The old world ended before Skye was born. Cities rotted, governments collapsed, and the last of the satellites blinked out one night without warning. Now, the world belonged to the survivors—and the chains that held them.
Rael Voss didn't care about the chains. Not anymore.
He lived beyond the maps, deep in the Saltreach Wastes where nothing grew and no one sane dared to follow. His shelter was a half-buried comms station, bones of the old world creaking beneath rusted steel and sand-cracked concrete. It was quiet. Just how he liked it.
Until she came.
Skye Lorne wasn't armed when she crossed his perimeter. She was barely sixteen, wrapped in a threadbare jacket with ash in her hair and blood on her boots. Rael watched her through his scope for a full minute before stepping outside.
"You're a long way from safe zones," he said, voice rough from disuse.
She didn't flinch. "I need your help."
"No one needs my help."
She pulled something from her coat. A weathered ID badge, cracked and faded, but still legible: Lorne, Elias — the man who once saved Rael's life back when the world still bled in color.
"My father's dead," she said. "They killed him. I ran. He told me… if anything happened, to find you."
Rael took the badge. He remembered Elias Lorne. Smuggler, engineer, idealist. A rare good man in a time that crushed them early. Rael felt a flicker in his chest — not emotion, just memory. It was enough.
"Who's after you?" he asked.
She looked up. "A group called the Broker Chain. They take kids. Strip towns for anything useful. My dad tried to stop them."
Rael stared at her. At the desperation behind her eyes, the cut on her cheek, the way she carried herself — cautious, but not broken.
"I'm not your hero," he said.
"I'm not asking for a hero," she replied. "Just someone who'll shoot back."
Rael turned and walked toward the hatch. "Get inside. We talk when you've eaten."
As the door hissed shut behind them, Rael knew the silence was over. Whatever peace he had clawed together out here in the wastes — it just ended.
And something else had begun.