I don't know what to do with that information, so I just nod and drink my coffee.
Over the next two days, I learn the crew's rhythms. Ken and Patricia bicker constantly but never meanly—thirty years of marriage have honed their arguments into an art form, more performance than conflict. They finish each other's sentences, anticipate each other's needs, and move around each other like dancers who've practiced the same routine a thousand times.
"You ever think about staying in a settlement?" I ask Patricia one evening while she's checking the ATV's fuel lines.
"Thought about it." She wipes her hands on her pants, glancing toward Ken. "But we spent our whole lives in one place. House, jobs, kids, grandkids—all gone now. Moving feels right. Feels like we're actually doing something instead of just waiting to die."
Eric hero-worships Travis but tries to hide it, always volunteering for the hardest jobs, always watching Travis for approval he pretends not to need. When I ask him how he ended up with the convoy, his expression shutters briefly before he answers.
"Travis found me holed up in an abandoned school. I'd been alone for three months after my family's settlement fell. He didn't have to stop. Could've kept moving, pretended he didn't see me. But he stopped." Eric shrugs, trying for casual and missing by a mile. "So now I go where he goes."
And Jess watches everything with quiet competence, ready for any crisis, her dry humor cutting through tension whenever it builds too high. She's the one who tells me about Travis holding my hand while I was unconscious, the one who notices things others miss.
They remind me of my own crew. The crew I got killed.
I keep expecting the grief to swallow me, but somehow Travis's people make it bearable. They don't treat me like a fragile thing. Don't pity me. They include me. Patricia braids my hair when my shoulder makes it too painful to do myself, her touch gentle and matter-of-fact. Ken tells terrible dad-jokes that make me groan even as they drag reluctant smiles from me. Eric asks about my medical training, genuinely interested, taking notes like he's planning to remember every word.
And Travis.
Travis is everywhere and nowhere. Leading discussions, making decisions, checking on me with such casual frequency that it takes a full day to realize he's watching over me specifically. His attention should feel intrusive, surveillance dressed up as concern. Instead, it feels safe. Warm. Like someone finally has my back.
On the second night, I couldn't sleep. The nightmares are waiting—Reggy's gap-toothed grin turning to blank-eyed death, Susan's braided hair matted with blood, Tommy's young face twisted in terror as he threw himself into the line of fire. I slip out of my bedroll and sit by the dying fire, watching embers.
Travis appears beside me like he was waiting. Maybe he was.
"Bad dreams?"
"The worst kind. The real kind."
He doesn't offer platitudes. Just sits with me in comfortable silence, close enough that I can feel his warmth against the mountain chill.
"Tell me about them," he finally says. "Your crew."
So I do. Reggy, who taught me to shoot, who always said life was too short for regret, who proposed to his wife three times before she said yes, and never once doubted she eventually would. Susan, who braided my hair every morning and told terrible puns, who'd been an accountant before the outbreak andstill balanced our supply ledgers with professional precision. Tommy, who was only sixteen, who wanted to be a medic like me, who died thinking he was protecting something that mattered.
"They did protect something that matters," Travis says when I finish, his voice soft but certain. "Those supplies will save lives. Their families will have medicine because your crew fought for it."
"Their families will have medicine because I survived when they didn't."
"Yes." He doesn't flinch from it. "That's the deal, Hazel. Survival isn't fair. The question is what you do with it."
"What do you do with it?"
"I keep moving. Keep connecting. Every settlement we link, every route we establish, every person we help, it adds up. It has to add up to something, or what's the point?"
I turn to look at him properly for the first time. Firelight catches the strong line of his jaw, the dark eyes that hold more weight than someone his age should carry. He's younger than I expected a convoy leader to be. Younger, but not innocent. This is a man who's made hard choices and lives with them every day.
"You really believe that? Does it really add up?"
"I have to believe it. The alternative is giving up, and I'm not built for giving up."
Neither am I. That's why I kept walking all night on an infected wound. Why couldn't I drop the supplies even when my body was failing?
The realization hits me suddenly:I'm not dead.I should be, by any reasonable measure, but I'm not. I'm here, alive, with this man who found me and refused to leave me behind.
What am I going to do with that survival?
I reach for Travis's hand. His fingers intertwine with mine, warm and solid, and he doesn't pull away.
