Three days of hard travel brought them to Mesa Junction. It was less a town and more a cancerous growth on the corpse of a vast, pre-collapse logistics yard. Towers of crumbling shipping containers formed makeshift walls. The air reeked of burnt rubber, ozone from overloaded generators, and unwashed humanity. In the center of the chaos stood the Sky-Rail terminus: a gantry of rusted steel, like the skeleton of a prehistoric bird, where massive, blocky atmospheric drones the size of buses would clank into magnetic clamps for loading.
The "Junction" was run by a collective of hard-eyed survivors and tech-scavengers who called themselves the Clampmen. Their currency was violence, useful tech, and secrets. They eyed Wolfen's group with a mixture of greed and wariness. Information about the hidden lab and its Architects bought them passage, but not comfort. They were assigned to a drone designated Cargo Hauler 77, its hull scarred and patched, its destination code listed as "Eastern Logistics Grid - Secondary."
Their berth was not inside. It was on the drone. Strapped to the exterior cargo module with fraying harnesses and their own determination, exposed to the wind and the cold.
For the first few hours, it worked. The drone lifted with a deafening whine of antiquated turbines, climbing above the ruined landscape. The world shrank to a terrifying, beautiful patchwork of green and grey. The air grew thin and biting. They held on, muscles straining against the g-force and the buffeting wind.
Then, over what used to be Kansas, the disaster Wolfen had quietly anticipated occurred.
A series of sharp, metallic pops echoed from the drone's starboard engine. Smoke, then flame, belched from the housing. Alerts blared from the drone's internal systems for a few seconds before dying. The massive machine shuddered violently, lurching sideways in a sickening descent.
"BRACE!" Wolfen roared, the command ripped away by the howling wind.
The drone wasn't gliding. It was corkscrewing out of the sky, trailing fire and black smoke. The harnesses tore. The world became a deafening, chaotic whirl of sky and ground.
Maya wrapped her arms and legs around a structural beam, her form blurring with the strain of holding on. Jordan calculated the angle of descent and locked his body into the most optimal crash position. Derek hardened his skin, becoming a living anchor for Leo, who grabbed onto him. Eva and Wolfen were thrown free as their module sheared away from the main body.
Wolfen wrapped an arm around Eva mid-air, a sphere of Umbralite forming around them just as the world exploded.
Cargo Hauler 77 plowed into the earth with the force of a small meteor. The sound was cataclysmic. Debris—burning composite, shredded metal, their scavenged supplies—rained down for a mile.
Silence, then the crackle of fire.
Eva coughed, pushing blackened Umbralite shards off of her. Wolfen stood nearby, brushing dirt from his clothes, utterly unscathed. By some miracle, or grim design of their enhanced bodies, the others emerged from the wreckage alive, battered, bleeding, but alive. The drone was a total loss, a funeral pyre in the middle of a vast, flat plain of dead grass.
Before they could even take stock, figures emerged from the haze of smoke. Not monsters. Not Architects. Humans. A ragged militia in mismatched armor, their faces covered in scarves, aiming an assortment of rifles and energy weapons at them.
"Scavengers! Looters!" a voice shouted. "You brought that fire down on our territory! You've drawn every walker for fifty miles!"
"It was an accident," Derek shouted back, his hands raised.
"We don't care! Get out! Go west! If we see you again, we shoot!"
The hostility was absolute. These survivors were hanging on by a thread, and a crashing drone was an existential threat. They were being exiled with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their injuries.
Dejected, aching, they limped away from the wreck and the hostile muzzles, heading in the only direction the militia hadn't blocked: west.
Hours later, holed up in the shell of a collapsed farmhouse, despair began to set in. They were stranded in the middle of a continent, their transport was ashes, and Vietnam was an impossible dream on the other side of the world.
Wolfen sat cross-legged on the dusty floor, a sharp piece of wreckage in his hand. He didn't look defeated. He looked pensive.
"Everyone shut up and look," he said.
He began to scratch lines into the concrete floor. Not a map of roads, but something more primal. He drew a jagged, elongated shape. "This," he said, pointing to the top, "is not a duck. It's the landmass once called Asia." He scratched a smaller shape to the right. "These are the island chains of Japan." He made a mark on the left side of the larger shape. "This is Vietnam."
Then, with a single, long line, he connected a point in the center of the duck-shaped continent (where they were now) all the way west, across the vast Pacific, to the islands of Japan, and then a final line down to Vietnam.
Leo stared. "You want us to walk across the ocean?"
"No, you imbecile," Wolfen sighed. "We go west from here—to the coast. The old California coast. Then, we find a boat. We sail west across the Pacific, to Japan. From Japan, it's a shorter hop south through what's left of the island chains, down to Vietnam."
He looked at their stunned faces. "The land routes are crawling with everything that wants to kill us. The oceans… the oceans are just big, wet, and full of different things that want to kill us. But there are fewer checkpoints. Fewer Architects, maybe. And a boat we control."
He tossed the scrap metal aside. "The Sky-Rail failed. The land route is a gauntlet of militias and monsters. So we change the map."
He pointed to his crude drawing. "We're here." He dragged his finger along the long, arcing line over the imaginary ocean. "We're going there. By sea. It's the only path left that doesn't end with us fighting an entire continent."
It was insane. It was brilliant. It was the only option they had left. The road east was closed. So Wolfen, the ancient anomaly, had simply redrawn the world. Their destination hadn't changed. But their path was now a line across an endless, haunted sea.