Rest was a foreign concept. Ren's body was still, but his mind was a turbulent sea of calculations and contingencies. For three hours, they sat in the sterile silence of the sealed office, the only sounds the rustle of ration packs and the quiet hum of the building's emergency power. Valeria meditated, her face a serene mask that betrayed none of her exhaustion. Silas meticulously cleaned his scavenged pulse rifle, his sharp eyes never staying in one place for long.
They were recovering. But Ren knew this fragile peace was a resource more valuable than any power cell, and it was time to spend it.
He pushed himself to his feet. "I'm going to scout ahead," he announced, his voice flat.
Silas looked up, his hands stilling. "Scout what? The plan's set. We go up."
"The path to Sector 34 is long," Ren said, the lie tasting surprisingly natural on his tongue. Or perhaps it wasn't a lie. It was just a truth with a hidden purpose. "I want to check the immediate corridors for any residual Covenant activity. See if the Aberrations left any… nests."
He was leveraging their ignorance of his power. To them, his ability was a strange, mystical sense. The excuse was plausible enough.
Valeria opened her eyes. "Alone? That's unwise."
"It's quieter," Ren countered. "I'll be back in thirty minutes. Stay here. Keep the door sealed."
He didn't wait for an argument. He slipped out of the office, the heavy door hissing shut behind him, plunging him back into the familiar gloom of the dead city. He wasn't just scouting. He was hunting a ghost.
He made his way back to the deserted residential block, his movements silent. The place was an eerie monument to lives interrupted. An overturned cup here, a child's toy there. Each apartment was a tiny tomb, its secrets locked behind a sealed door. He found the corridor from the security feed and approached the doorway where the figure had vanished.
The apartment door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open and slipped inside, the shadows of the room welcoming him like an old friend.
His eyes, long since adjusted to the perpetual twilight of the lower sectors, scanned the small living space. It was ransacked, but not with the destructive force of an Aberration. This was the work of a desperate scavenger. A survivor.
Then he heard it. A tiny, almost inaudible whimper from a bedroom closet.
He approached, every step measured. He didn't draw a weapon. He simply stood before the closet door and waited. After a long moment of silence, he spoke, his voice barely a whisper.
"It's okay. I'm not one of them."
A small gasp came from within. The door creaked open a few centimeters, revealing a single, terrified eye.
She was a child. No older than seven or eight. Her face was smudged with grime, her Gamma overalls torn and several sizes too large. She was impossibly small, a tiny, forgotten piece of the city's grand, broken machine.
Ren's first thought was a cold, brutal calculation. Liability. A child was a anchor. They were slow, noisy, and consumed resources. They were a liability that would get them all killed. The logical, ruthlessly pragmatic part of his mind—the part that had sacrificed Jax without a second thought—screamed at him to close the door, walk away, and forget he had ever seen her. It was the only sane choice.
He began to turn.
And then he saw it. In her small, trembling hand, she was clutching a crude, hand-carved toy—a little wooden bird.
The image was a key, unlocking a door in his own mind he had sealed shut years ago. A sharp, searing fragment of a memory flared to life: a different small hand, clutching his own, a different pair of terrified eyes looking up at him as they ran through the rain-slicked alleys of the outskirts. His sister. The one he had lost.
The cold calculus in his mind shattered.
This wasn't a liability. This was a child hiding in the dark. Just like he had.
The choice he made went against every rule of survival he had ever lived by. It was illogical. It was inefficient. It was an anchor that would drag them all down into the abyss.
It was the only choice he could make.
He knelt down, his eyes level with hers. "My name is Ren," he said, his voice softer than he had ever heard it be. "What's yours?"
When he returned to the administrative office, a small, silent girl was holding his hand.
The reaction was immediate and exactly what he'd expected.
"Are you insane?!" Silas hissed, jumping to his feet. "A kid? No. Absolutely not. She's dead weight. We are not a charity."
Valeria's face was a mask of cold, hard disbelief. Her training, her mission-oriented mind, saw this for what it was: a catastrophic compromise of their operational security. "Ren, what have you done?" she asked, her voice dangerously quiet. "We can't afford a liability."
Ren pulled the small girl, whose name he'd learned was Elara, slightly behind him. He looked at his two companions, the cynical scavenger and the disciplined soldier. They were right. From a tactical standpoint, he had just doomed them all.
But he didn't care. His new leadership was being tested, and he would not fail. He wouldn't justify his decision with the memory of his sister or some appeal to a compassion they didn't possess. He would state it as a fact, a new parameter in their equation for survival.
He met their hostile glares, his own expression cold and unyielding.
"She comes with us," he said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "This is the plan now. Get used to it."