They continued their salvage run, though none of them felt the usual enthusiasm. The wasteland had always been dangerous, but predictably so. This new behavior from the Hollowborn changed everything.
"Look, more crabs!" Elesa pointed to a cluster of rubble near what had once been a shopping complex. "At least two dozen."
"Worth the detour," Jyn decided. They needed something normal, something routine to push back against the strangeness of the night.
They'd hunted crabs dozens of times. It required patience, coordination, and the right equipment. Xander pulled out his net launcher again, the other two fell into routine, herd and shoot.
The crabs scattered as they approached, their six legs clicking across the broken concrete. They were fast, but predictable. Always heading for the nearest cover, always taking the path of least resistance.
"Man, this is much better than the time we tried this?" Xander called out, adjusting his aim.
"You shot yourself in the foot with the net launcher." Elesa replied, driving three crabs toward him.
"I shot near my foot. Important distinction."
"You were tangled in the net for an hour," Jyn added, herding more crabs into position.
"It was a learning experience!"
The net launched with a soft whoosh, expanding in flight to envelope four crabs. They clicked and hissed, their claws snapping at the air, but the Ceramic fiber net was beyond their ability to cut in such short time.
"Good catch, this is now an even better haul, good thinking Jyn." Elesa approved, helping to secure the creatures.
They worked together to bind the crabs' claws and place them in reinforced bags. The familiar routine was comforting, a reminder that not everything in the wasteland had changed.
As they worked, Xander started talking—nervous chatter to fill the silence.
"Remember when your parents took us to the observation post?" he asked Jyn. "We were, what, eight?"
"You were nine," Jyn corrected, smiling at the memory. "And you spent the entire time trying to figure out how the telescope worked instead of actually looking through it."
"It was a fascinating piece of engineering! Pre-war optics with post-war modifications. The way they'd integrated Amber lenses to filter radiation..."
"You took it apart," Elesa said.
"And I put it back together!" Xander shrugged it was very fascinating
"Eventually. After my father helped," Jyn said. The memory was bittersweet—his parents laughing at Xander's enthusiasm, his mother patiently explaining the principles while his father helped with the reconstruction.
"Your mom made those terrible nutrition bars," Xander continued. "Said they had perfect nutritional balance."
"They tasted like bricks." Jyn agreed. "But she was so proud of them. She'd spent weeks perfecting the formula."
"She was always working on something," Xander said more quietly. "Some new theory or experiment. Both of them were, same as my family, imagine the things the two familys could accomplish together."
"That's what killed them, and the two families are united more than ever, you are my brother Afterall," Jyn said, the words coming out harsher than intended.
Silence fell over them, broken only by the clicking of the captured crabs.
"They were trying to save the world," Xander said finally.
"They were trying to understand it," Jyn corrected. "There's a difference."
"Is there?" Elesa asked. "In a world like this, understanding might be the first step to saving."
They finished securing the crabs and continued east. The shard was pulling again, not urgently but insistently. North, it wanted to go in a specific direction.
"You're following it," Elesa observed. It wasn't a question.
"It wants to show me something," Jyn admitted.
"The shard wants," Xander repeated. "You're anthropomorphizing a crystal. You really think this thing is capable of thought and emotion? I think not likely."
"Am I? It belonged to my parents, was the focus of their research. Shows me visions, whispers things I almost understand. If it's not alive, if it isn't my parents' soul, it's doing a good impression."
They walked in silence for a while, each lost in their thoughts. The wasteland stretched around them. Here, the falling apart shell of a bus, its seats still visible through broken windows, eaten away by acid and water. There, a playground, the metal equipment twisted but recognizable. Each piece told a story of the billions who had lived before the bombs.
"My first memory of the wasteland," Elesa said suddenly, "was of my father's funeral."
"I was six yours old. He'd been on a salvage run, but he got caught in an acid storm without his skin suit. His team brought back what was left. My mother insisted on a proper burial, even though the Confederacy discouraged it. They said it was a waste of resources, we could use more fertilizer they say and they'd pay."
She paused, her hand unconsciously moving to the small pendant she wore—a piece of her father's old jewelry, polished smooth.
"We went outside the grove, just past the checkpoint. Dug a grave in the toxic soil. My mother said he should rest in the wasteland he'd spent his life trying to survive. The guards thought we were insane."
"But you did it anyway, he deserved a proper funeral, you did right by him." Xander said softly.
"We did. And as we were covering the grave, I saw my first Hollowborn. Just standing there, watching from a distance. It didn't attack, didn't move, just... watched. Like it was curious about what we were doing."
"What happened?" Jyn asked, though he knew the answer.
"Nothing. It left after we finished. But I never forgot that feeling—being watched by something that used to be human but wasn't anymore. It's why I learned to fight. Never wanted to feel that helpless again."
They understood. out here, everyone had their moment—the instant when the reality of their world became clear. For some, it was seeing their first corpse. For others, surviving their first acid storm. But everyone had that moment when childhood ended and survival began.
They walked on, sharing smaller memories. The first time they'd successfully hunted crabs together. The day they'd found a cache of pre-war books, the pages were brittle but still readable. The afternoon Xander had accidentally created a small explosion that turned Jyn's hair white for a week.
"Good times," Xander said with a grin laughing out load. "good times indeed."
"You have a strange definition of good," Elesa observed.
"We're alive, aren't we? In this world, that makes any time good."
The shard's pull was getting stronger, leading them through a section of the wasteland they rarely explored. The ruins here were different—more industrial, lots of concrete and steel structures that had partially survived the bombs.
"This is a Manufacturing district by the looks of it, gotta say Jyn, you may be write, these places are always full of good loot!" Xander identified. "Pre-war factories and warehouses."
"Good salvage potential for sure, we've gone to similar places and scored big time on electronics," Elesa noted, but her tone was wary. Industrial ruins often contained chemical hazards, toxic materials that even their protective gear couldn't handle.
The shard led them to what looked like just another collapsed building, but Jyn could feel something beneath the rubble. Something that resonated with the crystal in his pocket.
"Here," he said with certainty. "There's something here."
"Where is here exactly Jyn?"
"below us, we'll have to move rocks. he replied rolling his shoulders in anticipation.
Xander sighed, following Elesa's move putting down his pack. "fine, it better be worth it."
They spent an hour carefully moving debris, shifting metal, and broken concrete until they revealed a maintenance hatch. The metal was corroded but still intact, marked with warnings in multiple languages and, surprisingly, the Voss and Vey Industries logo.
"That's our family's crests," Xander said, tracing the stylized double V with his finger. "But this is old. Pre-war old."
"Your family did defense contracts," Jyn reminded him. "Black projects, classified research."
"Yeah, but out here? This far from any military installation?"
The lock was electronic, decades old, but somehow it was still powered. Xander connected his portable power cell, trying to bypass the mechanism, but it wouldn't budge.
"It's not broken," he said, frustrated. "It's working perfectly. It just won't open."
On impulse, Jyn pressed the shard against the lock. There was a pulse of warmth, a brief glow, and the lock clicked open.
"How did—" Xander started.
"My parents worked with your family on strange tech it seems," Jyn said. "Maybe they programmed it to recognize the shard."
The ladder descended into darkness, their lights revealing a narrow maintenance tunnel. The walls were lined with cables and pipes, some broken but many intact. The air was stale but breathable, filtered through systems that still functioned after all these years.
At the bottom, another door waited. This one opened to Xander's touch, responding to some genetic marker or encoded permission they didn't understand.