Three days into the wastelands, Ian understood something that most people from Greyveil never lived long enough to learn.
The wastelands were not dead. They just operated by different rules.
The plants that grew here were grey and brittle and looked useless, but some of them, when crushed between the fingers, released a faint bitterness that settled the stomach. He had discovered this accidentally when hunger pushed him past caution. The animals were sparse but present. He saw the tracks of something large moving parallel to his direction on the second day and changed course slightly to avoid whatever it was. On the third morning he caught a lizard the length of his forearm sunning itself on a flat rock, and it tasted like nothing good, but it was protein.
He was adapting. That was what he told himself. Adapting was what you did when you couldn't go back.
On the fourth day he found the girl.
She was sitting with her back against a dead tree, her left ankle wrapped in torn cloth, and she was looking at him with the specific expression of someone who had decided not to beg. Dark hair, lean build, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She had a small pack beside her and a knife in her right hand that she wasn't pointing at him, but wasn't putting away either.
"Are you going to rob me?" she asked.
"No," Ian said. He stopped walking. "What happened to your ankle?"
"Fell in a ravine. Yesterday. I can walk on it but not fast." She looked at him steadily. "I have food. Not enough to share but enough to negotiate with, if you're thinking of helping."
Ian looked at her ankle, then at the landscape around them. There was nothing useful in any direction except empty ground and the distant shape of something that might have been ruins to the northeast. Traveling alone in the wastelands with an injury that slowed you down was a death sentence given enough time.
"I'm not going to rob you," he said again. "I'm heading northeast. If that's your direction, you can travel with me until your ankle holds."
She studied him for a long moment. Whatever she saw must have been acceptable, because she put the knife away. "Sera," she said.
"Ian."
"What are you running from?"
"Sect soldiers. You?"
"Sect soldiers," she said, with a small flat humor in her voice that Ian recognized. It was the sound of someone laughing at something that wasn't funny because the alternative was crying.
She got to her feet with care, testing the ankle. It held. She picked up her pack and fell into step beside him, a little behind, favoring the left side.
They walked in silence for a while. Ian did not ask questions. In his experience, people who were running from something told you what they wanted you to know when they were ready to tell it, and pushing earlier just made them defensive and useless. Sera seemed to operate on the same understanding, because she didn't push him either.
By midday he had adjusted his pace without deciding to. She wasn't slow, just slightly uneven. He matched it without thinking about it too much.
"Where are you from?" she asked eventually.
"Greyveil. Southern border, Thornwall Province."
"I know it. Small place."
"Was," Ian said.
She looked at him sideways but didn't ask.
They made camp that night near the ruins he had spotted from a distance. Up close they were the remains of something that might have been a building once, grey stone worn down to knee height in most places. Ian checked the perimeter out of habit, found nothing dangerous, and they settled on opposite sides of the ruins with a small fire between them.
Sera produced hard bread from her pack and split it down the middle. Ian took his half and ate it slowly. The fire was small enough not to show from a distance, which was something she had thought about before he mentioned it.
"You've been outside before," he said.
"My family traveled," she said. "Not by choice. We moved around a lot." She paused. "There are sects that don't like people who know certain things. My father knew certain things."
Ian understood that without needing details. "Is your father—"
"Yes."
They finished eating.
Above them the sky was the dull black of wasteland nights, which had fewer stars than the sky over Greyveil because of some quality of the air out here that Ian hadn't identified yet. Or maybe he was just noticing the sky less. He wasn't sure.
"There's something northeast of here," Sera said. "About two days. An old cultivation site. Collapsed, from the outside. But I think there's still something in it."
Ian looked at her. "How do you know?"
"My father had a map. Old, hand-drawn, before I lost the pack with it. I memorized the relevant parts." She met his gaze evenly. "I'm telling you because we're traveling the same direction and there's no point pretending I don't know things."
"What kind of cultivation site?"
"The kind that someone sealed and abandoned a long time ago. The seal has been decaying. My father said the qi leakage from places like that could be felt from the outside if you knew what you were looking for." She hesitated. "I'm not a cultivator. Neither are you, I'm guessing. But my father said even ordinary people could absorb residual qi from a collapsed site if the concentration was right. He said it wasn't safe. He also said it was the kind of chance that only came once."
Ian was quiet for a moment. He thought about what he was currently doing, which was surviving in the wastelands with no plan and no power and no prospect of getting close to the people who had killed his family.
A chance that only came once.
"How certain are you about the location?" he asked.
"Certain enough," she said.
He nodded once. "We go there first, then."
Sera looked at the fire. In the orange light she looked older than he had first thought, the way people who had lost things always looked older up close. "I should tell you," she said, "that my father also said not to try to absorb from a collapsed site without preparation. He said you needed to know what you were doing."
"Did he say what happened if you didn't?"
"He said it would probably kill you."
Ian considered that. He thought about the alternative, which was wandering the wastelands indefinitely with no power and no path forward.
"Probably," he said.
Sera almost smiled. It wasn't a happy expression, but it was real. "Yeah," she said. "Probably."
They let the fire burn down on its own and slept on opposite sides of the ruins, and in the morning Ian's ankle didn't hurt because he hadn't fallen in a ravine, and Sera's hurt less than yesterday, and they kept moving northeast because that was the direction that had something in it.
The first rule of the wastelands, Ian was beginning to understand, was that caution kept you alive in the short term and got you nowhere in the long term. You had to calculate the risk correctly and then move through it without hesitation.
His father had stood in the center of the yard and faced forward.
Ian intended to do the same thing, just with better results.
* * *