Toward the town.
Toward the chaos we helped cause.
Tebbles meets us at the outer wall, looking ten years older and twice as wrung out. His shirt is soaked through. His beard is singed on one side. But he grins when he sees us.
“About damn time,” he mutters, ushering us inside.
Rebuilding has already started. Sort of. People are yelling. Kids are patching panels that shouldn’t be touched. Someone’s trying to rewire a main junction using stripped speaker cable and a fork.
It’s a mess.
But it’s alivingmess.
And nobody’s dead today.
That’s something.
I spend the afternoon helping where I can—patching wiring, rerouting power, scolding two teenagers trying to ride a half-functional loader drone like a hoverboard. Vrok shadows me the whole time, saying little, doing plenty.
His hands move slower now. More careful.
Like he’s remembering how not to crush everything he touches.
By sundown, the worst of the damage is under control.
And I’m exhausted.
Bone-deep.
The kind of tired that sinks into your marrow and makes you wonder if the world ever really stops spinning or if you just get better at not falling off.
Vrok finds me on the roof of the comms building, watching the first stars bleed through the dusk.
He sits beside me.
Quiet.
After a while, he says, “They’ll rebuild without us.”
I nod. “They will.”
“Do we stay?”
I don’t answer right away.
I think of the deserts. The war zones. The legends. The quiet between explosions. The way his hand felt in mine this morning. The way my heart didn’t stop even when everything else did.
“No,” I say finally. “We don’t.”
He turns his head, brows raised.
“We go back to Syfer,” I say.
He nods once.
Like he already knew.
We sit in silence until the sky goes fully black.
