Where… where did you get all this?" Mara asked. Her voice was quieter than she meant, but the question needed an answer.
Elias looked up, shrugged once,
"I found it."
Hana's relief deepened into hope, clutching at the food as if it proved the world hadn't ended after all. But Mara's eyes flicked to Darius, and his to hers.
This didn't add up.
Supplies like this didn't just appear. Not here. Not now.
Mara wanted to push. To ask again, harder, demand the truth. But Elias's stillness was unsettling. Something in the way he held their gaze; as if pressing further would mean stepping somewhere they couldn't come back from.
So she swallowed her words.
And Elias began dividing the rations with careful hands, though his own portion stayed untouched.
They ate in silence.
Hana tore at her ration bar like she hadn't eaten in days. Darius chewed slow, eyes locked on Elias as if every bite might be poisoned. Mara forced herself to swallow, like her body wanted to refuse the food.
Only Elias didn't touch his.
When Hana noticed, she stopped mid-bite. "Aren't you hungry?"
"I already had something."
Hana nodded quickly, ducking her head, but Mara's skin prickled.
She tried to ignore it. Tried to eat. But her eyes kept drifting to him.
The silence stretched, broken only by Hana's small, eager chewing. She looked brighter than Mara had seen in days, clinging to the food Elias had brought.
"Elias," Mara said suddenly, against her better judgement, "did you see the scavengers?"
"Scavengers?"
"Yeah... we got ourselves into a bit of trouble,"
Elias's reply came too fast.
"Not anymore."
Mara wanted to ask what Elias meant, what he had seen, what he had done. But her instinct told her: Don't peel the skin back and see what waits underneath.
Across the fireless circle, Darius shifted, blade in hand as always. He said nothing, but the way his eyes narrowed told Mara he was thinking the same thing she was.
No one spoke again.
They moved at a crawl through the city's ribs, Hana limping but stubborn, Mara's arm steady under her shoulder. The streets widened into broken arteries where the ruins showed signs of life; not the wild, desperate kind they had grown used to, but something else. Almost foreign.
The first was a mall, its glass teeth shattered but its entrances sealed with sheets of welded metal. Watchtowers made of scavenged scaffolding rose at the corners, rifles glinting in the pale ash-light.
Smoke lifted from barrels along the roof, curling skyward like banners. A slogan, black spray paint across the broken facade: THE ASH WON'T TAKE US. Beneath it, a child's doll dangled by the neck from wire, swaying in the breeze.
Voices carried faintly; rough, disciplined, not the half-starved muttering of loners.
Mara froze the moment she saw them, pulling Hana tight to her side. She gestured low, urgent: back, back.
They circled wide, sticking close to collapsed storefronts and overturned cars. Darius never lowered his blade, eyes tracking every shadow.
Elias walked at the rear. His head tilted once toward the fortified mall, then forward again, calm as if he were looking at a nest of pigeons instead of armed sentries.
Later, they passed the yawning mouth of a subway entrance. Where once there had been tiled stairs leading underground, now there was a makeshift barricade: shopping carts welded together, barbed wire strung tight, broken mannequins planted like sentries.
Inside, firelight flickered off the walls. Figures moved in the glow, silhouettes armed and laughing; too loud, too unafraid.
From below, faint music leaked up, a warbling old song, radio static chewing at the edges. The smell of roasting meat curled faintly into the air.
"Keep moving," Mara hissed, urging Hana forward. Her heart jackhammered against her ribs. She knew the kind of men who laughed like that.
They slipped away, deeper into the city's scar tissue, where ash muffled their steps again.
But the unease lingered. Not from the factions. From Elias.
Where Mara's breath shortened and her hands trembled, Elias walked loose, steady, as though he hadn't seen the armed guards or the barbed wire. His eyes flicked toward the enclaves without recognition, without fear. He looked disinterested.
It felt wrong.
For Mara, every glance over her shoulder was survival. For Elias, it was… nothing.
They found shelter beneath the husk of an overpass. The night wind whistled through gaps in the girders.
Hana curled close against Mara, her scarf bunched beneath her head. She slept quickly, exhaustion pulling her under.
Darius didn't.
He crouched near the edge of the space, knife in hand, sharpening it with long, deliberate strokes against a piece of rubble.
Sparks hissed once, briefly illuminating his jaw. His eyes, though, never left Elias.
Finally, after what might have felt like forever, Darius spoke up:
"Where the hell have you been?"
The words were an accusation.
Elias gaze lifted, meeting Darius's gaze.
"Surviving."
The answer was simple, but he went on, voice unshaken:
"You all left me to die. Remember?"
There was no heat in it. No grudge. Just a statement of fact.
Darius stiffened.
The memory was vivid; Jonah pushing Elias forward into danger. How they had obeyed without thinking. How Elias had been swallowed by the chaos, left behind.
There was no excuse.
Elias leaned forward slightly, shadow spilling across his face in the fireless dark.
"But I'm here now. That's all that matters."
Guilt pressed down on them all. Heavy. Unshakable.
They settled into silence after that, just the broken city groaning in its sleep around them.
Hana mumbled softly in her dreams, the words tumbling from her lips like fragments of prayers: "Don't let him in… don't… please don't let him in…"
Mara lay stiff beside her, one hand on the girl's shoulder, the other gripping her crowbar even as sleep pulled at her eyes.
Sleep came jagged, merciless.
She dreamed of Jonah.
He was calling to her through the ruins, his face half-lit by the red glow of fire, reaching out a hand. His voice was strained, broken by ash, but she knew it: Jonah, alive, whole, waiting.
She reached back.
And then the rubble shifted. The fire bent wrong. The shadow behind Jonah stretched too far, swallowing him whole until what looked back at her wasn't Jonah anymore.
It was Elias.
Not his body, not exactly. Just the outline of him, sharp and endless, as if his shape had been carved out of the dark. His eyes were pits, his smile too calm. He raised his hand, palm out, in the same gesture Jonah had made.
Mara…
The voice was layered, static-flecked, like a broken transmission played on repeat.
Mara jolted awake with a strangled gasp, sweat slicking her skin despite the cold. She clutched the crowbar to her chest, breath tearing in and out as though she'd been running.
The ruins were quiet again. Hana slept on, whimpering softly.
Across from them, Darius sat against the wall with his knife. He hadn't closed his eyes once.
His eyes remained fixed on Elias.
Elias sat in his same unnervingly calm posture, shadows layered across his face. His eyes were open. Watching as always.
The night dragged until the sky bruised pale with pre-dawn gray. Ash fell slow and constant, catching faint light as though it were snow that had forgotten how to be clean.
Mara stirred, rolled onto her side, and froze.
Elias wasn't where he had been.
He had moved closer.
Too close.
He sat beside Hana now, the girl curled tight in her scarf, her chest rising shallow with each breath. Elias leaned toward her, not touching, but near enough.
His posture was still, his head tilted, studying her like she was a puzzle he couldn't solve.
For a long, brittle moment Mara thought she saw hunger on his face, or maybe tenderness, but it wasn't either. It was worse than both. Something alien sat in his expression, as if the act of watching was feeding something inside him.
Her hand closed around her crowbar. She told herself to rise, to step in, to pull Hana away, but she couldn't. Fear held her spine in place, heavy and cold, while denial whispered that she was imagining things.
Elias spoke.
"…I won't lose them. Not again."
The voice doubled.
It wasn't just Elias. There was something else threaded beneath his tone; static, distortion, like another voice hidden in his, one that scraped along the inside of Mara's skull. The sound made her teeth ache.
The crowbar trembled in her grip.
One step. That's all it would take. One step forward and she could drive the steel through him, end this wrongness before it swallowed them whole.
But she didn't move.
She couldn't.