The dust of Chihuahua clung to everything: the sweat-soaked rags Salvador Cruz wore, the taste of the meager, stolen bread in his mouth, and the very air he breathed. The Sequence had injected itself into him, not as a calming balm but as a furious, persistent whisper: Live. Endure. Do not break. The compounded grief of Rahmat, the quick, fatal pride of Jason, and the blazing conviction of Nandita were now all channeled into one singular, primal directive.
He was eleven years old, yet he moved with the economical cunning of a veteran street fighter.
The Railway Line
His focus was the railway line—the artery of the revolution. Supplies, weapons, and troops all moved by train, and where there was movement, there was opportunity for a boy skilled in the art of the vanishing act.
Two weeks after escaping the Rurales, Salvador found himself scavenging near a makeshift camp outside the city, where General Obregón's forces had paused. He wasn't loyal to the Federales or the revolutionaries; his loyalty was strictly to his next breath.
He found three other children—a girl named Elena, older than him and missing three fingers from a factory accident; and two younger boys, Felipe and Ramon—all driven by the same hunger. Salvador, channeling Nandita's inherent leadership, quickly became their grim shepherd.
"We need the cans," Salvador hissed to Elena, pointing toward the field kitchen. The cooks were lazy, sometimes throwing away meat tins that were merely dented, not spoiled.
"They'll shoot us, Salvador," Elena whispered back, her face streaked with dirt and fear.
"They'll shoot us when we're weak from hunger, too," he retorted, his eyes cold and ancient. "At least this way, we move on our own terms."
The Ambush
That night, they moved. It wasn't the guards or the cooks who were their undoing; it was another, older gang of scavenging boys. They cornered the younger group in the shadowed space between two boxcars.
The fight was brutal and short. The older boys were bigger, armed with rusted shivs and lengths of chain. Salvador fought like a cornered animal, using every ounce of his new, composite strength. He twisted, ducked, and bit, the lesson of Nandita's final, sacrificial strike burned into his muscle memory. He kept shouting at Elena, telling her to grab the cans and run.
He managed to disarm one boy and deliver a shattering kick to another's knee. But the overwhelming weight of the attack finally brought him down. A heavy leather strap snapped across his face, splitting his cheek open.
As he lay in the dirt, the taste of his own blood mixing with the perpetual dust, one of the older boys stomped on his chest, crushing the air from his lungs. "You don't take our scraps, rata (rat)!"
Through the haze of pain, Salvador saw Elena and the younger boys scrambling away with two dented cans. Good. They survived.
Then, the final, terrifying moment: the lead boy raised a piece of jagged metal, intent on making an example of him.
The Grit
It was at that moment the Sequence reacted to the absolute limit of his physical survival. A cold, detached intelligence—the integrated wisdom of Rahmat's suffering and Jason's observation—took over.
He stopped struggling. He looked directly into his attacker's eyes, not with fear, but with an unnerving, vacant acceptance. He used his last reserve of air to force out a single, phlegmy cough, spitting a mouthful of blood and dust directly onto the boy's worn boot.
The move was unexpected, utterly defiant, and strangely unimpressed by the threat of death.
The attacker paused, his eyes narrowing, momentarily thrown off by the sheer, pathetic refusal to beg. He lowered the weapon just an inch.
That fraction of a second was all the Resilience trait needed. Salvador seized a handful of the man's clothing and pulled, hard, just as a passing train began to move, its deafening shriek momentarily covering the sounds of the camp. The attacker stumbled, lost his footing, and went down.
Salvador didn't stay to fight or kill. He rolled, scrambling away under the immense, rolling train cars. The smell of oil and hot metal choked him, the deafening rattle threatening to liquefy his bones, but he was moving. He was surviving.
He emerged bloody, bruised, and alone on the other side of the tracks. The pain was immense, but the core of Atri was now harder, layered with the grit of Salvador Cruz. He was Peeled down to the raw nerve, but he was Dust—ubiquitous, settling, and impossible to truly destroy.
He spat out the last of the dust and began to walk toward the mountains, the direction of the Revolution, and the next brutal lesson in survival.