It had been three days since they left the road.
The first day Rae thought he was just tired.
His legs shook, but that made sense. They had run until his vision blurred, until the caravan's dust was only a smear behind them. His throat burned, his chest ached, and when he lay down that night every bruise and cut shouted at once.
The second day the shaking did not stop.
He woke cold and sweating, muscles twitching under his skin. His hands would not hold still. When he tried to stand his knees simply folded and he sat back down hard, breath knocking out of him.
By the middle of that day the headaches started. A slow, grinding pulse behind his eyes, like someone was trying to push his skull in from both sides. His stomach clenched and rolled. He could smell berries on the air that were not there.
Somewhere along the way, when he had been too busy trying not to fall on his face, Cynthia had stepped off the game trail they were following and crouched by a stream bank. She had torn up a handful of stringy weeds and dug up pale roots with the point of her knife, shaking mud from them before shoving them into her pack.
Later, when he had been slumped against a tree and too tired to ask why, she had boiled those plants in a dented little pot over a smokeless twig fire and handed him a steaming cup that smelled like dirt and bitterness.
"Drink," she'd said.
It had helped. A little.
The pounding in his skull had eased from a hammer to a dull mallet. The worst cramps in his gut had loosened. His hands still shook, but not quite as wildly. The hollow need under his ribs hadn't shifted at all.
By the third day it had begun to ease on its own.
The tremors still came in waves, but not as often. His thoughts felt less like loose stones. He could stand and walk without his legs giving way. The craving was still there, a hollow itch under his ribs, but it no longer drove everything else out of his head.
It was only because of Cynthia that they had gotten this far at all.
The merchants had fled toward the city with what guards they could gather. That meant news of the attack would reach the walls sooner or later. Once that happened, patrols would ride out along the main road. Someone would follow the caravan's old tracks and ask why there were broken wagons and blood stains instead of a neatly chained line of bodies.
Rae could not do anything about that.
He could only hope that the other escapees would be a wide, ragged trail for the city's men to chase, a cloud of scattered footprints to pull attention away while he and Cynthia disappeared in another direction.
At first they had followed the road like fools.
He had kept his head down and his eyes on the dirt, counting his steps, telling himself that if he just moved forward eventually his legs would stop feeling like rotten wood. The wagon ruts sat to his left. The packed earth of the walked path ran ahead of him, cutting through scrub and dry grass.
Then Cynthia's hand closed around his forearm.
She did not say anything at first. She just pulled, turning him off the path and into the tall grass, the trees beyond.
Rae stumbled once as the ground changed under his feet, almost fell, then forced his body to keep moving. Behind them the road ran on, bare and obvious.
"We should not…" he started in her language, breath tight in his chest. The words were clumsy on his tongue. "Road is… safe?"
"For patrols, yes," Cynthia said, still not looking back. Her voice was calm, even. "For people running from merchants and slavers? Not so much."
They left the track behind.
The scrub turned to thicker growth. Trees rose around them, trunks leaning together, branches woven tight enough to catch most of the afternoon light. The air under the canopy was cooler, carrying the smell of earth and old leaves instead of dust and dung.
They walked until Rae's legs were shaking again and black spots were drifting at the edges of his vision.
Only then did Cynthia slow.
They found a cave halfway up a rise, hidden behind a screen of thorn bushes and low, twisting trees. The mouth was narrow, but once they squeezed through, the space opened up into a shallow hollow, just deep enough to keep wind and rain off. Old ash on the stone floor said animals or people had sheltered here before them.
Cynthia checked the mouth twice, peering out through the thorns, then slid her small pack from her shoulder.
He had not even seen her grab it in the chaos around the wagons. Now he realised she had not come away with nothing. Inside were a few bundles of dried meat wrapped in cloth, a skin for water, a small knife that had not come from any slave's chains, and a tight little bundle of the same roots and weeds she'd cut on the way.
"Those help?" he asked, nodding toward the bundle as he eased himself down against the cave wall. His tongue tripped over a word and he had to drag it back into shape. "The drink."
"A little," Cynthia said. "They cool the blood, settle the stomach. Don't touch the craving. That's not in the flesh anymore." She shrugged one shoulder. "But every little bit helps."
And he had his suit.
The battered frame still hugged his torso, scratched and cracked in three different places. The outer shell was scored and dented. One of the lower plates had been torn halfway free, hanging from a strip of composite like broken armour on an old statue.
The slavers had never looked twice at it. To them it was just strange, ugly metal. They had not found the ration bars he had sealed into a compartment on the inside. They had not understood the clips and seals that kept part of the central unit shut.
He was very grateful for that.
By the time Cynthia had piled a few armfuls of dry wood just inside the cave mouth, the tremor had returned to his hands. His bones felt hollow. His skin was slick with sweat that the cool cave air could not touch.
Cynthia knelt by the wood and closed her eyes.
Rae watched.
Her fingers curled toward her palm. The lines of her knuckles stood out, pale against her skin. For a heartbeat nothing happened.
Then the air around her hand shimmered.
It was not bright, not like the clean blue arcs of a welder's torch back home. It was more like the warping of hot air above metal left in the sun. The space around her fingers bent and rippled, and the small pile of scraped bark and fine twigs began to smoke.
A thin thread of flame licked from the wood.
Cynthia opened her eyes and carefully drew her hand back, as if she were pulling away from a pot without burning herself. She exhaled, slow and controlled.
The flame hesitated, then caught. The bark curled. Dry twigs took. In a few breaths there was a small but steady fire flickering in the gloom of the cave.
Rae stared at her hand.
"How… you do that?" he asked. He knew most of the words when she spoke them, but dragging them into his own mouth was another thing. He gestured from her to the fire. "No stone. No tool."
Cynthia glanced at him. The orange light picked up the fine lines of tiredness at the corners of her eyes. She seemed a little paler than before she had started.
"Bloodline ability," she said. "It runs in my family. We can generate heat, sometimes flame, if we focus."
She flexed her hand once, then shook it out as if easing a cramp.
"I'm still a novice," she added. "Using it like that costs a lot. If I push too far, my body empties out and I can't stand. So I don't waste it on campfires unless I have to."
Rae nodded slowly, trying to fit this into something he understood.
Back home they had invented machines to do what she had just done. Ignition coils, arc welders, fusion taps, controlled plasma. All of it needed metals, circuits, cooling assemblies. And this girl had just reached out and persuaded the air to be warmer.
"You can… always?" he tried. "Since small?"
"Since I was a child," Cynthia said. "The potential was there. My teachers helped me shape it. But even with training, it has limits." She gave a small, humourless smile. "Nothing is free."
He looked at the flames, then at her hand again.
Machines. Systems. Field generators. Every part of his training told him power did not come from nowhere. There had to be rules. His thoughts latched onto the puzzle gratefully, anything to keep from thinking about the gnawing in his chest and the way his muscles kept clenching.
"If I have time," he said under his breath in his own language, "I have to take you apart in a lab and see how you work."
Cynthia frowned at him.
Rae caught himself and forced the words back into hers. "I mean… your people. Not you. Not cut." He tapped his temple. "Study. Learn. In head."
She looked at him a moment longer, then huffed a quiet breath that might have been a laugh.
"You're strange," she said. "But I've met worse."
The cravings scratched at him again. He could almost feel the texture of the berries between his fingers, the way the juice had stained his tongue. His mouth watered and his stomach clenched, and there was nothing to give it. Even the bitter aftertaste of her concoction felt distant now, like something from another life.
He pulled his gaze away from the fire and focused on the suit.
The central unit sat against his chest like a dead animal. He had used the seams of his slave rags and whatever scraps of leather he could find to keep it lashed to him. Now, in the shelter of the cave, he eased the straps loose and set the main portion in his lap.
The outer shell was scarred from the river and from the caravan. Mud had forced its way into joints that were supposed to be sealed. One of the diagnostic panels was cracked down the middle, dead lines where there should have been status lights.
He thumbed one of the hidden catches and a small compartment slid open. Inside, lined up like small bricks, were the ration bars. Not many. Not enough for comfort. Enough that he knew they would not starve this week if hunting went badly.
He shut the compartment again and pushed the temptation of immediate food aside.
Once, he had been able to flick his fingers across the suit's side, speak a code, and watch the interior light up with pale blue lines. He could pull schematics into the air, call up readings, see the world in overlaid spectra.
Now, when he pressed where the activation plate should have been, nothing happened.
He had juice, but only a little.
He had learned that the hard way once already. One short diagnostic could burn through more charge than an hour of normal use if he wasn't careful.
No more random tests. Not until he had a way to recharge.
He exhaled slowly and began to work blind.
The worst cracks on the shell had to be stabilised. There were broken sensor nodes he could pull out, fried chips he could discard, structural pieces he could repurpose. If he was careful, if he made a plan piece by piece, he might be able to keep the most important functions alive.
Navigation. Environmental scan. Basic reactor interfaces. If any path home existed, it would start with those.
He muttered to himself in half-whispered technical jargon as his fingers ran over the battered casing, tracing familiar seams by touch.
Behind the crackle of the small fire, he heard Cynthia shift.
"You work on that thing a lot," she said after a while.
Rae did not look up. "Have to."
She leaned forward a little, eyes narrowing as she watched his hands. From her angle the suit was just a lump of odd metal with strange lines.
"Is it some kind of artefact?" she asked. "Old, damaged, barely working?"
He almost smiled.
"In your world," he said, "maybe artefact. For me, it is… tool. Ship. Home."
"It doesn't look like much," Cynthia said. "No glow, no sound, no tricks. Most people would call that scrap, not an artefact."
"It is not dead," Rae said. His fingers found one of the release catches and popped it, exposing a shattered cluster of components. He winced. "Damaged. I can fix. If I find parts. Time. Right metals."
Cynthia let out a short breath through her nose. "We're running from city guards and slavers. You can barely stand half the time. And you're worried about fixing broken metal."
He looked up at her then.
The firelight threw shadows across her face, catching on the sharp line of her jaw, the small scar at the edge of her left brow. Her eyes were steady, but there was tiredness there as well.
"It is important," he said.
"Why?" she asked. There was no mockery in it now, only curiosity. "You fight better with a knife than with that thing right now."
"Because," Rae said slowly, tasting the words, "it is only way I get to go home."
The last word hung between them, heavy and soft.
Home.
It was not a clear picture in his mind anymore. Sometimes it was the sterile white of the Ring's inner chambers. Sometimes it was the view from the shuttle window, cloud swirls over a blue world. Sometimes it was a small flat in a city that did not exist here, with noise outside the window and a kettle on the bench.
Cynthia's gaze dropped to the fire.
For a moment her face was very still. The flames reflected in her eyes, turning them to small, flickering coins.
"Home," she repeated quietly. "Yes."
Her fingers tightened on her knees.
"I had one," she said. "A big house. Too many people, too many rules." The corner of her mouth twitched. "I thought I hated it."
She watched the fire, and for a heartbeat the years between that house and this cave seemed paper-thin.
"I would walk down those halls again," she said, so soft he almost did not hear her, "even if it meant listening to every boring elder's speech twice."
Rae didn't know what had happened to her family. He only knew that there was a wound behind the way she said home, something sharp and old she never named.
He knew enough to keep his mouth shut.
Instead he glanced down at the suit.
"If I fix this," he said, "maybe I find a way to go back. Or speak to them. Tell them what happening."
Cynthia was quiet for a long moment.
"At least you still have a place to call home," she said at last. "A place that might still exist."
The fire popped. Outside, somewhere in the dark trees, a night bird called once and fell silent.
"We all want to go back," she said. "To somewhere. To some time. But the road we walked burned behind us."
She lifted her head and met his eyes again.
"So fix your artefact," she said. "If it gives you something to hold on to, then fix it. I'll watch the entrance."
Rae swallowed against the dry ache in his throat.
"Thank you," he said.
His hands were still shaking. The cravings still crept in like cold fingers. His head still hurt. But there was work under his fingers and a faint, stubborn line stretching from this cave to a ring of metal hanging over a distant blue world.
He bent over the suit and began to carefully, slowly, take it apart.