Sergeant Miller found Ethan at his workbench on a Tuesday and told him he was done sweeping barracks.
"You're on the next scavenging run," Miller said, arms crossed, grease dark under his nails. "Outside the walls. Sanctioned. You keep your head down, you stay in formation, and you don't touch anything that isn't scrap. Clear?"
"Clear, Sergeant."
It was the opportunity Ethan had been waiting a year for — a sanctioned way past the walls, into the ruins where the real answers were buried. The runs were tightly controlled: two FEDRA soldiers, three or four civilian scavengers, everyone armed and wound tight. But they went outside. That was enough.
Their first run took them into the remains of a suburban neighborhood, swallowed by a decade of relentless overgrowth. Houses sagged with their windows like vacant, broken eyes. Vines had forced their way through shattered panes and were slowly pulling the brickwork apart. The air hung heavy — damp earth, mold, the sweet rot of decay working under everything.
"Alright, people, stick close!" Corporal Jenkins called out, young and jumpy, his eyes never settling. "Standard sweep. Food, medical, working tech. And keep your eyes open — this sector's had activity. Recent activity."
Corporal Davies took the rear, rifle up, jaw tight. The scavengers fell in between: Old Man Silas, slow and stooped, a scavenged pipe resting on his shoulder, his gaze sharper than his years should have allowed. Maria, restless and quick, one hand never far from the worn wooden crucifix at her throat. Finn, lean and cynical, spitting into the weeds every few steps. Lena, nervous, twisting the frayed strap of her backpack. And Gus — burly, broad-shouldered, swinging his heavy crowbar like it was part of his arm, a forced bravado in the set of his jaw.
Ethan took the back of the group without being told, and disappeared into it.
They worked a two-story house with a collapsed garage, picking through rusted tools and waterlogged boxes. Maria drifted close to Ethan, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"Anything?" Her eyes flicked from the dark garage mouth to his face. "This place feels… wrong."
Ethan turned a broken wrench over in his hand, feeling its dead weight. "Just old junk," he said quietly. "And a lot of dust."
She nodded, not reassured, and moved on.
The shriek came twenty minutes later — a Runner's cry, bloodcurdling, echoing down the ruined street and coming fast.
"Form up! Stay frosty!" Jenkins barked, voice cracking. "Could be one, could be a dozen!"
Lena's hand went for the small blunt knife at her belt, her breathing ragged. Silas tightened his grip on his pipe until his knuckles went white. Gus raised his crowbar, trying to look braver than he felt. Finn just cursed and spat.
Ethan stood still in the rising panic and listened. The cry's direction. The way the echo decayed off the broken houses. The rhythm under it — thudding footfalls, fast, uneven. Two of them. Maybe three. Coming down the main street, straight at the group's exposed flank.
"Stay behind us!" Davies yelled, swinging his rifle toward the sound.
The first Runner burst out of a collapsed storefront — a blur of rotting flesh and raw muscle, jaw hanging, saliva stringing — and went straight for Davies, who'd stepped too far forward. Ethan's hand was already moving. His fingers closed on a loose brick in the crumbling wall beside him, and he threw it sidearm, no windup, the way he'd once skipped stones across creek water. It caught the Runner hard in the side of the head. The thing stumbled, veered with a confused shriek, and Davies' re-aimed shot took it cleanly through the skull. Wet thud. Silence.
Davies stared at the brick lying innocently on the asphalt, then at the empty air where Ethan had already melted back into the group's shadow.
"Lucky shot," he muttered. "Damn lucky."
Two more Runners came at the gunshots' echo, and the scavengers huddled, Lena sobbing quietly into her crucifix. Ethan drifted along the edge of the group until he reached the sagging porch of an abandoned house. He set his boot down on a rotted floorboard — one precise tap — and the wood gave a loud, protesting creak. Both Runners' heads snapped toward it. They veered off the huddled group and into the lane where Jenkins had a clear, safe line of fire. Two bursts. Done.
The whole skirmish lasted minutes. Three Runners down. No human casualties — though Lena was shaking violently, Finn was breathing hard, and Gus's crowbar came away smeared with gore, his face the color of old paper.
"That's enough," Jenkins declared, pale under his helmet. "This sector's hotter than reports said. Way hotter. We pull back — sweep the adjacent blocks only, then head home."
It was exactly what Ethan needed. Adjacent blocks meant ground the regular sweeps hadn't stripped yet.
He lingered near Davies as they regrouped, all innocent curiosity. "Where's the new route, Corporal?"
Davies, still rattled, tapped the faded map strapped to his wrist with a trembling finger. "North, then west. Old industrial zone. Warehouses, factories. Should be quieter."
Ethan nodded, and the route burned itself into his memory — overlaid, without effort, against the QZ's hidden access points and the Firefly dead-drop rumors he'd pieced together from whispers and discarded manifests. Warehouses meant forgotten paperwork. Factories meant records. Things that might have sat undisturbed for years, waiting.
On the trek to the industrial zone, Ethan let himself fall behind. It was easy — the soldiers watched the obvious threats, the scavengers watched their own feet, and the ruins were full of deep shadow. He slipped sideways into the collapsed ground floor of an admin building, moving through dust-thick offices where the light came down in grey shafts. In a back room, under a fallen shelf, he found what he'd come for: a partially burned logbook from a quarantined military unit, its pages curled and blackened at the edges. He thumbed through it with held breath until the words stopped him cold.
Level 5 biohazard containment breach. Facility perimeter compromised. Location: 40 klicks NE of Houston.
His heart hammered against his ribs. Near Houston. His hometown. The nightmare had an address, and it was his.
He was back in formation before anyone noticed he'd been gone. Simply there, the way he'd always been.
The walk back to the walls took them through the long amber light of evening. Finn grumbled about another empty run, barely enough scrap to justify the patrol. Lena murmured about fresh vegetables, a wistful, dangerous nostalgia. Gus shrugged his heavy shoulders — didn't matter what you missed, only what you had. Jenkins, overhearing, promised a supply drop next week, maybe even fresh produce, and Ethan kept his face blank. He'd read the quartermaster reports. He knew the supply lines were dying and the drop was a story told to keep people from breaking. His own hidden cache — MREs from a forgotten bunker, medical supplies from a collapsed clinic, enough to vanish on if he had to — sat untouched in its vent shaft, and that was worth more than every promise FEDRA made.
The QZ was his cage, yes. But it was also his platform — the thing he would stand on to reach everything beyond it.
Ahead of them the walls rose out of the dusk, concrete and floodlights, and Ethan's hand found the logbook's hard, burned edge through his jacket, and held it.