Florence smiled faintly. "Think of sothing sweet. I'll see you when you wake up, dear."
Wren nodded, but the smile she offered didn’t reach her eyes. It trembled, too thin, too ready to crack.
The anesthesia hit slow. Gentle. A creeping warmth in her limbs, a fog pressing against her temples.
She didn’t fight it.
She let it pull her down.
She fell into mory.
The alley was narrow. Wet brick. Oil-stained pavent. A sour stink clinging to the walls.
She rembered her own breath, short and sharp, the way it echoed off the walls. She'd been the lure. Bait in an ambush she hadn't even known Warren was planning.
She hadn't wanted to be afraid. But she was.
The n had closed in, smug and stupid. She rembered their voices, not just the words, but the tone. That oozing, laughing certainty. Like the world had always given them whatever they wanted.
And then Warren ca.
Not loud. Not heroic. Not like in stories.
Just there.
One mont she was alone. The next, there was a crack, and one of the n was choking on his own blood, pipe buried in his mouth.
She hadn’t seen Warren move. Not really. Just flashes of him, shoulder, elbow, step, twist. The pipe arcing like punctuation, like judgnt. One scream. Then none. Just wet sounds and bootsteps.
The last one tried to run.
Warren broke his leg first.
She’d stood there at the end of the alley, barely breathing, blood on her shoes. Her fingers had been shaking. But not from fear.
He'd looked back at her when it was done, face unreadable, pipe still gripped like he might need it again.
She rembered what she'd said.
"What a show, " she whispered in the dream. "Was that all for ?"
The dream twisted.
Now it was the courtyard. Not clean. Not prepared. Wild.
She rembered the mont Warren realized she wouldn’t make it out if they stayed together. He hadn’t said anything cruel. Just gave her a look, the one that said don’t argue.
And then he ran.
He ran at them.
Three Broken. Maybe four. She couldn’t rember. They were fast, misshapen, and louder than they had any right to be.
Warren hadn’t dodged.
He led them away like it was a ga. Made noise. Drew attention. Forced the chase.
She'd hidden behind a half-broken panel, pressing her fist to her mouth, watching him draw every one of them toward the dead-end corridor.
She heard the first impact. The second. The wet crunch of tal on bone, or bone on tal. She rembered thinking he can’t win this.
But he did.
One of them ca back out.
It wasn’t Warren.
Then the body hit the wall, Broken, twisted, and Warren staggered after it, pipe dripping black.
He’d made it back to her with a limp and a grin like nothing happened.
"Told you to hide, " he’d said.
The dream softened.
Now they were in the tunnel. Close and quiet. Their breath fogged the air.
She rembered laughing about the pipe. Stick. She'd nad it that just to get under his skin.
He’d hated the na.
But he kept it.
Later, he ca back with sothing different. Not the sa rusted tal he’d always carried. It had a new grip, a counterweight, made of blacksteel and thought.
He gave it to her without a word.
When she asked, he just said:
"Pipe."
She kissed him for that.
It hadn’t been planned. It just happened. Because there was too much truth in that gift.
She rembered the way his hand had lingered on hers for just a mont longer after she took it.
And then the dream held there.
Wren curled into the weight of mory, of his coat, of the thing he'd made just for her.
He was nearby. He always was.
She mouthed the word:
"Warren."
And then the dream rippled. The color bled. The silence broke.
Wren flinched. The dream shattered.
And the old world ca rushing back.
Not yet awake. But fighting it.
Sowhere, above the blood and fire:
She was still holding on.
They used to pretend the old buildings were castles.
Wren and Calra, barefoot, dirt-streaked, unstoppable, raced through the skeletal ruins of the pre-collapse world like they owned it. The Wilds weren’t dead then. Not to them. They were a kingdom. A ga.
Broken tal beams beca jungle gyms. Shattered road signs turned into shields. They’d clamber up vine-wrapped stairwells that led to nowhere, laughing the whole way.
Wren rembered how Calra used to sing, surprisingly well, bold and clear. Her voice echoed off glassless windows like it belonged there, warm and fearless. Wren would climb higher just to outdo her, plant a flag made of tied cloth on a rusted balcony and declare herself queen of the overgrowth.
Calra was older. Taller. Quicker.
But Wren had always acted like the big sister.
She made the rules. Led the charge. Pulled Calra away from sharp tal edges or suspect floors with a glare and a bossy tug. When Calra cried after skinning her knee, Wren didn’t coddle, she spat on a rag, cleaned it up, and made her a crown of dandelions like it was part of a royal initiation.
Calra followed her everywhere.
Even when Wren didn’t ask her to.
Their father never minded.
He wasn’t Calra’s biological father, but that never stopped him from claiming her as his. She’d co into his life when his sister died giving birth to her, before Wren was born. But it had never mattered. He raised her like she was his. And when Wren ca along, the two of them beca a pair he watched over like twin stars.
He’d sit in the shade of a half-crushed skimr, arms crossed, smiling like nothing in the world could go wrong. When the day ended and their feet were raw from running, he’d gather them with a whistle and sling Calra over his shoulder like a sack of rice while Wren marched ahead pretending to scout.
Dinner was always fire-ward. Never enough, but always shared. And he’d tell them stories, about the ti before the walls fell. About stars and machines and the things people used to believe in.
Wren used to fall asleep curled up beside him, cheek against his jacket, counting the beats of his heart like it was a drum holding the world together.
Then one day, he left.
Just a supply run.
Just a few clicks past the safe path.
He never ca back.
She rembered the way Calra sat in silence that night, staring into the fire like it would burn through the answer.
Wren had scread.
Not at the world.
At the silence. At the empty coat still hanging from the hook. At the whisper of footfalls that never ca.
Sothing in the Wilds had taken him.
And the ruins stopped being castles.
They beca bones.
The night was quiet in the way only dreams could be.
Wren stood at the window, her forehead resting against a pane of glass so old and cracked it looked like it might fall apart if she breathed too hard. Outside, the world was washed in that pale silver glow that didn’t co from the moon or any sun she rembered, a kind of soft, otherworldly light only dreams dared to conjure, the kind that made ruins look like temples and dust shimr like snow.
She felt like a child again. Not in age, but in posture and in longing, small, hopeful, unguarded in a way that no longer fit her waking body. Calra lay behind her, nestled in a nest of too-thin blankets, the fire long gone cold and the kettle forgotten beside it. But Wren stayed awake, watching the dark outside the fra like it owed her sothing, like the night itself might return what she had lost.
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She was waiting.
Because he was supposed to be ho by now.
Her father.
He’d promised it would be quick. Just two days, he said. A salvage run barely past the ridge, sowhere quiet in the Wilds where even the wind moved soft. Nothing risky. Nothing new. Nothing to worry about.
And she had believed him, the way only a child could believe a father’s voice when it carried the weight of certainty.
The silence held for too long.
Then...
Footsteps.
They were heavy. Intentional. Each one spaced apart like punctuation, the kind of stride that said the person walking knew exactly where they were going and didn’t care who heard.
Her heart surged upward like it was trying to fly.
She ran toward the door without thinking, bare feet smacking against the stone, breath caught sowhere between hope and relief. Her hand reached for the latch, already shaking, and her mouth stretched into a grin she hadn’t felt in weeks. She imagined him on the other side, worn and tired, maybe bloodied, but whole. Always whole.
The door opened.
But it wasn’t him.
The man standing there was taller, too broad through the shoulders, and everything about him was wrong in a quiet, calculated way, slicked-back hair, hands too clean, a posture that didn’t belong to soone who lived in the Wilds. The light behind him bent strange, like the world was warning her.
The Warlord.
Wren didn’t breathe.
Every part of her froze in place, every mory, every instinct curling backward like a wounded animal.
He didn’t smile at first. He just stared down at her with a kind of asuring detachnt, the way one might look at salvage or a half-buried trap, sothing to be assessed, not acknowledged.
Then he stepped over the threshold.
And smiled.
Her stomach lurched.
Even inside the dream, though she felt stripped down and too-young, she understood on a bone-deep level that he wasn’t supposed to be here. He didn’t belong in this house, in this mory, in any part of her life.
She stumbled back, one step, then another, trying to will the door to close, to lock, to reject him.
It wouldn’t move.
She shoved at the heavy wood, heels skidding on the stone floor, but it stayed open like it had never been a door at all.
The Warlord stepped inside, and the dream changed around him. The light bled away, replaced with the jaundiced yellow of oil-lamps and cracked generators. The warmth she rembered vanished, replaced by the stale heat of fear and old power.
He reached for her cheek with a hand that looked too calm.
She recoiled instinctively.
He didn’t stop.
The dream fractured at the edges.
Hands that weren’t his pressed against her skin. Her throat. Her shoulders. Her scalp. She opened her mouth to scream but found no voice.
The blankets were gone. Calra was gone. The walls didn’t look like ho anymore. They were too smooth. Too wet. Lit from overhead by dying fluorescents.
Not a house.
A cage.
Ti folded sideways. Her knees hit concrete. Chains clinked in the dark, faint but present.
And the Warlord stood above her.
He didn’t speak.
He didn’t need to.
His presence filled the room like gas.
And what he took from her in that mont, not in visible motion, not in a scene the dream dared to show, but in everything else it refused to look away from, was understood.
The pain lived behind her ribs. The silence vibrated in her skull.
She rembered how tal tasted. How bruises layered themselves in places no one could see. How her throat stopped making sound long before her eyes stopped spilling tears. How she learned the shape of obedience not from instruction, but survival.
And how sotis, it wasn’t her pain that kept her alive.
She rembered the mont he dragged soone into the room, a girl, bloodied and crying, barely standing. She rembered the choice he gave her, obedience or consequence. One of them would die unless the other complied.
So Wren complied.
He gave her a blade. Cold. Too clean. He told her to hurt soone who’d tried to help. Soone she barely knew. Soone who had passed her food in secret, just once.
Wren did it.
She did it to protect Calra. To keep her safe. Because the Warlord said this or her, and Wren already knew how loss tasted.
The girl never spoke to her again.
Later, Wren learned what it ant to be valuable.
She beca a reward. A promise. A favorite toy he handed off when he wanted to make soone else feel important. The guards. The rchants. The n who ca to drink and barter and break things.
She was passed between them like a coin.
They weren’t gentle.
They weren’t brief.
Sotis she was gagged so she wouldn’t interrupt their laughing.
Sotis she was told to smile or they’d hurt Calra instead.
She rembered trying to be grateful that it was her and not Calra.
She rembered the sha of that thought.
She rembered how the Warlord watched from the doorway, smiling, pleased, like he’d taught her sothing.
And in that mont, she stopped being Wren.
She beca what they wanted.
Until the dream cracked.
"You belong to now, " he said.
Not out loud.
It ca from the walls. The floor. Her own mind.
The dream collapsed inward.
Her father’s voice vanished.
The stars dimd.
And she forgot how to scream.
Only her na remained.
Wren.
Wren.
Wren.
And even that felt borrowed.
The walls didn’t bleed, but she swore she could hear them breathe.
The Warlord’s chambers had been a shrine to control. Soft floors, dim lights, no shadows deep enough to hide in. Everything designed to feel inescapable, because comfort can be another kind of prison. Wren had spent months reading those rooms, learning the rhythms of his rituals. When he drank. When he slept. How long it took him to snore. When he stopped locking the outer door.
She waited. And waited. For the right night.
And when it ca, she moved.
The drug had taken weeks to obtain. Slipped from the infirmary when no one was looking, stored in cloth, pressed under her cot. A sleeping agent. Enough to dull a monster. Not kill. Just quiet.
She brewed it into his tea with steady hands.
He liked to watch her pour it.
She smiled like she always did. The small, obedient one. The one who didn’t scream anymore.
And when he drank it, when his eyes began to flutter and his body sank heavy into the cushions, she didn’t run right away.
She waited.
She watched him fall apart.
Only then did she move.
She reached the outer corridor checked if it was clear then she doubled back to the shelf beneath the Warlord’s personal desk, where he kept trophies, keys, and the tools he didn’t want anyone to touch. Her fingers found the twin ssenger bands buried beneath a storage box, old-model comms that still blinked green when activated. Just beside them, tucked in an old linen pouch, were two encoded lens disks, the kind used by scouts and high-clearance runners. She took both, hands steady. She turned off the comms and pocketed the disks, knowing she’d have to figure out what they did later.
One had broken before she made it out of the Wilds. A fall too hard. A stone too sharp. But the other? The other would change her life.
She turned them off before slipping everything into her satchel. No one saw.
Then she crept barefoot across tile. Quiet. Controlled. Every sound morized. Every blind spot accounted for.
She slipped past the guards by moving when they were laughing.
The door creaked once.
She froze for seventeen full seconds.
Then moved again.
She took only what she had carefully gathered over the last week: a flask, a ration pouch, a small knife she’d pald off a distracted guard, a stitched satchel lined with dust and the stolen ssenger bands, and the blackcoat Calra had stolen for her when no one was looking. She carried it all under her cloak, each item planned, each ounce justified. Nothing that jingled. Nothing that tore.
She had paid the guards too. Not all of them, just the ones who cared more about flesh than duty, n who watched her too long, laughed too loud, and thought they understood power. She gave them what they wanted. Not because she wanted to. Because it bought silence. Bought a delay. Bought the chance to slip out the door without a dozen lances at her back. Her body beca the toll they expected her to pay, and she let them believe she was theirs for a little longer. Let them believe it so she could vanish the mont their guard dropped.
Calra had tried to stop her. The night before, she caught Wren lacing the satchel and sealing the flask. They hadn’t argued. Not really. Calra begged. Wren didn’t answer. She just hugged her once, tight and final. The kind of hug that closes a door without slamming it. Then she left.
The cloak she wore had been stolen months before, long enough to cover her face and hair, long enough to hide everything they thought they knew.
The Wilds were colder than she rembered.
The first night she slept in a rusted shipping container. Curled up under a tarp stiff with blood. She didn’t sleep much.
The second night, she found a creek. She boiled water in a dented tin cup she'd tucked into her satchel, waiting until it bubbled before letting it cool enough to drink. It wasn’t perfect, but it kept her from vomiting her guts out like the stories warned. Her throat burned anyway.
The third night, the sky opened and it rained for twelve hours. She had no shelter. She nearly drowned standing up.
But she kept going.
She ran through burn-scars and scarred roads, through old killzones and over broken gates, moving only at night and hiding by day. She passed places she knew from whispers, Black Ridge, Hollow Scar, the Pit Mouth. Places no one walked out of.
She walked out of all of them.
Once, she passed a caravan. She didn’t wave.
Once, she saw a girl like her in a window. She kept walking.
She didn’t speak for six days.
By the ti she reached the outskirts of Sector D, she’d forgotten what her real voice sounded like.
But she rembered his.
She kept walking anyway.
Her boots were cracked but held together, stolen from a guard’s quarters and wrapped in salvaged cloth to keep the seams from splitting. She'd worn them every step since leaving, the soles worn nearly smooth. She was covered in dirt and blood. They didn’t recognize her.
She didn’t stop.
She didn’t ask for help.
She just moved.
Wren didn’t escape all at once.
She escaped a hundred steps at a ti.
And each one bled.
The dream opened with blood in her throat and broken pavent under her feet, the familiar sting of torn lungs and the sharp, tallic sting of air that scraped like wire against the back of her tongue.
She was running again.
The ruins warped and flickered around her, a blur of burnt-out concrete and shattered signage, ghost shapes of buildings older than mory that lood and dissolved like fog when she looked too hard. Her legs scread with every push forward, her lungs clawed for breath, but she didn’t stop, because behind her, pounding through the dead city, ca the sound no scav ever survived twice: the rhythm of sothing not quite human. Not just footfalls, but that footfall. Deliberate. Heavy. Glitching out of sync with the world like a predator born in static.
A Broken.
It had seen her as she sprinted past the old pharmacy, her breath a broken rhythm, her hands still scraped from a fall. She hadn’t gone in. Hadn’t dared. She didn’t even know what it was yet. All she knew was that the buildings were unfamiliar, the streets too quiet, and the thing behind her never slowed.
It hunted with certainty.
She veered down alleys so narrow they scraped the fabric from her shoulders, leapt over rusted rail lines, skidded down stairwells where rats burst like shadows from underfoot. The streets here were wrong. Marked. Black-coded. Red-tagged. The kind of place people talked about in warnings, not maps.
But that was the point.
She wasn’t sane. Not anymore.
She was desperate.
Sowhere in this ruin-stained hell, behind the false paths and ancient threats, lay sothing real: the Vault.
She hit a corner too fast, her boots skidding on loose gravel as she threw her weight into the turn. The glass cracked underfoot, but she stayed upright, shoulders brushing the edge of a bent steel beam that lood too close. She didn’t stumble. Didn’t slow. Just kept moving.
It was gaining.
Closer.
Closer.
And then, nothing.
Silence fell like a dropped blade.
She spun, body low, ready to die screaming if it ca to that.
But the alley was empty.
Gone?
No.
Not gone. Claid.
The thing hadn’t given up. Sothing else had taken it.
She moved forward in steps that felt carved from stone, her heartbeat too loud, her breath too thin.
And then she saw him.
The boy in the yellow raincoat.
He stood where the Broken had fallen, its limbs splayed in unnatural angles, the torso cracked open like old armor folded inward, wires and bone-joint equivalents exposed to the air. Its head was nothing but a cave-in of alloy and ruined sensors, black fluid leaking in a slow spiral. The boy, no, the figure, held a truncheon with a grip that was loose but undeniable, like it wasn’t just a weapon, but an extension of his will, swung once with precision and absolute finality. He hadn’t needed to try hard. That was the terrifying part.
Wren didn’t speak.
Couldn’t.
She didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink.
She had thought he was gone. When she first passed through the edge of Red, she'd seen his sigil on a waystone marker, a symbol too deliberate, sothing left behind with purpose. She'd thought he had died. No one soloed the Red and survived, not really. The idea that soone could go in alone and co back was the kind of lie you told to keep your hands steady, not sothing that ever happened. So when she'd seen his sigil on the waystone, Her heart stopped. The sigil lingered, bold and recent, and sothing in her refused to believe that kind of presence ended quietly. If he had lived, he could take her through. If he hadn’t... she would still learn from his path.
She’d doubled back toward the pharmacy, not for salvage, but to wait for him. She’d seen how he set his traps, and she had reset them, quietly, carefully, hoping he might co back. Not because she expected kindness. But because sigil told her this place was protected.
She hadn’t touched a thing. Hadn’t even opened a drawer. She just curled up in the corner and waited.
And then there he was.
He turned slowly, without urgency, like he had all the ti in the world. And when his eyes t hers, they didn’t drop. Didn’t drift. Didn’t weigh her like an object.
He didn’t look at her chest, or her hips, or anywhere the guards always stared before deciding what she was worth.
He looked at her eyes.
And in that gaze was the strangest thing she had felt in years:
Recognition.
Not of what she was, but of who she was.
Human.
He didn’t ask why she was in his ho.
Didn’t demand a trade, or explanation, or lie.
He said nothing that hinted at judgnt.
He just tilted his head, studied her for a breath too long, and said, not unkindly:
"I’m not going to hurt you. If sothing else tries, you get first shot. That’s the rule."
And for the first ti in years, years of being passed, hunted, owned, and broken, she believed soone.
She didn’t know if he was human. Not really.
Didn’t know if she was, either.
But he looked at her like she might be.
And in the dream, she clung to that impossible mont, curling her mory tighter around it like a coat she didn’t know how to take off.
Like it might hold long enough to protect her from the waking.
And if she died like this, floating in the warmth of being seen, of finally not being alone, it wouldn’t be the worst way to go. Not after what they’d done. Not after everything. She’d flown. She’d found him. That was enough.
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