Chapter 4
The Line We Cross
The depot reeked of rot and rust—old oil, burned wiring, and something sour that no one wanted to identify. Once a rail hub for freight and military shipments, now it was just a gutted skeleton held together by steel beams and stubborn survivors. They called it “the Yard,” though the only thing it housed these days was tension thick enough to cut.
Griffin stood near a crumbling wall, eyes locked on a grainy projection sputtering across a cracked screen—Authority patrol patterns, stitched together from drone glimpses and intercepted radio bursts. The resolution was garbage, but the pattern was clear enough. They were tightening the perimeter and closing the noose. Every red marker was a warning, not a statistic.
Vesper leaned against a concrete pillar across from him, arms crossed, lips drawn into a hard line. She didn’t need the feed to know what was coming. She could feel it in her bones, like weather before a storm. A face flickered in her mind—a child in rags, branded too early, her scream still alive beneath Vesper’s skin.
“We move now,” she said, slicing through the quiet.
“No.” Griffin didn’t look at her. His voice was sandpaper and ash.
“They’re repositioning. You can see it plain.”
“That’s why we wait. Let them commit to the wrong corridor.”
Vesper pushed off the pillar, her boots cracking loose mortar from the tiles. “And what if you’re wrong? What if they sweep west and we’re still camped here playing war games with ghosts?”
Griffin turned slowly. “Then we move with intel instead of walking blind into a trap.”
“Intel doesn’t save people who are already burning,” she said, quieter this time, but sharper like a scalpel.
Across the depot, Forge leaned over a supply crate, methodically checking a med satchel. He didn’t speak, but his eyes shifted toward them, measuring the weight of every word, cataloging tensions like an old soldier taking inventory before a siege.
Zahara, perched on a rusted catwalk above, called down, “Two more drones circled south, low altitude. That’s five in three hours.”
Vesper gestured upward. “They’re probing. We strike now, hit their flank while they’re dancing sideways. We can gut the depot and vanish before they even blink.”
Griffin’s jaw tightened like a vice. “This isn’t about tactics anymore. This is about you needing to be right.”
“And you need to be in control,” she said, voice steady despite the fire beneath it.
Silence followed—dense, suffocating. The kind that made even the shadows feel like they were listening.
Forge finally spoke, voice low but sharp enough to cut steel. “You’re both seeing the same fire. Just from different ends of the blaze.” He didn’t say what came next—what that fire did to people who stood in it too long. But he remembered.
Vesper scoffed, turned, and vanished into the dark without another word.
Jude slipped out two hours after sunset.
The depot was still, breathing in slow, mechanical exhales. Most of the Collective rested in corners or half-slept with rifles propped beside them. Jude moved like a shadow—deliberate but not silent. His heart pounded too loudly in his chest to believe he was unseen.
He passed Rook’s comm station and left behind a hand-drawn map—just enough to show where he’d gone, but not enough to stop him.
Breaker stood at the side gate, arms folded in judgment. “You’re gonna get your dumb ass killed.”
“I promised them,” Jude said. “I said I’d come back.”
Breaker didn’t blink. “You’ve got ten minutes. After that, I call it in.”
“You’re a saint.”
“I’m an idiot,” Breaker muttered, clicking open the gate. He handed Jude a small red flare. “Only if it goes real bad.”
Jude nodded, then vanished into the dark.
Forge found the hole ten minutes later.
He didn’t shout. Didn’t rally. He simply picked up his coat, checked the blade behind his back, and stepped into the night like a man following a shadow he already knew would vanish.
Griffin sat hunched over the feed Vesper had hijacked—grainy, corrupted, but damning. The Authority’s movements told a story no one wanted to hear. The pressure points weren’t where he’d thought. She’d been right.
Elle passed him a ration bar without looking up. “Might want to learn how to lose without bleeding pride, Commander.”
He didn’t respond. But the flicker of his jaw betrayed him. Pride wasn’t the only thing bleeding. His eyes fell on a sector marker his father used to favor—now overrun. He closed the file.
Vesper returned, quiet but not smug. She looked over the maps, then said without looking at him, “Being right doesn’t always feel like winning.”
Jude returned just before dawn, flanked by five civilians—three adults, two children. Dust clung to their clothes like sorrow. One little girl sat cross-legged near the depot wall, absentmindedly playing with the disjointed arms of a naked doll. Griffin caught sight of her—his gaze snagged, just for a second. Where had she gotten that? Toys hadn’t circulated in years. Maybe it was a bit of contraband from before. Or maybe someone had risked a beating to smuggle memory into a world that kept trying to forget.
One child with a torn flannel jacket gripped Jude’s hand like a lifeline.
Griffin was waiting. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
“You disobeyed a direct order. You jeopardized the team.”
“I saved lives,” Jude said, eyes blazing beneath soot-smudged skin.
“We are not a charity. We are a resistance.”
“They were going to die.”
“They still might.”
The silence that followed wasn’t about guilt—it was about line-crossing. The kind you don’t come back from.
Then Forge stepped forward.
“You done?” he asked.
Griffin blinked. “What?”
“I said, are you done dressing him down in front of people who already think the Authority’s the only voice that knows how to command?”
Griffin squared his shoulders. “You’re defending him?”
“I’m reminding you that the second we stop seeing people as worth saving, we start looking like them.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you’re trying so damn hard not to be your father, you forgot what made him worth following.”
Griffin froze.
No one spoke. No one moved.
He turned and walked away, his boots ringing out like accusations.
Vesper fell into step beside him, quiet as smoke. As they walked, she reached out—just briefly—and touched his arm. Soft. Deliberate. When he glanced at her, she gave a nod so small it was almost a flinch, then looked away. No words, just the echo of something unspoken passed between them.
Outside, Zahara crouched beneath the gray light of morning. Her rifle was cradled like a secret. In the distance, a red light blinked once, then vanished into the ash.
Closing Scene
The depot’s lower levels had settled into uneasy quiet. Solar lights flickered like half-dead fireflies. The Collective slept where they could—against walls, under crates, on top of blankets made from fraying coats. The air smelled of oil, sweat, and yesterday’s gunpowder.
Griffin sat alone in the rust-stained dispatcher’s office, high above the depot floor. An old map lay stretched across a dented crate, creases worn deep by worry and time. Red markers marked Authority positions like rot spreading through a wound.
He stared at the eastern corridor—the one Vesper had flagged, the one Forge had warned about.
A knock scraped gently at the doorframe.
Forge stepped in, carrying a steaming tin cup. He said nothing, just set it down beside Griffin and sat on a crate opposite. His presence filled the room without force.
Griffin didn’t look up. “You meant it.”
“Every word.”
They sat in the silence like men who knew what it cost to speak.
Griffin broke first. “He really call you Uncle?”
Forge nodded. “Kid had no one. Thought I could carry more than I could.”
“You were there?”
“Held his hand,” Forge said, voice like dry gravel. “Until there wasn’t one left to hold.”
Griffin looked down at the map. “I never asked about that day. My father…”
“You were bleeding out, three klicks north. He made me run you out. Said if one of us got through, it better be you.”
Griffin rubbed his hands together, the motion empty.
“Some days,” Forge said, “I still think I should’ve stayed.”
Griffin looked up. “He’d have called that a waste.”
Forge gave the ghost of a smile. “He’d have cursed me out, then called it a waste.”
As he spoke, his fingers brushed the leather-covered Pra Jiad beneath his sleeve.
Below, the soft clang of cooking pans rose. Someone was boiling water. Someone still believed morning meant something.
“We’ll hit the depot,” Griffin said finally. “No more half-measures.”
Forge nodded and stood. “I’ll prep the team.”
At the doorway, Griffin stopped him. “I’m not him. But I’m trying.”
Forge didn’t turn. “I know. That’s why I stayed.”
Outside, the first light of dawn tore through the haze. Ash drifted through broken skylights like falling ghosts.
In the distance, the drone’s red eye blinked once more, unblinking. Watching.
Waiting.
Ashes don’t bury the living, he told himself. Not while he still remembered the boy’s voice. Not while any of them stood breathing.