They found the service station by the way its roof hadn't quite remembered how to cave in.
The awning had collapsed on one side, pinning a pickup beneath it like a fossil. The windows were already gone—glass powdered into the snow long ago—and the doors hung at angles that would have offended a carpenter. But three walls still stood, and someone before them had stapled tarps along the gaps. The wind pawed at those tarps now, snatching and slapping, making a sound like sails that had forgotten the sea.
Aileen checked the corners twice before she spoke. "Inside. Quiet hands."
Mina slipped in first, boot steps careful, the med-kit tight against her chest the way a child holds a pillow after a nightmare. Blake followed, turning sideways to keep his rifle from scraping the doorframe. Luke went last, sweeping the lot with a glance that counted shapes, shadow lines, places a man might lie down to die or wait to make it happen. He let the Echo thrum at the back of his skull, not fully open, not fully shut—like a door on a latch. The night had already taught him the cost of trusting quiet.
They made a fire from what the station coughed up: splintered shelf boards, broken pallets, a door that had once been red under the grime. When the match took, the flames climbed with greedy, popping sounds. Smoke licked the rafters, then pooled beneath the tarps, trying to figure out which way the wind wanted. The heat rolled against their faces and immediately ran thin, eaten by drafts.
No one sat where Ty would have sat.
Mina didn't let herself look at the empty space, but her body did it anyway, a small lean toward absence, then a flinch away. She eased down beside the fire and peeled back her sleeve. Shrapnel had kissed her forearm in six places, drawing a map in red and grit. She inhaled through her teeth and set to work: rinse, powder, stitch. Her hands were steadier when they had something to fix.
Blake dropped into a squat with the heaviness of a pack thrown off after too many miles. He took a brass casing from his pocket and rolled it over his knuckles—a little trick he'd practiced so long the metal had polished itself against his skin. The casing flashed when it crossed the firelight, then vanished in his palm. He did it again.
Aileen stood, not sitting until she had cleaned and reassembled her rifle twice. Even then she only rested on the edge of a crate, spine straight, eyes moving. She didn't have a poker face; she had a poker posture.
Luke lit a cigarette.
He didn't look at the others when he did it, because the gesture already knew it would be judged. The ember burned small and stubborn, a star he could carry, a wound he could control. He drew once, twice, then let smoke curl thin from his lips. It drifted through the gas station smell—oil and old sugar and damp cardboard—and made its own weather.
"You're going to attract things," Mina said without looking up from her arm. Her voice was even; even was the only thing she had left to lose.
Luke thumbed ash into the coals. "There are worse things to attract."
Blake huffed a laugh that forgot to become a laugh. "Like bullets? Like men with anvils welded to their shoulders and cannons where their good choices used to be?"
Aileen cut him a look. "Enough."
He shrugged. The casing flashed and vanished. "Just saying. 'Cigarettes save lives' is not the proverb my mother taught me."
"Your mother taught you proverbs?" Mina said, and for a heartbeat she sounded like a girl who might have grown up telling jokes to a kitchen radio while soup simmered.
"No," Blake said. "She taught me to count who came home and to make noise about the ones who didn't. The proverbs were my idea."
Silence thickened. The wind pressed its shoulder against the tarp, found a gap, sighed in frustrated, teeth-on-edge bursts. Snow pressed the windows like faces. The Red Moon hung swollen behind the clouds; you couldn't see it, but you could feel the color trying to bleed through.
Mina tied off a stitch and bit the thread. "He had a picture," she said. She didn't say Ty's name. Names were hooks, and if you cast one now it might snag on something you couldn't pull in. "He kept tapping it. He said—he asked if first patrols were supposed to be—" She stopped. Her mouth moved around the word "easy" and decided not to let it out.
Aileen's hands flattened on her thighs. "We carry him in the ledger until the morning." Her tone was clipped; her eyes were wrong. "Then we close the account. The way it's done."
Blake rolled the casing. It clicked off his knuckle. "The way it's done. That's a nice phrase for a wall with names on it and a clerk who never runs out of ink." He shook his head as if scattering snow. "Don't mind me. I get sentimental in the cold."
Luke took another drag. The smoke tasted like paper and the ghost of something better. He opened the Echo a fraction—just enough to feel the station's bones hum against the wind, just enough to hear the fire's center speak to its skin. No human hearts beat outside; no cone of attention swept the lot. The night's threat was larger than men.
"It's getting worse," Mina said, as if answering a question no one had asked. "The world. Today at noon the road went soft. You could see heat wringing itself out of the asphalt. Then the wind turned like someone changed their mind and the water froze in my canteen while I was still drinking." She shivered, remembering the cold climbing her throat from inside.
Blake nodded. "Last week, sand in a snowstorm. Grit in your teeth while the drifts tried to swallow your kneecaps. Two hundred clicks of wind, they said, over on the east wall. Took the top off a prefabricated guard tower like a tin can. Lucky the men below had time to run."
"Lucky," Aileen said in a tone that did not believe in the word.
"It's not just weather," Mina whispered. She put a dab of salve on the last angry red line and hissed when the sting bit back. "Everything's wrong. Seasons don't mean anything. The Red Moon—"
"Don't," Aileen said, but gently this time. Warning wasn't a rule; it was a hand on a shoulder saying don't look over that edge unless you want to fall.
Blake tossed the casing into the fire. It flashed, then lay dull among the coals. "All right, new topic. Let's scare ourselves a different way. Who wants beasts or bugs first?"
"No," Mina said, then caught herself and blew out a breath. "Beasts."
"Beasts," Blake agreed. He made a show of thinking, but his eyes had gone somewhere else, somewhere with a fence line and torn wire. "Heard the north caravans got hit by wolves last week. Pack moved like it had a sergeant—flanking, feints, one group cut the tires while the others harried the guards. Not smarter, exactly. Just meaner and more together about it. And the bears—they're not supposed to figure out doors. One did. Head-butted the latch until it broke, then peeled the metal back like a can of peaches."
Mina's fingers tensed around her forearm. "And the birds," she said. "The ones that travel like a weather front. They go for the lines first. They took down the lights at Gate Three. It was morning for everyone else and night for us."
"The lights were rationed anyway," Aileen said. It wasn't comfort. It was a ledger observation.
"Bugs?" Blake prompted himself, because no one else wanted to. "Saw a beetle as high as Mina's hip a month back over by the freight yard. It was chewing steel. Not rust. Steel. Like it could taste the iron in the bones of the world and decided to make a meal of it. And ants… I won't talk about ants."
"Don't," Mina said.
"Fine. Vines, then. My cousin—" He stopped, then started again with a different word. "A guy I knew said they found a house wrapped in green. Thought it meant salvage. Opened a window. Spore cloud hit him in the face. He said he felt warm and safe and full, like it was summer and someone was singing downstairs, and then when he woke up he was half a day away in a ditch with roots around his wrists like bracelets."
"That's enough," Aileen said. She didn't raise her voice. Authority doesn't need volume when it has weight.
Blake put his hands up, palms outward. "Just painting you a picture so you'll appreciate how good we have it—warm fire, leaking roof, three walls, no ants." He tried a smile; it made it halfway to his eyes and got lost.
They fell quiet. The station clicked and popped around them, timber shrinking or swelling or deciding between the two. The tarps flapped in short, unhappy bursts. The storm worried at the door, found the latch too stubborn to flirt with, retreated.
Luke let the cigarette burn down one long red breath at a time. The smoke made a veil between him and the others, then the wind tore it. He did not think about Ty tapping a picture twice like a ritual. He did not think about the way the twenty-millimeter had sounded—too big to be a man's voice, too eager to be a machine's. He thought instead about angles and lines and the way sounds intersected when they meant harm.
"Do you think the Hounds smell smoke?" Blake asked into the quiet, because some men cannot resist poking the bruise to see if it still hurts. "That's the story, right? Smoke and blood and oil. All the scents that make a good day's work."
Mina shuddered without meaning to. "They'll follow a scent for days," she said. "A caravan near Lake County, the refugees said. The Hounds didn't shoot from far off. They got up close. Made sure the people could see them. The masks—the dog faces. They didn't run. They herded. They made them break before they killed them."
Aileen's jaw hardened. "Stories carry faster than truth. The Legion doesn't govern by rumor."
"The Legion governs by math," Blake said mildly. "Which is less fun to tell around a fire."
"Math keeps people alive," Aileen said.
"Math forgets their faces," Blake said, then decided he didn't like where his words were walking and kicked them sideways. "Hounds, math. You know what I heard today from a caravan that slipped the east gate? They were talking about the Dreammother."
Mina's head came up. "Don't call her that like it's a joke."
"Isn't it?" Blake tilted his head. "You think she's real?"
Mina looked at the floor. "I think… people want her to be."
Aileen's eyes narrowed. "Define 'her.'"
Mina swallowed. "A woman. Or not a woman. A place. A voice. It changes when they tell it. She makes the nightmares stop. When the spores dig into your lungs and show you your mother dying, she can take that away. When you close your eyes and see wolves moving like soldiers, she makes them lie down. They say you can sleep in her dream and wake up with no hunger, no cold. They say you can talk to people who are… who aren't here anymore."
"She charges in Marks?" Blake asked, but without humor.
Mina shook her head. "They say she doesn't charge at all. That's why the stories run. She asks for something else."
"What?" Aileen said.
Mina's voice became a thread. "To choose her over the Bastion when the day comes."
No one spoke. The fire shifted; a board fell, sending up a small galaxy of sparks.
Luke watched them go, sparks drawing brief constellations through smoke. He felt the pendant beneath his armor, the cheap metal disc with its broken ring. It had warmed during the fight. It hadn't cooled. Every few breaths it sent a small pulse outward, like a heart that wasn't his, asking a question he couldn't yet hear.
He let the Echo open a little more. The station's sounds sorted themselves: wind at the seam, tarp eyelets fretting against nails, the breath of each person at the fire. Beyond that: the hush of snow, the distant grind of something large across ice—maybe a tree dragged by roots that had decided not to be polite anymore, maybe a billboard taking a walk. No cone-sense lanced them. No human breath clouded the lot.
He stood. "I'll take first watch."
Aileen looked up. "We rotate on the hour. Wake me."
He nodded, pulled his coat tighter, and pushed through the door. The cold hit like a lesson. The kind that stung and then tried to rewrite your choices. He stood just under the ruined awning where the wind went sideways, enough to keep the snow from filling his hood, not enough to deny the night its hands on his face.
The Red Moon glowed behind a thin veil of cloud, not bright but insistently there, like the memory of a lamp you'd turned off and then couldn't shake the feeling you hadn't. Its light washed the lot in a color that wasn't on any palette. Geometric lines ghosted across its surface—Matrix scars, riders in a language older than the Bastion's walls.
Luke listened.
There were the normal wrong sounds: the wind arguing with itself, the snow creaking under its own new weight, the faint static of the tarps' cheap fiber as they rasped against nails. Further away, perhaps across the highway, something padded through drift and paused and padded again—four legs, light, choosing its steps. It stopped when he lifted his head. He didn't move. It decided his hunger was not worth his cost and faded into the blue-gray roar.
He did not think about closing Ty's eyes. He did not think about how Mina had not looked at the empty spot by the fire. He thought about ledgers and walls and what it meant when people started believing the dream was safer than the math.
Behind him, the fire's light pulsed against the tarps. He could almost taste it—a sweetness over the burn, like sugar leaking from something that had cracked. He ground the cigarette under his heel and realized he'd forgotten to decide to do that.
The pendant warmed against his sternum. Not hot, not pain. Just certain. The Echo rose to meet it. For a breath the night's noise clarified into something like a chord. The ground hummed. The hum answered the pendant, or the pendant answered the ground, or both answered a third thing under both.
Luke closed his eyes and let it pass. When he opened them, the moon had shifted a finger-width; or he had.
Inside, after a time, he heard the scrape of a boot. Blake's voice went low: "You asleep?"
Mina answered, equally soft. "No."
"It doesn't help to ask," Blake said. "If you were asleep you wouldn't—"
"I know how sleeping works," Mina said, and something like a smile ghosted across her words.
He heard Aileen's voice last, the kind that walked patrols up and down its own length. "We move at first light. Direct route. We avoid the overpass. Too exposed."
"And the wolves?" Mina asked.
"We shoot them," Aileen said, and not even Blake tried to make that funny.
Luke kept his eyes on the lot. The snow had begun to fall in a different shape—finer, racing at angles that spoke of the wind changing its mind again. Somewhere far off a sound went up that might have been a train, if trains still ran, or a pack, if dogs still took orders from anything but hunger. It rode the storm, went thin, then away.
He stayed where he was until his hour became two without quite deciding to let it. He stayed because the night had more to say and because he did not want to see the empty places by the fire. He stayed until the cold wrote its name on his cheeks and his hands and then asked politely for more.
When he went back inside, he ducked through the tarp and found the room different by a few degrees of sleep. Blake had lost the casing and was palming a knife instead, not awake, not safe. Mina had curled on her side with the med-kit as a pillow and one hand beneath her cheek, stitches neat along her arm and no blood on the floor. Aileen sat with her back to the wall and her eyes closed exactly halfway, which was her version of rest.
Luke took a place near the door where his shoulder could touch real wood and his boot could catch the corner in case the door changed its mind about staying shut. He did not sleep. The Echo might have let him, now that it had spent itself arguing with the pendant and the ground, but his mind would not. He watched the coals move through their last colors: orange to dull to dark, a timeline too fast to be honest.
Sometime near morning the wind dropped like a man sitting down too hard. The tarps sighed in relief. The cold pressed closer without the wind to push it. The dark thinned at its top edge.
Aileen's eyes opened and did not show surprise at finding him awake. "Third watch was mine," she said.
"I borrowed it," Luke said.
She studied him a moment as if there were math to be done there. Then she nodded once, a small acceptance of a debt he hadn't asked for. "We're moving."
They doused the coals with snow. The smoke went up in a low, sullen steam that turned to frost midair and fell on their sleeves like a blessing that couldn't decide if it was real. Mina checked her stitches and cinched her sleeve down. Blake patted his pockets and frowned when he didn't find the casing, then looked relieved that he didn't. Aileen slung the rifle and rolled her shoulders back into the shape of command.
Luke fastened his coat and touched the pendant through fabric. It felt like a promise and a problem.
At the door, Blake hesitated. He looked at the space where a fifth shadow should have joined theirs and didn't. He reached into his breast pocket, tapped twice, then stopped with his fingers flat there, as if telling a memory: stay.
They stepped into a world iced blue by a sun that hadn't yet remembered heat. Snow squeaked under their boots with the fine, brittle voice of cold cutting itself. The highway lay white and wrong to the horizon. The wind had not decided what kind of day it wanted to be.
"Back to Bastion," Aileen said. "Then the Hall."
"The Hall," Blake echoed, and for once the word was not a complaint. It was the name of a door you walked through because the alternative was worse.
Luke glanced up. The Red Moon still ruled the sky behind the paling clouds, its Matrix scars pulsing faintly, a far machine learning to speak. The Leyline hummed under his boots like a note the earth kept forgetting how to stop. His Echo tasted both and filed them under the same column: soon.
They set out. Their shadows moved long and thin beside them, four dark lines walking a white world. The service station watched them go until the storm changed its mind again and erased the prints they left, one careful boot at a time.