The night was indistinguishable from those that preceded it, save for one definitive shift: the silence was no longer a state of waiting. It was a verdict.
The fire was a dying lung, its embers gasping for oxygen in the thin, cold air. Their faces were carved out of shadow—ashen skin, hollow sockets, limbs sprawled across the concrete like discarded refuse. Speech had become an anatomical impossibility; even a whisper required more caloric energy than they possessed.
Adam was awake.
He wasn't watching the fire, nor was he scanning the perimeter for ghosts. His gaze was anchored to Fadi. He watched the man with a clinical, unblinking intensity—a look reserved for an indigestible truth. It wasn't pure rage. It was something more corrosive: a sense of betrayal that had no vocabulary.
Fadi was asleep, or perhaps merely performing the act. His chest rose with a rhythmic, infuriating slowness. His mouth hung slightly agape, revealing the faint, greenish stains of succulent pulp on his lips. The water he had consumed... alone.
Adam had not forgotten the bottle.
He had not forgotten the look of animalistic greed.
And he had not forgotten the thirst that had left him bound and humiliated, a spectator to his own dehydration.
Adam moved with a terrifying lack of urgency. His body seemed to anticipate the trajectory before his mind could rationalize it. He didn't wake the others; or perhaps he did, but they no longer possessed the psychic strength to care.
He approached Fadi, gripping a jagged piece of concrete he had scavenged from the edge of the slab and concealed during his hours of isolation. The premeditation hung in the air, heavy and undeniable.
The world was so silent that their synchronized breathing sounded like an intrusion upon the night.
Fadi's eyes flickered open, catching a sliver of starlight. He saw Adam looming above him, a dark monolith framed against the sky, holding the stone.
"Adam...?"
The name never fully escaped his throat.
The sound that followed was not a scream, but a frantic, failed attempt to expel air through a passage that had suddenly ceased to exist. Fadi's body convulsed—one final, reflexive protest of the nerves. The stone met the concrete with a wet, heavy thud, blooming with a dark stain. Then, the stillness returned.
It was over quickly.
It lacked the operatic violence Adam had envisioned in his fever dreams.
It felt less like a murder and more like the flicking of a switch. The cessation of a nuisance.
When Adam stepped back, Fadi was still staring, but the gaze was vacant—an unaddressed letter.
Adam stood for a long time, watching the void.
He felt no surge of triumph.
He felt no crushing weight of guilt.
He felt only a profound internal rupture, a snapping of a fundamental cord that could never be spliced back together.
He turned slowly and sat at the furthest edge of the concrete, his back to the group, his back to the circle.
At dawn, Nour was the first to register the unnatural quality of the silence. Then the metallic tang of the air. Then the posture of the body.
No questions were asked. The inquiry would have been redundant.
The crime was a physical fact. Clear. Irreversible.
Elias said nothing; his clinical detachment had finally met its match. Saleem turned his face away, retreating into the fortress of his own mind. Nour sat on the cold floor and pressed her palm against her mouth—not to stifle a scream, but to physically block the ingress of thought.
Adam did not flee; there was no geography left to escape to.
He did not deny.
He did not justify.
He sat alone. A team of one. Exactly as he had decided since the succulents were shared without him.
And now, for the first time, the survivors realized the truth: the forest was no longer the primary architect of their extinction.