Nathan didn't sleep after the Warden left. He sat by the Core until the sky turned from black to the same tired gray it always did, turning the choice over in his head without landing anywhere solid.Wait, and hope his own light didn't go out next. Or move, and risk everything he'd built to find people he'd never met, who might not even want to be found.He thought about Priya's map fragment, still folded in his inventory, and about the ruins he'd walked away from without ever finding out what happened to whoever left that second set of handwriting behind. J.M.R. had stood in that room once. Maybe they still stood somewhere, waiting for someone to come looking.He pulled the fragment out and laid it flat on the table next to the journal, smoothing the creases with the side of his hand. Most of the marks on it still meant nothing to him, scattered points with no obvious pattern. But two of them sat close enough together that they could plausibly be the same day's walk, maybe a day and

The cart made the difference. Two days later, moving slower but steadier than his first failed attempt, Nathan reached the first mark on the map with water to spare and legs that still worked properly underneath him, sore but reliable.What he found there wasn't a camp. It was the memory of one.A ring of scorched earth, wide and deliberate, marked where a Core had once stood. No structure remained. No fence, no cabin, not even the scattered debris a raid usually left behind according to everything he'd read in the channel about attacks on other survivors. Just a circle of ground darker than everything around it, like something had burned there once and never quite recovered its color.Nathan stood at the edge of it for a long time, unwilling to step inside, the cart's wheels quiet now that he'd finally stopped pulling it.He didn't need the interface to tell him what this was. He already knew, in the same cold, certain way he'd known when he read RUSTLINE's blank status for the first

Nathan stayed at Priya's camp only one night, long enough to trade what supplies he could spare and agree on a way to reach each other that didn't run through the public channel at all, a private code they worked out together by firelight, nothing written down anywhere the interface could read or record.He left at first light, the cart lighter now, pulling toward home instead of away from it, the wheels somehow feeling less like a burden on the way back.The walk felt different than the walk out had. Not shorter. Not easier, exactly. But less lonely, somehow, even with nobody actually walking beside him, the simple knowledge that Priya's Core was still burning somewhere behind him enough to change how the silence around him felt on the long stretches between landmarks.The cart handled better empty than it had loaded, the wheels catching less against the loose stone near the hills, and Nathan found himself thinking, somewhere in the second day of walking, that he'd need to build a se