Mark woke in the gray before sunrise to the soft hiss of the apartment's vents and the thick quiet of a city not yet awake. He lay still, letting his eyes adjust, then sat up carefully so the mattress springs didn't complain. The bowl from last night waited on the table, a ring of lamp-shadow sitting perfectly inside its lip like an eclipse. He filled it with tap water until it rounded just shy of the rim, then sat cross-legged on the rug and let the world settle around him.
Breath in, hold, slow release. Breath in again. He wasn't calling power. He was reminding pathways they existed.
The thin awareness living behind his sternum—what he'd started to think of as the Dao seed—warmed in answer, a tiny sun under bone. The apartment had no Chaos storm yet; this was the week before. But the city still made currents: the fridge exhaled, the hallway light drew a faint river from wires in the wall, a bus two blocks over sent a slow pulse through asphalt that remembered heat. He let those small things touch him. The water steadied. The lamp ring sharpened.
A single bright thread peeled loose at the edges of what he could feel and laid itself across the surface of the bowl. No drama. No fireworks. The smallest possible admission: I am here. He didn't drink it in whole. He tapped it, as if to nudge a door, and let a drop slide down the line he offered, into the shallow dish of potential he'd rebuilt behind his navel.
The dish took the drop and didn't break.
Heat kindled in the muscles of his back and hands, not burning, more like a promise. He flexed his fingers and the joints made quiet, satisfied noises. He'd been higher than this once, at the crown of the Mortal road, looking up at the Immortal gate. Today he could say, without lying to himself, that he stood at Bodyforge—Novice again, the first rung. It should have embarrassed him. It didn't. It felt like permission.
Hannah's footsteps padded down the hall; she appeared in an oversized T-shirt and pushed hair from her face with the back of her wrist, the half-smile of someone who had been awake for a minute and a half and had already made two decisions. She looked at the bowl, looked at him, and came to stand with her shoulder against the doorway.
"Morning," she said. "Is the water behaving itself?"
"Barely. I had to talk it down from a coup."
"Good. I hate when it tries to seize the means of production." She yawned, then sobered a little. "Are we… is today the day we go to Ben's?"
"It should be." He stood and rolled his neck until the vertebrae voted aye. "We load the car, get out there before lunch. I'll bring more back this afternoon—water, barrels, stupid amounts of beans. We'll make drills for Luke that don't feel like drills. I want the house ready to lock down if… if it goes early."
"Will it?"
"No." He didn't say I think. He didn't say that the world sometimes liked to play dice with its own rules. "But we'll act like it might."
She came closer and set her palm flat against his chest for a second, like she could feel that small heat. Maybe she could. "I want lists, then. Lists I can boss around."
"You're at your most dangerous when handed a Sharpie."
"I am an administrative terror," she said, and smiled because it was true.
Luke barrelled in twenty minutes later with a blanket around his shoulders like a cape and a dinosaur clamped under one arm. He climbed a chair, surveyed the kingdom of breakfast, and declared, "The cereal is wrong."
Hannah didn't look away from the eggs. "The cereal is the same cereal it has always been."
"That's what wrong means."
"Do you want a banana or to make the cereal do right by adding apple pieces?"
Luke considered. "I will fix it with banana. We need a knife."
"We need a responsible adult to cut the banana," Mark said, and handed the knife to Hannah with both hands like an offering to a small, benevolent god.
Luke watched her slice, eyes narrowed in the way he had when learning a thing and deciding how it might later be used for mischief. "Are we going to Uncle Ben's now or are we going after I become a skeleton because of waiting too long?"
"After breakfast," Hannah said. "After putting things in the car. After finding your left shoe. Then Uncle Ben's. And you aren't allowed to become a skeleton; there's a fee."
"How much?"
"Three raisins and a sincere apology."
Luke seemed to find this rate acceptable. He accepted his bowl, frowned at it until the banana pieces settled into the proper spiritual order, and tucked in.
They packed with the quick efficiency of people who had moved a dozen times and learned what mattered. Hannah ran the apartment with one hand while texting Uncle Ben with the other; Luke carried small jobs like medals—battery packs, the roll of duct tape, the bag of crayons. Mark took a last tour of the place: stove off, plugs out, windows latched. He put the bowl in the sink and thought, stupidly and with sudden sharpness, of a hundred mornings when he'd left a mug or a plate and told himself it would still be there when he got back.
"Ready?" he asked at the door.
"Ready," Hannah said. "Luke?"
Luke arrived with his backpack and a solemn nod. "I put dinosaur underpants in it. For you."
"For me?"
"In case."
Mark looked at Hannah. Hannah lifted a shoulder. "As contingency planning goes," she said, "it's better than most government projects."
They drove east under a sky too blue to believe in storms. Palms stood in two neat lines along certain avenues like patient accountants, as if someone had told them they'd get to go inside eventually if they were good. The Superstitions were a flat painting on the horizon that textured themselves slowly as the miles unrolled.
Hannah rested her forearms on the window ledge and watched desert slide past. "Tell me the plan like I'm a fearful but cooperative board of directors," she said. "Long version. No pretending it's fine."
"Okay." He kept his eyes on the road and gave the pieces names as he laid them out. "Number one: shelter. Ben's place is a good spot—the kind of neighbors who solve problems by minding their own business. I'll harden it today and tomorrow: windows, doors, a way to black out light without suffocating us. Number two: supplies. Water first. Food people will actually eat, not aspirational lentils we'll come to hate. Medical. Batteries. Masks—cloth is fine, we're not worried about viruses, we're worried about dust and ash. Number three: communication that doesn't rely on cell towers. Walkie-talkies, spare AAAs. Number four: drills for you and Luke. Not panicked ones—games. Hide and seek with rules about quiet and patience. A place to go when you hear a certain word. A word to use if something is wrong and you need to tell me without telling me."
Hannah nodded as he spoke, not to please him, but because she was building the same map and checking for bridges. "What's the word?"
He looked at Luke in the rearview. "What do you think, bud? What would be a good, silly word we could say if we need to be very serious?"
Luke didn't answer immediately, which made Mark's heart be proud in a way he didn't define. Then Luke said, "Pickle."
"Why pickle?" Hannah asked.
"Because no one yells pickle unless they mean it."
"Sold," Mark said. "If you hear pickle, you go to the hiding place we pick today. You stay there even if someone knocks. You stay until me or Mom says your full name through the door. If you have to move, you go to the bathroom and climb into the tub and pull the shower curtain. If you have to be quiet, you bite your thumb instead of making noise."
"Biting is bad," Luke said reflexively.
"Biting people is bad," Hannah corrected, gentle. "Biting your own thumb to keep from yelling is a tool."
Luke thought about that, nodded, and looked out at the desert again. "Can I chase a lizard when we get there? I will use non-biting teeth."
"We'll consider appropriate lizard policy," Hannah said. She reached to the dash and turned the vents toward her with a little hiss. "What about you?"
"I make a list of the first beasts and where they'll wake," Mark said. "I go where they go. I learn what this"—he tapped his sternum—"can actually do when it matters."
She didn't say be careful. She didn't say don't be a martyr. She kept her gaze on the Superstitions and said, "If there's a line between brave and foolish today, I want you on the brave side. If there isn't a line, I want you on the side where you come home."
"Understood."
"You say that like a man agreeing to terms and conditions."
"I read those now," Mark said. "I'm a new man."
Hannah snorted softly. "Sure."
Uncle Ben's chain was looped, not locked. That was a Ben philosophy in a single gesture: I'll tell you where the boundary is and what I think of it, and then we'll see who believes whom. The double-wide sat under a sun-silvered tin roof; three sheds leaned at angles possible only to structures held up by will. A slatted shade framed the porch, and a wind chime made from old wrenches knocked against itself in a minor key.
Ben came down the steps with the slow care of a man who has long ago realized the ground never actually goes anywhere and will meet you halfway if you let it. He hugged Hannah like she was oxygen, clapped Luke on the shoulder and solemnly accepted a lecture about airborne dinosaurs, then looked at Mark as if the desert had written a note and handed it to him.
"You look like somebody's trying to sell you a bridge," he said. "Come inside and be judged by beans."
The kitchen had a table rescued twice from the nineteen-eighties and a stove that would have lost an argument with a building inspector but won every debate about whether food cooked better over something with history. Ben slid a pot across the burner, lifted the lid, and released a smell that could probably end small wars.
"We brought vegetables," Hannah said, setting a tote on the counter like a prize. "And olive oil not in a can."
Ben made a polite face. "Oil in a can is not a sin. It's just a hymn." Then, off her look, "Fine. Sing your song. We'll use the good stuff."
Luke was authorized to put out plates. He did so with deadly seriousness and two near-catastrophic attempts to also be an airplane. They ate standing up and then sitting, because the first few minutes wanted standing and the next wanted something kinder. Toward the end, when Luke had been inherited by the TV and a stack of cartoons and the couch that remembered when it had been newer, Ben set both elbows on the table and looked at Mark in that way he had when measuring a man against the horizon behind him.
"What's the job?" he asked.
"Make this place hard to hurt," Mark said. "Water up. Food up. Quiet drills. I'll be there when the first things stir; I'll keep the wrong things from finding this land. I'll travel back and forth as needed. If we're lucky, it's a week of strange weather and burned-out transformers and some idiots getting themselves hurt with fireworks. If we're not—well. We won't waste the week."
Ben considered this, nodded once, and stood. "Then we'll move like thieves and preachers. You tell me which windows you don't love and I'll get the screws."
They worked. It felt good, the honest kind. Mark cut heavy plastic and stapled it to frames; Ben laid thin slats over it and drove screws into studs with a drill that had seen more history than some counties. Hannah labeled shelves with a Sharpie as if they were beloved students: beans; rice; oats; tomatoes; coffee because we're not animals. Luke was allowed to count batteries, and then—because he announced that numbers were boring and hiding was important—Hannah turned the hallway into a game board and made the cupboard under the sink into a fortress. They practiced the word pickle three times, the first like a joke, the second with the gravity of people who wanted to get it right, the third with a timer because fun and urgency were not enemies.
Mark walked the yards with Ben and learned where the ground liked to give and where it liked to hold. He kicked at the base of a fence post, squinted toward the far wash, and said, "I'll need to go into town after lunch. Two hours. Three at most."
"Mm," Ben said. "You coming back with something we can eat or something we can swing?"
"Both," Mark said. "And a couple of things we can talk through and put away somewhere we hope we never need them."
"You're asking me about guns without asking me about guns," Ben said. "I appreciate the manners."
"I'm not there yet," Mark said. "If I need one, I'll ask. Today I'm better with heavy and simple."
"Truth be told," Ben said, "heavy and simple has been the backbone of civilization since we invented hitting rocks with other rocks." He tipped his hat toward the road. "Go on, boy. Get what you think you need. I'll keep your family here where gravity knows their names."
Hannah walked him to the car and leaned in the window like a checkpoint. "If something goes wrong, you run toward us, not away from us. Deal?"
"Deal."
"And if something goes right, you bring decent coffee beans."
"That's implied."
"And if you find someone you can help—without risking us—you help them, because that's who you are, and I didn't accidentally marry a different person."
He closed his eyes for a second. She had always made the hardest truths sound like permission. "I'll be home for dinner," he said. "Say six."
"Say sooner," she said, but she let him go.
Phoenix looked too calm for a city with six days left on the clock. The freeway shimmered in heat that pushed on the day with an open palm. Mark kept the radio low and the windows up and rolled a list in his head as if it were prayer: barrels, lids, siphon pump; zip ties that didn't snap when you looked at them; more plastic; more screws; a wheeled cart to make heavy things less heavy. He paid cash out of habit and because the habit felt right in his hands.
At the second hardware place, the clerk in a sun-bleached baseball cap rang him up without comment, the way people ring up men who might be over-preparing or might simply be part of the quiet infrastructure of a neighborhood that had learned to build its own bridges. At the feed store, a teenager with forearms browned by sun loaded two blue water barrels and said, "You know they look smaller on the internet." Mark tipped him and agreed that everything did.
He took University back instead of the freeway, cut across to a vacant lot near an off-ramp where weeds reclaimed a former car-wash, and parked where the shade from a billboard pretended to help. It was the spot he remembered. In the first life, on Thursday, a pack of strays would have woken here with their eyes gone wrong—bright with something that wasn't animal and wasn't mercy. They would have chased a cyclist into traffic and learned terrible lessons about what cars could do and what bodies could not. Not everything had to happen the same way, if he was standing where the world wanted to make a mistake.
He stepped out into heat that smelled like sunburned rubber and old oil. The Dao seed warmed in his chest as he let his attention slip outward: vents breathing tired air; the electric hum of the big box store's freezers; a bus's low complaint as it idled at the corner. He didn't hear Chaos yet. He felt its approaching shape, like noticing when a room is half a degree cooler than it should be.
He waited. An hour. Two. He drank water and ate a granola bar that tasted like a contract between oat and glue. He let the day do its loud work around him. He didn't try to meditate; he didn't try to frighten anything away. He stood where something would happen and tried to be worth the happening.
They came just before noon: three dogs slinking through the weeds with the casual arrogance of creatures who'd been ignored long enough to build their own rules. Two were mutts in the desert mode—endless ancestry, lean. The third was a yellow something that had once been capable of fetch and had since learned other games. They moved in a messy triangle, not hunting but remembering how.
Mark did a stupid thing well and on purpose; he looked at them like prey and then looked away. The yellow bristled. The wrong gleam touched its eyes—not Chaos full and bright, not yet. A pre-echo. The others followed its decision because pack is a kind of gravity.
He didn't run. Running would have made them better at this than he was. He turned slightly so the yellow would be the only one that could reach his legs cleanly. He took the pry bar from the car's footwell. It wasn't pretty. It did not have to be.
When the yellow leaped, he stepped in and to the side and brought the bar down in the short, mean arc that workmen and soldiers have always known. You can feel bad about everything and still do the necessary thing with your whole hand. It hit with a sound he'd dislike forever. The animal went down and stayed.
The second dog tried to adjust mid-commitment and put its feet wrong. Mark's boot caught rib and turned it into an argument with air. The third snapped at space where his leg had been and closed on nothing; he used the pry bar again with the kind of control that comes from practice you never wanted to need.
When it was over, the lot held three bodies and the settled dust of a small ugly event. He stood over them, chest heaving, sweat running into his eyebrows, the after-shake already building in his hands. He knelt beside the yellow. It wasn't dead. It was leaving, and it would not come back to itself on this side. Its eyes rolled to find him, and that wrong gleam—a little brighter now, sensing the door—met his.
"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it.
He laid his palm against its head and reached with the sense he had been practicing, toward the bright thread that sat not in the dog but in the space between what the dog had been and what the world was about to make it. He didn't yank. He didn't claim. He offered the little warmth of the phoenix in his chest the way one fire offers another a coal.
The thread came. It slid along his bones like cold water in July, then found the shallow dish of potential and decided it knew that place. It settled with a click as small as a star. The dog exhaled and didn't inhale again. He kept his hand there until the quiet fit.
The other two were quicker. Their threads were smaller, different angles of the same problem. One smelled like heat recognition—where the air blooms around hot metal, where a roof stores noon and gives it back at dusk. The other felt like awareness of approach—the way a small thing enters a space without being seen until it wants to be seen. They found homes in him and lit little signal lamps.
He sat in the driver's seat a long minute afterward with the air conditioning impersonating a glacier and his stomach reminding him he was made of animal. He didn't feel stronger. He felt differently informed, like someone had added sidebars to the pages of his day. He could tell which car had been parked in sun and which in shade without touching either. He could see, in the reflected storefronts, how people moved through the world when they thought it wasn't watching.
On impulse, he rolled the window down and whistled softly, a nothing sound. A minute later a wasp angled across the lot from right to left and he knew it would clear the billboard by a hand's width because the air there was a degree cooler and the wasp preferred the warmer stream. He laughed once, quietly, because none of this made sense and all of it did.
He drove back to Ben's with the barrels bumping in the rear and the pry bar returned to a life of pretending to be a tool. He stopped at a warehouse store and bought things nobody loved enough to fight for on day one: a crate of canned tomatoes, a sack of rice in the size of an insult, oats in an unforgivable tub, the ugly batteries that work when the pretty ones sell out. He hesitated by the shelf with the camp stoves and took one that promised three hours of flame in exchange for metal and regret.
Ben met him in the drive and lifted a barrel like it had been accused of a crime. "You got yourself a real afternoon," he said. "What else?"
"Beans and a plan to staple plastic to every window we don't fall in love with," Mark said. "And… a better sense of what I can do."
Ben eyed him, read more than Mark said, and didn't ask how. "Good. Your wife and I invented a hallway game while you were out. Boy runs it like a general now."
Inside, Luke saluted him with two fingers and announced, "Pickle is a silly word but also dangerous." Hannah, who had somehow managed to make a labeled shelf look like a love letter to the future, crossed to him with the particular walk she used when scanning his face for damage.
"You okay?" she asked, low.
"I will be," he said. He didn't offer the story in the doorway. He would tell it later, when Luke was asleep and the desert had put some quiet around the day. "I learned something useful."
"Show me later," she said. "For now, help me argue with the pantry."
They argued with the pantry. They bolted the shelf to studs because gravity has opinions. They counted batteries in fours until Luke declared fours were boring and tens were better; then he declared tens were a social construct. They taped, they screwed, they acted like they would occupy this space forever, which is the trick to making a place safe even when everyone knows it won't be.
As evening climbed the window glass, Mark cut more plastic and Ben held it flat while Hannah handed up strips of wood like a nurse in an operating drama. They ate beans and tomatoes from bowls they didn't mind breaking. After, out on the steps where the heat finally released its hold on the day, Hannah leaned her head on Mark's shoulder and said, "Tell me the part you didn't want to say in the kitchen."
He did. Not every word, but enough: the waiting, the dogs, the way the threads had come when he offered instead of took. He told her the thing he'd felt settle in him, the new little senses that had spun up as a result.
"So you… what do you call it?" she asked, not flinching from the ugly, not romanticizing it either.
"Not steal," he said. "That's the closest word, but it's wrong. It feels more like… being present at a moment of transfer and honoring what's leaving by making use of it. It's—" He searched, then shook his head. "It's a Dao of last chances. I don't know the big name for it yet."
"Okay," she said. "If it makes you better at coming home, I will write it on a cake." She was quiet a moment. "I'm sorry it had to be dogs."
"Me too," he said.
They let the desert talk; coyotes stitched opinions through the dark. The air smelled like creosote, dust, and the old secret of water stored deep.
When Luke was asleep and snoring the way only a small person can, Mark set the bowl on Ben's kitchen table and tried what he hadn't dared that morning: he brought a second thread down into the dish of his core, not a drop this time, but a thin pour, as if filling a line in a jar and stopping when the mark was met. The dish accepted, flexed, didn't crack. Heat rolled through his forearms. He curled and uncurled his fists and felt the old language of the first rung return to him: your body is your first tool; make it worthy of weight.
He went outside and did pushups on the porch because it would have felt like lying to take that gift and not answer with work. Ben stepped out halfway through and stood there, arms crossed, pretending not to count.
"You going to show off?" Ben asked finally.
"No," Mark said, pushing up. "I'm going to practice being boring and hard to kill."
"That's my favorite kind of person," Ben said. "Tomorrow I'll take you out to the wash and we'll see which of us can carry a stupid rock faster. Loser has to say something nice about government."
"Cruel," Mark said. He didn't ask who had won the last time. He suspected the rock did.
They slept in shifts the way cautious people do when they don't yet know what they're afraid of. Around three, the house sighed as the night let go of heat. Somewhere far off, a transformer snapped and died with a sound like a giant's knuckle popping. It wasn't the beginning. Not yet. A rehearsal, maybe. A reminder.
Mark lay awake a while longer and listened to the small sounds of people he loved breathing and the even smaller sound of a world that had already started to go strange. He touched two fingers to the spot behind his sternum and felt the Dao seed's faint, steady warmth answer him back.
"Six days," he whispered to the ceiling, not as a promise, not as a prayer, but as a schedule.
In the darkness, the house didn't answer. It didn't need to. It was learning their names. It would hold them as long as it could. Tomorrow, he'd go back into the city and start tugging early threads out of bad places. Tomorrow, he'd talk to Maria at the shop about a different kind of noise under the hood—about generators, if she knew a guy, about how long things last when you ask too much of them.
Tomorrow had room in it. Tonight had a page left. He closed his eyes on the sound of coyotes arguing with the moon and let sleep catch up, for once, without having to run him down.