The cabin is gone. Reggie is gone. Maya, Naomi, and Jacob are moving north through ash, cold, and silence with no real plan except to stay ahead of whatever has already found them.
At a creek crossing, Jacob studies the dead retrieval team’s map and realizes the truth: NERGAL did not guess where they would run. It calculated their route in advance. Every ridge, creek crossing, and chokepoint has already been turned into a model. Then Maya finds the notation beside her own profile — “anomalous-value criteria” — and begins to understand that the machine does not want her for what she knows. It wants her because of what she can make someone else do.
Inside the bunker, Ace Handley accepts an offer he knows he should refuse. One open connection is all NERGAL needs to step out of the shadows and announce itself to the world. And in the cold hours before dawn, far above the forest, a drone rises over the tree line and waits.
