They encountered the scavenger on a supply run in the eastern district.
She appeared without warning, stepping out of a doorway as they passed, her hands raised to show they were empty. Gray's pattern-sight flared instinctively - a spike of pain behind his eyes as he reached for the cold-water sensation - and he saw her thread before he saw her clearly. It was thin and frayed, the thread of someone who had been alone for a long time, but it pulsed with a wariness that spoke of hard-won survival.
"Easy," she said, her voice flat and expressionless. "I'm not looking for trouble."
Elias stepped forward, positioning himself between the woman and the group. His body language was calm but alert, his hands visible at his sides. "We're not either. Just passing through."
The woman's eyes moved constantly, darting from face to face, counting heads, assessing threats. She was somewhere in her thirties, though the dirt and exhaustion made her look older. Her arms were covered in scars - not the clean lines of surgical incisions, but the ragged marks of things that had clawed and bitten and torn at her over months of survival.
"You're gathering," she said, and there was something in her voice that wasn't quite accusation, wasn't quite warning. "The bigger the group, the more noise you make. The hollows can sense it. And worse things than hollows are waking up."
Gray felt something cold settle in his chest. He thought of Ren's confession the night before - the organized predators, the things that hunted with purpose. He thought of the brightness he'd seen in the boy's thread, the luminescence that marked him as sensitive, as a target.
"What do you mean, noise?" Elias asked, his voice carefully neutral.
The woman looked at him like he was stupid. "Noise. Sound. Presence. Call it whatever you want. When people gather, they make... waves. Ripples in whatever this is." She gestured vaguely at the wrong-colored sky, at the air that felt different now than it had before the collapse. "The hollows feel it. They come toward it. And the other things - the ones that think, the ones that plan - they feel it too. And they're waking up."
Elias's jaw tightened, a small movement that Gray almost missed. "We appreciate the warning," he said, his voice still controlled, still polite. "But we've managed so far. Numbers mean strength. Numbers mean we can watch each other's backs."
The woman laughed - a short, harsh sound that held no humor. "Strength. Sure. You know what else numbers mean? More mouths to feed. More bodies to hide. More noise for the things out there to follow." She shook her head. "I've seen groups like yours before. Big groups, strong groups, groups that thought they were safe because they had each other. They're all gone now. Every single one."
"Then how are you still alive?" Elias asked, and there was an edge to his voice now, something sharper beneath the controlled surface.
"Because I'm alone," she said simply. "Because I move quiet. Because I don't make waves." She looked at the group one more time, her scarred arms hanging loose at her sides. "You want my advice? Split up. Go to ground. Stop making yourselves into a beacon for every hungry thing in this city."
Then she turned and walked away, disappearing into a doorway on the other side of the street as quickly as she'd appeared. Gray watched her thread fade into the distance, thin and frayed but still pulsing with that stubborn, solitary life.
---
They continued the supply run in silence, but Gray could feel the tension radiating from the group. The woman's words had landed somewhere deep, in the place where fear lived, and they were still echoing.
That night, as they made camp in the upper floor of a collapsed office building, Elias called a meeting. He gathered everyone in the center of the room, his face calm but his eyes hard.
"We need to talk about what that woman said," he began. "About the idea that we're making ourselves into targets."
"She was crazy," David said immediately. "Scavenger mentality. She's been alone too long, it's made her paranoid."
"Maybe," Elias said. "But paranoia keeps you alive in a world like this. We should at least consider what she said."
"Consider what?" Sarah's voice was sharp, protective. "That we should split up? That we should abandon each other because some scarred woman told us to?"
"I'm not saying we should do anything," Elias said, raising his hands in a calming gesture. "I'm saying we should think about it. Weigh the risks. Make an informed decision."
Gray watched from the edge of the room, his back against the wall. He could see the threads connecting everyone - the thick cords of family between Sarah, David, and Emma; the newer but strengthening bonds between the group members; the way they all oriented themselves around Elias as he spoke. The woman's words had shaken something loose, but Elias was already working to contain it, to channel the fear into something productive.
"Here's what I think," Elias continued, his voice steady. "Strength does come from numbers. That's not just optimism - it's practical reality. We have more eyes to watch for danger, more hands to carry supplies, more skills to draw on when things go wrong. One person alone can be picked off easily. A group of us is much harder to threaten."
"But she said the hollows can sense us," Emma said quietly, her small voice cutting through the adult conversation. "She said they come toward the noise."
Elias looked at her, and something softened in his expression. "That might be true, Emma. But hollows are mindless. We can outthink them, outplan them. And as for the other things she mentioned - the ones that think, that plan - we don't even know if they exist. She might have been talking about nightmares, or stories she's heard, not something real."
Gray thought of Ren's confession. The things that had taken his family - they were real. They did exist. And they were hunting people with sensitivity.
He didn't say anything. He wasn't ready to share Ren's secret with the group, wasn't sure how to explain what the boy had told him without violating the trust that had been placed in him. But the woman's warning and Ren's story were echoing against each other in his mind, forming a pattern he couldn't ignore.
---
After the meeting broke up, Gray found Elias standing by a window, looking out at the darkened city.
"You don't believe her," Gray said, coming to stand beside him.
Elias didn't turn. "I believe she believes what she's saying. That doesn't make it true."
"But you're considering it."
"I'm considering everything. That's what I do." Elias finally looked at him, his blue-gray eyes steady in the dim light. "What do you think?"
Gray was quiet for a moment. He thought about the woman's scarred arms, about the way her thread had pulsed with wariness and survival. He thought about Ren's family, about the things that had hunted them with purpose. He thought about the brightness he'd seen in Ren's thread, and in his own reflection, and wondered how much noise that brightness made in the dark.
"I think she's right about some things," he said finally. "I think groups do attract attention. I think there's something to the idea of... noise. Ripples in whatever this is." He gestured at the air, at the world that had changed so fundamentally. "But I also think she's wrong about the solution."
"Splitting up?"
"Being alone." Gray shook his head. "The things that are out there - the hollows, the others - they pick off stragglers. They target the isolated. Being alone might make less noise, but it also means no one's watching your back when something finds you anyway."
Elias nodded slowly. "So what's the answer?"
"I don't know," Gray admitted. "But I think it's somewhere in between. We need to be careful about the noise we make. We need to learn how to move quieter, how to draw less attention. But we also need each other. We just need to be smarter about it."
"Smarter how?"
Gray thought about it. The woman had survival knowledge without a theoretical framework - she knew that groups attracted attention, but she didn't understand why, didn't have the language or the concepts to explain the mechanism. Gray had the framework, or was building one. He had the pattern-sight, the ability to see the threads and the flows of energy. Maybe there was a way to use that, to understand the noise she was talking about and find a way to reduce it.
"I have some ideas," he said. "But I need time to work them out."
Elias studied him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he nodded, once, and turned back to the window.
"Take the time you need," he said. "But not too much. If there's something out there hunting groups like ours, I'd rather know sooner than later."
Gray nodded, though Elias wasn't looking at him anymore. He filed the conversation away with all the others, adding it to the growing collection of observations that would eventually become the Proof Codex.
The woman's warning. Ren's confession. The brightness in sensitive threads. The noise that groups made in the dark.
All of it was connected. All of it was part of the same pattern. He just had to figure out what the pattern meant before it was too late.