The figure slowed as they approached, the distance between them closing with agonizing deliberation. It wasn't an assassin, nor a priest of the Ledger. It was a man, hunched under the weight of a heavy, leather-bound pack that looked as if it had been cobbled together from a dozen different eras of history.Reno didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't have one left. He stood, his feet rooted in the damp soil, watching the stranger step into the glow of a dying ember."You're early," the man said. His voice was like dry leaves skittering over pavement. He wasn't looking at Reno; he was looking at the mountain behind them, now a jagged, silent monolith in the twilight."Early for what?" Reno asked. His throat felt dry, his pulse a frantic, irregular rhythm in his ears.The man tilted his head. He looked older than the world Reno had left behind—his skin mapped with creases, his eyes the color of washed-out slate. "The end of the cycle. I’ve been sittin

The morning mist clung to the valleys like a shroud, heavy and damp, smelling of pine needles and wet stone. It was a cold, indifferent air—the kind that didn't care if you were the architect of a digital apocalypse or a wanderer with nothing but the clothes on your back.Reno stood on the lip of a granite ledge, looking out over the basin below. The forest didn't end; it stretched in a verdant, suffocating tangle toward a coast he could barely see, a place where the tide was doing exactly what it had been doing for eons: eroding the world."You’re standing like you’re waiting for a signal," Clara said, coming up behind him. Her boots were caked in mud, her coat frayed at the edges. She wasn't holding a weapon; she was holding a half-eaten apple she’d scavenged from a wild orchard three miles back.Reno shifted his weight, forcing his shoulders to drop. "Just checking the horizon. Force of habit.""The horizon isn't a taskbar, Reno," she said, bit