The column broke apart on the third hill.
Not from enemy fire. From gravity and exhaustion and the weight of people who couldn't walk anymore being carried by people who barely could. A stretcher pole snapped on a root and dumped a wounded fighter into gravel. He screamed once, sharp, then bit down on it.
Aria hauled him up by his vest while the carriers fumbled for a replacement pole.
"Leave the frame," she said. "Two-man drag. Faster."
Viktor checked rear scope from the ridge crest. Dust plumes east, maybe two kilometers. Closing steady.
"They're not rushing," he told Torres. "Tracking pace. Waiting for us to stop."
Torres wiped grit from his eyes and didn't look up from his route scraps. "We stop, we're done. Simple math."
Not simple. Nothing about dragging a hundred-plus people through bad hills with seven critical wounded and a prisoner in zip-ties was simple. But Torres had stripped language down to load-bearing words only, and Viktor respected the efficiency.
Marcus jogged up from the column's tail, breathing hard but moving like his body hadn't gotten the memo about being fifty-three.
"Rear contacts splitting," he said. "Main body still on our track. Flankers peeling south, maybe trying to cut the ravine ahead."
"How many flankers?"
"Eight, ten. Hard to count through scrub."
Viktor did the math he hated. "If they reach the ravine before us, column gets bottlenecked in the open."
Marcus nodded like Viktor had confirmed weather.
"Rearguard," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Take six. Buy us forty minutes."
"I'll buy you what I buy you." Marcus was already turning, hand signals pulling fighters from the line without breaking stride. "Don't wait if I'm late. Get them underground."
He stopped once, looked back at Viktor with an expression that wasn't quite worry and wasn't quite instruction.
"Keep your head working," he said. "You've been reaching for words."
Then he was gone, jogging downhill with his squad toward the dust.
---
The ravine Torres had marked on his hand-drawn scraps turned out to be a drainage cut between two slag ridges, steep-walled and choked with dead brush. Good concealment. Bad footing. One path in, one path out unless you wanted to climb thirty feet of loose shale.
Viktor took point with Aria while Torres managed the column from center.
"How's your frequency?" Aria asked without looking at him.
"Fourteen percent. Maybe less."
"And the head?"
He'd been seeing doubles on bright surfaces since the quarry blast. The concussion hum hadn't faded. Every time he reached for a specific memory (a name, a place, a sequence) there was a coin-flip delay before it arrived. Sometimes it didn't arrive at all.
"Functional," he said.
Aria snorted. "That's not what I asked."
"It's what I've got."
She let it drop, which meant she was saving the real conversation for a moment when it would hurt more. That was how Aria fought every battle, including the ones with him.
The ravine opened after six hundred meters into a flat stretch of dead ground. Rusted rail tracks ran through it like old stitches in dirt. Two parallel lines disappearing west into a cut between hills where concrete structures hunched against the slope.
Torres's rail settlement.
Viktor stopped at the edge and let Reality Frequency pulse through the ground ahead. Low power, wide sweep. The skill answered sluggish, like dragging a net through mud.
No active energy signatures in the structures. No skill resonance. No movement.
Dead ground. Dead rails. Dead station.
"Clear," he said. Then, because honesty cost less than surprise: "As far as I can read. Which isn't far."
Aria raised optics and scanned the buildings.
"Station house, mostly intact. Roof sag on the south end. Yard buildingsâthree, maybe four standing. Rail shed collapsed. And thereâ" She pointed past the yard to where the hillside showed a dark mouth framed in cracked concrete. "Tunnel entrance. Service access, probably."
"Torres said tunnels were partially flooded."
"Torres said a lot of things from a map he drew on a medical label." Aria lowered the optics. "We're here. It's what we have."
She sounded like Torres. Everyone was starting to sound like Torres. Efficiency was contagious when you ran out of room for anything else.
---
Getting a hundred and fourteen people into a half-collapsed rail station took nineteen minutes and cost them what was left of organized movement.
The station was worse than Torres described, which Viktor had expected, and better than nothing, which was the only standard that mattered now.
Main hall: concrete shell, windows blown out, roof holding except on the south end where weather had punched through and left a slope of debris and pigeon bones. Two side rooms, one with a rusted generator frame, one flooded ankle-deep from a cracked pipe nobody could find the source of.
The yard buildings offered more space. A dispatch office with intact walls. A signal house with a lockable door and sightlines over the approach ravine. A tool shed that smelled like chemicals and dead animals but had a solid floor.
People settled where they dropped. Stretchers lined the main hall. Kids pressed against walls. The wounded made sounds they tried to muffle and couldn't.
Emma set up triage on a concrete platform that used to hold ticket machines, already sorting supplies from the packs they'd carried.
"I need clean water, elevated surface for the chest wound, and perhaps someone to explain why we're treating battlefield injuries in a train station," she said to no one and everyone.
Kira brought water. Lyra brought a door ripped from a bathroom stall to serve as a gurney platform.
Emma looked at the door, looked at Lyra, and said, "That'll do."
Viktor found Torres at the signal house, already pinning route scraps to the wall.
"Perimeter options?" Viktor asked.
Torres pointed without turning. "Ravine approach is the main threat axis. Signal house gives overwatch. Tunnel entrance is secondary accessâneed to clear and block or use as fallback. Yard fence is decorative at best. Thirty minutes of work with wire and scrap gives us early warning on north and south flanks."
"Do it."
"Already started. Wen's running wire from that tool shed. I need four fighters on perimeter rotation and someone who can stay awake for eight hours."
"I can stay awake."
Torres finally turned and studied Viktor's face for three seconds.
"You can barely stand. I need someone awake, not someone proving a point." He pulled a folded paper from his vest. "Take this. Updated headcount, injury tally, supply inventory. Read it, then sleep for two hours. That's not a suggestion."
Viktor took the paper and didn't promise anything.
---
Gunfire cracked from the east at 15:22.
Not close. Half a kilometer, maybe more. Short bursts, disciplined spacing. Marcus's rearguard making contact.
Everyone in the station froze for two heartbeats. Then training kicked in and people started moving to positions that didn't exist yet because they'd been here twenty minutes.
Aria grabbed a rifle and sprinted for the signal house roof.
Viktor reached for Reality Frequency and got a dim pulse back. He could feel the skirmish as vibration through stone. Kinetic impacts, skill discharge, bodies in motion. Too fuzzy to count, but the pattern said small engagement. Hit and move. Marcus buying time the only way Marcus knew how.
The firing lasted nine minutes.
Then silence.
Then, at 15:38, Marcus's voice on comm. Winded, rough, but intact.
"Six contacts down. Rest pulled back to regroup." A pause for breathing. "Viktor."
"Go."
"They're not Council."
Viktor's hand tightened on the comm.
"Identification?"
"Mixed gear, no unit markings, civilian-grade armor with aftermarket plates. One had a collection harness." Another breath. "Harvesters. Black market skill extraction rig on the body. Modified, but I've seen the base model before."
Aria was back from the roof, listening. Her jaw set hard.
"Harvesters don't chase columns," she said. "They ambush solos and small groups. Forty-plus is an army by their standards."
"Somebody hired an army," Marcus said over comm. "And they're not after the network. Two of them shouted during contact. They used your name, Viktor. Specifically."
Viktor closed his eyes.
Harvesters wanted skills. His skills. The fusions, the Reality Frequency, the whole collection that made him worth more dead and drained than alive and free.
"Someone put a bounty out," Torres said from the doorway, stating what everyone already knew. "Council outsourced."
"Or someone else entirely," Kira said from behind him. "Harvesters work for whoever pays. Council, guilds, private collectors. We don't know who's writing checks."
"Right now it doesn't matter who's writing checks," Viktor said. "It matters that forty people with extraction gear know where we are. Marcus, get back. South approach, stay below the ridge."
"Oscar mike. Twenty minutes."
Viktor opened his eyes and looked at the room.
Exhausted faces. Wounded bodies. A station that smelled like rust and pigeons and old rust and pigeon shit and the funk of places that every version of civilization had tried and quit.
This was home now.
He started giving orders because that was the thing he could still do when everything else was stripped away.
"Aria, defensive positions. Choke the ravine approach, wire the yard, set two-person watch rotations."
"Torres, inventory everything. Water, ammo, medical, food. Actual numbers, not optimistic ones."
"Kira, I need you on Crane. If Harvesters are in play, his value as a prisoner just changed. Find out what he knows about Harvester contracts."
"Emmaâ"
"I know what I need to do," Emma said without looking up from the chest wound she was packing. "Perhaps you could let me do it."
He let her do it.
---
Marcus arrived at 16:01 with five fighters, one limping badly, all carrying extra magazines stripped from Harvester bodies.
He dumped the collection harness on the floor of the dispatch office where Viktor and Torres were working.
It was an ugly thing. Metal and leather with extraction needles and containment vials, designed to pull skills from living targets through pain and resonance disruption. The needles were stained dark.
"Three models in the field," Marcus said. "This one's recent manufacture. Serial numbers filed, but the alloy stamp is Eastport industrial. Means money behind this."
Torres photographed it with a cracked tablet.
"Harvester casualties?" Viktor asked.
"Six confirmed dead. No prisonersâlast two ate capsules before I reached them." Marcus dropped into a chair that groaned under him. "Suicide protocols. That's not freelance behavior. That's contract discipline."
"How long before main body regroups and pushes?"
Marcus rubbed his face with both hands. "Tonight, maybe. Dawn more likely. They lost their scout element and they're cautious with unknown terrain. But they'll come."
Viktor nodded. "Get your people fed and rested. Four-hour rotation starts atâ"
Wen burst through the door.
Not his usual controlled movement. He was carrying a portable scanner with wires trailing and his face had gone flat, the way it did when data broke his predictions.
"Problem," he said.
"Which kind?" Aria asked from the doorway.
Wen set the scanner on the table. The display showed a waveform pattern, regular and low-power, emanating from below the station.
From the service tunnels.
"I was running wire along the tunnel entrance and picked this up," Wen said. "Encrypted narrow-band signal. Very low power, very deliberate. Someone's transmitting from approximately two hundred meters below us."
Torres leaned in. "Old equipment? Automated system left running?"
"Automated systems don't use current-generation encryption protocols," Wen said. "This was updated within the last month."
The room went quiet.
Below them, in tunnels they hadn't cleared, someone was broadcasting. Someone with modern equipment and reason to hide in a place the world had forgotten.
Marcus reached for his rifle out of reflex, then set it down.
"So," he said. "Who's home?"
