Dawn bled through the compound's fractured walls, slicing Tobias's quarters into jagged halves of light and shadow. Eighteen years in this ruin of a world had left him with relics: a duct-taped window, a bed with sagging springs, a dresser missing a drawer. On its warped surface—his treasures. A tarnished dog tag. Coins crushed under train rails that would never run again. A carved wooden soldier, its paint chipped from years of a boy's fidgeting hands. And the river stone, still warm from his sister's feverish grip when she'd pressed it into his palm that morning.
"For luck," she'd whispered.
Neither of them believed in luck anymore.
Home. This rotting compound was all he'd ever known. Seventy years after the Fall, and the world had nothing better to offer.
Tobias sank onto the bed, its springs groaning under his weight. His calloused fingers traced the cracks in his boot leather—not for wear, but for the habit. At eighteen, he was his father's shadow—broad-shouldered, too tall for doorways, yet right now, he felt ten years old again, waiting for Pops to come home and tell him he'd done good.
A rust-colored strand fell into his eyes. He pushed it back, all sharp angles and restless energy. The gold flecks in his eyes glinted as he scanned the floor—not a soldier's measured gaze, but a kid's nervous search for answers he wasn't ready to find.
The memories rose in him like a tide—his mother's hands smoothing his hair, Tori's breathless giggles as he carried her piggyback through the compound. Now his sister lay burning with fever, yet still pressed that damned river stone into his palm like some childish talisman. Then his father's face surfaced—that flint-hard scowl carved deeper with every mission into New Orleans' Corpse. Tobias's knuckles whitened around his bootlace. He could split a target at 300 yards, and reassemble a rifle blindfolded, yet the old man's approval remained as distant as the city's skyline.
His fingers stilled over the frayed laces. Scars mapped his skin like battle reports: the knife slash across the bridge of his nose from sparring with Brooks, the burn from mishandling a sigil-charged barrel, the ragged half-moon where his own teeth had bitten through flesh during Pops' "discipline drills". The memory stung worse than the wound had—how Pops had stood over him afterward, not with pride but that familiar disappointment. "You're eighteen now. Act like it." As if being born into a war meant he should know how to end it.
The compound stirred outside his window, its rhythms as familiar as Tobias's own ragged breathing. He pressed a calloused palm against the glass, thick fingers dwarfing the cracks in the pane, as the acrid stench of diesel and swamp rot seeped through the duct-taped seams of glass. Outside, flashlight beams cut through the gloom, illuminating soldiers half his size jogging toward the armory. Their boots kicked up gravel; their rifles clattering like loose change. Tobias's gut tightened, that old, familiar weight settling low in his belly. He hated this part—the waiting, the wanting to prove himself warring with the dread of another failure.
He hauled his pack from under the bed, the muscles in his broad back protesting as he crouched. Every item earned its place through ruthless triage: the water tablets (expiration date scratched into the foil), the dog-eared field manual (his cramped notes spidering around official diagrams), the lockpicks he'd forged from a radiator pipe last winter. His Bowie knife came last, the grip snug against his palm, the only thing that ever fit right. A memory flashed—his father's face when he'd picked the armory lock, that fleeting spark in Jonathan's eyes before it hardened into "Don't expect applause for doing what's expected." Tobias swallowed against the knot in his throat. Precision was his weapon, but nothing ever pierced that man's armor.
He was still wrestling with the doubt gnawing at his ribs when—
"Ready, boy?"
His father's voice cut through the room like a rusted blade.
Tobias's head snapped up. Jonathan Frey filled the doorway, not a man but a monument. Dawn backlit him, carving every scar into a trench on a battlefield map. His father had become a living war memorial: every line spoke of survival, and every glance carried the weight of a man who'd traded softness for steel. Tobias's throat tightened. For a heartbeat, he searched that icy blue gaze for the man who'd once spun him laughing under summer stars, who'd carried him home asleep against his shoulder after night patrols.
Gone.
What remained was the commander—eyes sharp as gun sights, already tallying his son's worth in ammunition and obedience.
"Born ready, sir." Tobias straightened instinctively, his voice flattening into that practiced military cadence. Eighteen years of training compressed into three words, each one sanded smooth of anything resembling hope.
As he made to follow behind, a hand caught his arm, lighter than his father's grip, but iron-strong in its own way. "Don't think you can sneak off without givin' your mama a proper goodbye!"
Tobias turned to see Miriam Frey standing there, her work-worn hands still dusted with flour from the predawn baking shift. A streak of it smudged her left cheekbone. The scent of fresh sourdough clung to her—warm and yeasty and so unlike the gun oil stench of the armory—as silver threaded hair escaped her braid to frame a face that was his own in twenty-five years, if he lived that long.
"Not now, Ma," he muttered, but his body betrayed him, leaning into her touch as she cradled his stubbled jaw. Her thumbs brushed the scar on his nose, a silent rebuke to the man who'd put it there. For one breath, two, he let himself be eight years old again, let her vanilla and lavender soap overwrite the smells of mud and blood waiting beyond the gates.
She attacked his collar with military precision, her fingers darting like sparrows—tugging nonexistent wrinkles, retucking strands of his auburn hair behind ears that still felt too big for his head.
"You mind your sigils," she said, buttoning his chest pocket. "And eat the damn rations I packed. Not just the jerky." Each fussy adjustment was her way of armoring him against everything she couldn't control.
Miriam's thumb brushed his cheekbone, her touch lingering like the last warm ember in a dying fire. "Tori wanted to say goodbye." His sister's name fractured in her throat. "Fever's got her shakin' like a leaf, but she made me swear—'Tell Toby I love him to the stars and back.'' The tears in her amber eyes didn't fall, Miriam Frey had shed her last useless tear the day the midwives laid her firstborn in her arms—but they turned her gaze into something that carved through him sharper than any blade. "You listen to me and you listen good, Tobias James Frey. You die out there, I'll storm heaven's gates with my rolling pin and drag your fool hide home."
A half-strangled laugh tore from him. "Then I'll just have to survive." His voice cracked on the lie—they both knew survival wasn't a promise anyone could make, not in this world.
Outside, engines growled like restless beasts. Through the warped glass, Tobias watched Kline clasp his wife's face between his hands, their foreheads touching like it was the last sacrament. Every farewell in the compound carried the same silent scream: This might be the one that doesn't come back.
Miriam's fingers dug into his arms. "Stay," She whispered, and that word nearly broke him—not only because it trembled (Miriam never trembled), but because it was the first time in eighteen years she'd ever asked for something just for herself. "The gardens need tending. The children need teaching. That's useful, baby. That's enough."
Tobias's hand found the compass in his pocket by muscle memory, his thick fingers curling around the brass edges worn smooth from years of anxious handling. The dent on its northern rim—from when Jonathan had thrown it at him during a navigation drill—bit into his palm like a reproach. For a moment, the cool metal against his calloused skin was the only anchor in the storm of his mother's pleas. This compass had once guided his father through the Fall's early horrors; now its cracked face mirrored the fracture between them. Tobias thumbed the hairline fissure. Had the war truly hardened Jonathan into this stranger, or had the man always been this way—his kindness as rationed as their ammunition, waiting for a peace that would never come?
"I'm eighteen, Ma," The words came out too loud, the forced confidence cracking like green wood under strain. "Old enough for missions. Old enough to—" His voice hitched. "Odd jobs won't make me the kind of man Pops respects." The admission tasted bitter. He wasn't sure which hurt more: the lie that this mission could earn Jonathan's approval, or the truth that he'd trade her terror for even a scrap of it.
Miriam's hand rose and brushed the auburn wave from his forehead. When she spoke, her voice was steel-wrapped in velvet. "Then show me the man you're choosing to be." Not a plea. A gauntlet thrown.
He kissed her flour-dusted crown, inhaling the scent of yeast and soap that had defined safety since childhood. The compass burned in his pocket as he crossed the threshold. He had to duck under the doorway—a movement that still felt unnatural despite his years outgrowing every shelf and chair Miriam could cobble together. One foot in the wasteland, one still tethered to her heartbeat. He didn't look back. A warrior couldn't. But oh, how the boy in him ached to.
* * *
The convoy idled beneath skyscrapers deformed by the Surge—their silhouettes slumped like mourners at a graveside, steel bones twisted into grotesque arches against the dawn. Tobias dragged his fingers along a rusted beam, its surface unnaturally sleek where ancient energies had liquefied its structure. This was the Weeping District, where the air itself seemed to vibrate with residual pain. Some swore buildings wailed when the wind blew just right. Tobias knew better—the keening sound came from whatever still lived in the warped rebar, something even the rats avoided.
Ahead, Jonathan stood sentinel-steel against a truck's grille, cradling a sigil-carved rifle. The etched symbols pulsed in the low light, their jagged lines throbbing like exposed veins. Tobias had seen what they could do—how they'd turn mages into screaming pillars of salt.
"Not a toy." Jonathan thrust it forward. The morning light caught the hollows under his eyes, making him look more cadaver than commander. "This eats magic. Gets hungry enough, it'll eat you too." His gaze flicked toward the other soldiers—a wordless reminder of the audience evaluating Tobias's every twitch. "Can't dance with this iron, best stay behind."
The rifle's stock slapped into Tobias's palm, colder than grave dirt. His body remembered the drill before his mind caught up—safety check, sight alignment, sigil inspection—muscle memory carved through countless drills. The markings seethed under his touch, their hum vibrating up his arm like a live wire. Their hunger vibrated up his arm. Hungry steel, the soldiers called it. One slip, one moment of doubt, and they'd turn on him like a cornered animal.
Around them, the squad had gone still. Nash's cigarette hung forgotten between his lips. Brooks' sneer faltered. Even the wind seemed to pause.
Tobias exhaled through his nose—once, twice—then snapped the weapon to his shoulder. The stock kissed the same bruise Jonathan's boot had left last week. Perfect contact. The central sigil flared gold against his cheek, then faded to a contented simmer.
"Been dancin' since I could walk," he said, and for half a heartbeat, almost believed it.
For a fractured second, something raw flickered across Jonathan's face—not pride, not quite, but something that made Tobias's breath catch. Then it was gone, buried beneath that familiar granite mask. His father turned without a word, combat boots grinding gravel to dust as he strode toward the lead truck. The sound might as well have been Tobias's bones breaking.
He couldn't stop himself from looking back. Past the razor-wire fences, past the watchtowers sagging like tired sentinels, to the crooked doorway where Miriam stood. Her silhouette was a blade against the dawn, one hand clutching her collarbone as if holding her heart in place. Even from this distance, he could read her lips: "Bring him home." The prayer he wasn't meant to hear. His own ribs ached in answer.
Then the engines roared, and Tobias faced forward. The road ahead was a wound splitting the horizon—blood-red dust swirling in their wake, swallowing the compound whole. Somewhere in his pocket, the river stone from Tori burned like a hot coal. Will I see home again? The question coiled around his spine, but the rifle's weight against his shoulder answered for him: Not the same. Not the same boy, anyway.