The far bank was a cold, miserable place to stop, but Rourke had already dropped his pack and Kael was wringing river water from the hem of his shirt, so the decision was made by committee without anyone calling a vote.
Aaron lowered himself onto a flat rock and tried to look like a man who needed to rest. It wasn't entirely a performance. His right palm was a slow throb where the scab had torn, and his wet boots had started to feel like they were actively digesting his feet.
Maya sat down across from him.
Not beside Kael. Not near Lara, who had found a mossy log and was cradling her slung forearm with the careful attention of someone cataloguing pain. Maya chose the rock directly opposite Aaron, maybe four feet of open ground between them, and she did it with the same economy of motion she applied to everything—no fidgeting, no adjustment, just settled.
Her recurve bow rested across her knees. Her hands were loose in her lap.
"Office work," she said. Not a question. A prompt.
Aaron looked up from his palm. "Sorry?"
"You said earlier. Before the crossing." She tilted her head a fraction. "You worked in an office."
I said that? I don't think I said that.
But he let the correction die. If she wanted to hand him a cover story, the polite thing was to take it.
"Data entry, mostly." He shrugged, which pulled at the wet fabric of his tactical vest in an unpleasant way. "Tech company. Nothing exciting. Lots of spreadsheets."
"Spreadsheets." She repeated it without inflection, the way a person repeats a word in a foreign language they're not convinced exists.
Lara was pretending to examine the bark of her log. Kael and Rourke were murmuring about something—food, probably, or the state of Rourke's boots, which looked worse than Aaron's—but they were a comfortable distance away, far enough that this conversation had a shape to it. A frame. An audience of one.
"And the Scavenger class," Maya continued. "How did that happen?"
"Survival instinct, I guess." Aaron let himself look faintly rueful, the expression of a man embarrassed by his own ordinariness. "When the System initialized, I wasn't anywhere useful. No weapons. No training. I just—grabbed things. Useful things. The System apparently decided that made me a Scavenger."
"Mm." She was watching his face the way a cartographer watches a coastline—not for beauty, but for the places where the map might be wrong.
He kept his breathing even. He kept his hands still, which was harder than it sounded when every instinct he had was telling him to do something with them, to shift his weight, to manufacture some piece of body language that read as harmless. Doing nothing was its own kind of tell. He knew that. He was betting she knew it too, and that the trick was to make the stillness look like fatigue instead of discipline.
"What did you scavenge?" she asked. "In the first week."
"Food, mostly. Some tools from a hardware store." He paused, as if remembering. "A rain jacket. I thought the rain jacket was a big win."
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. More like a notation.
"And before the office," she said. "School? Military? Anything physical?"
There it is.
"High school track," Aaron said. "Long time ago. I was mediocre at it." He rubbed the back of his neck with his uninjured hand—not a nervous gesture, just a man acknowledging his own athletic history with the appropriate amount of self-deprecation. "Why?"
"You crossed that river well," she said simply. "For someone who slipped."
The four feet of ground between them felt like it had contracted.
"Got lucky," he said. "You grabbed me fast."
"I did." She held his gaze. Not a challenge, exactly. More like a door held open, waiting to see if he'd walk through it. "You braced before I touched you."
"Did I?" He manufactured a slight frown, the look of a man genuinely uncertain about his own reflexes. "I didn't notice."
"I did."
Lara had stopped pretending to study the bark.
Aaron opened his mouth—he had something ready, something bland and plausible about adrenaline and instinct, the kind of answer that was technically true and practically meaningless—
The growl came from the tree line.
Low. Guttural. The kind of sound that didn't build up to itself, just arrived fully formed in the dark between the trunks, and every head in the group snapped toward it simultaneously, and the question Maya had been about to ask dissolved into the cold air, unanswered, as everyone reached for something sharp.
The growl landed in Aaron's sternum like a dropped stone.
He was on his feet before the sound fully resolved, knife already clearing its sheath, the motion so automatic he had to consciously degrade it—fumble the grip, let the handle rotate a quarter-turn wrong, recover it with a visible wrist correction. Maya was already standing, bow drawn, an arrow nocked with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd done it ten thousand times. Kael had his hand axe up. Rourke had stepped in front of Lara, which Aaron noted was either chivalrous or tactically sound depending on whether you factored in Lara's expression, which suggested she found it neither.
Then the treeline came apart.
Not one. Not three.
Seven.
They came out of the dark in a low, flat wave—Shadow Jackals, their fur so deeply black it read as holes punched through the night, edges blurring where the dim light tried to find them. The only definition was their eyes: pale amber, catching the ambient glow of the corrupted western sky in quick, saccadic flickers. They moved without the sound Aaron expected from something that size, paws finding the soft river-bank mud with a precision that felt engineered.
Tier-two pack behavior. Flanking formation. The two on the outer edges are the redirectors—they'll curve inward once the center draws attention.
He filed it and did nothing with it.
Kael charged the nearest one with a shout that was more therapy than tactics, axe swinging in a wide arc that connected with a satisfying crack of flat steel against bone. The jackal yelped and skidded sideways, buying Rourke a clear line to drive his boot into a second animal's ribs. Maya released her first arrow in the same second—no pause, no breath-hold he could detect—and a third jackal dropped mid-stride, the shaft buried to the fletching behind its left shoulder.
That left four.
One of them peeled off the formation and came directly at Aaron.
He tracked it the way he always tracked things: the weight shift in the haunches two strides out, the slight elevation of the right shoulder telegraphing a left-biased lunge. He had the knife up and his arm cocked before the animal's feet left the ground.
The throw mechanics assembled themselves without consultation. Weight transfer from rear foot to front, smooth and low. Shoulder aligned with the target. Elbow leading the rotation. Wrist snap timed to the release point.
He held the blade a fraction too long.
The knife left his hand on the wrong side of the arc, the angle already degraded past correction. It tumbled once and buried itself in a pine trunk three feet to the jackal's left with a sound like a mallet hitting green wood.
The jackal's lunge carried it close enough that Aaron had to throw himself backward, landing hard on the wet bank, one hand sinking wrist-deep into cold mud. The animal overshot him, scrambled, turned. Rourke's boot connected with its haunches before it could reset, and Maya put an arrow through its neck from twelve feet with the unhurried precision of someone clearing a to-do list.
The remaining jackals read the situation correctly and decided to be somewhere else. They dissolved back into the treeline in the same silence they'd arrived with, which Aaron found more unsettling than if they'd snarled on the way out.
He was still sitting in the mud when Maya walked over to the pine tree, gripped the handle of his knife, and worked it free with two deliberate twists. She looked at the blade. Then she looked at the tree. Then she looked at where the jackal had been when Aaron released the throw.
She walked back and held the knife out, handle first.
Aaron took it.
"Good throw," she said.
He started to say thank you and she spoke over him.
"Wrong target, though." She tilted her head, a small, precise movement. "You had the form on the wind-up. Weight transfer was textbook. Wrist snap was clean." She paused. "And then you let go late."
"I panicked."
"You didn't panic at the river."
"That was different."
"How?"
Aaron opened his mouth. Closed it. He was aware of Kael and Rourke moving in the background, checking the treeline, giving the exchange a wide berth with the social instincts of people who'd learned when not to insert themselves. Lara was watching from further back, her expression unreadable.
Maya took one step closer. Not aggressive—clinical. The way someone moves when they want to reduce the variables between themselves and accurate information.
Her hand closed around his forearm. Not grabbing. Just present. An anchor.
"Your story doesn't add up."
The words weren't loud. They didn't need to be. They sat in the space between them with the specific weight of a conclusion someone had been building toward for hours, and the corrupted western sky bled its cold, wrong light across her face, and she didn't look away, and neither did he.