By the time I had walked far enough for my boots to stop feeling like buckets, the worst of the shock had burned down to a dull ache.
The river sounded steadier beside me. When I was lying in it, it had been noise and cold and panic. Now it was a long, low rush, like a thousand quiet conversations pressed together.
Water slapped the stones. My suit clung to me, heavy with what it had soaked up. Every step made a small squelch inside my boots. The inner lining had lost that temperature controlled nothing feeling. Now it was just wet cloth, which felt wrong for something that had once cost more than my parents' first car.
I tried not to look at the sky.
Every time my eyes drifted upward I saw the hill again. Dust on sandals. Calloused hands. A man who had looked at us like we were a curiosity that would pass. A god, or something close enough that my brain did not have a better word for it.
Behind that, the corridor. The way it had twisted. The feeling of the knot tightening in my fingers.
My mind kept wanting to go back there, to replay the moment I lost my grip, to ask where I had gone wrong.
Backwards meant thinking about things I could not fix.
I stopped walking.
"Alright," I said softly. My voice sounded small against the water. "Inventory."
Saying it out loud helped. It made the world feel more solid.
I stepped back from the edge of the river onto a patch of firmer ground and crouched. My legs shook just enough that I did not trust them if I stood still too long.
The suit's main display had died on the riverbank. No overlays, no maps, no tidy lines of numbers to tell me how badly everything had gone.
I tapped the side of my helmet anyway, because habits do not die just because the universe has gone strange.
Nothing.
A moment later, a faint strip of green flickered at the very edge of my vision. Not a full interface. Just a single stubborn line.
Emergency strip. The lowest trickle of the suit's systems, wired separately so that if everything else failed, you would still get the bare minimum.
It told me three things.
Heart rate: too fast, but not red.
External temperature: dropping slowly.
Suit power: almost flat.
That was all.
No position. No comms. No link back to the Ring. No neat blinking indicator that said: your team is here, you are here, step one, step two, go home.
If there had been any connection left, someone up there would have been screaming my name in my ear by now.
Silence was an answer all by itself.
The strip of green dimmed a fraction. I did not know if that was my imagination or the power draining another notch. Either way, standing here staring at it would not improve anything.
I dropped my gaze to the hard clips along my waist.
The fall and the river had tried to rearrange my gear. Some things had stayed where they were supposed to be.
My right hand found the small hard shape of the emergency knife. I slid it free.
It was not a sleek multi-tool with its own processor and tiny diagnostics. It was a simple fold out blade with a few extra heads tucked in its handle. A small saw. A flathead. Scissors that would probably complain the first time I asked them to do anything serious.
The sort of thing you put in museum displays when you were talking about "early modern field gear".
"Hello," I told it. "Looks like it is you and me."
My left hand checked the pouch beside it.
Inside, still wrapped in thin crinkly packets, were three compressed ration bars. High density, high boredom. The kind of food accountants liked more than chefs did. You could live on them for a while. You would complain every minute.
The emergency water cartridge that was meant to sit opposite them had torn loose. Its clip was still there, empty and smug.
So.
One mostly dead suit.
One knife.
Three ration bars.
A river.
I could work with that.
I tilted my head back and finally let myself glance at the sky.
The sun had moved since I had crawled out of the water. It was still high enough that I had some hours left, but its angle said evening would come faster than I wanted.
Shelter slid up the list in my head.
If the air stayed like this, I could survive a night outside. Surviving was not the only point. Sleep on open ground and I would wake up damp and shaking and slower. Slow was bad. Slow got you dead.
A roof was better than no roof.
I slid the knife back into its sheath and palmed one of the ration bars. That one went into the chest pocket that still closed properly. The other two went back into the pouch.
Then I pushed myself upright and went back to walking.
The river bent and curved, so I did too. I kept it on my right, close enough that I could reach it, far enough that I was not in danger of slipping back in with one careless step.
The world was too quiet.
No engines. No faint hum of distant traffic. No Ring hanging like a pale scar in the sky, singing soft numbers no one entirely trusted.
Just the water, the soft rustle of leaves, and the occasional call of something in the trees that did not sound like any bird I knew.
The air tasted strange. Richer than home. Not thicker. Not thinner. Simply full, as though there was more in every breath than there should be. Each inhale left the inside of my chest feeling very slightly cool.
I filed that away with the list of things I did not understand and could not fix.
After a while the bank rose higher under my feet.
Mud gave way to rock, dark stone streaked with lighter veins. The river narrowed, forced between the shoulders of the land. Its voice changed, turning from a low rush into a louder, more impatient sound.
I rounded a bend and stopped.
On my side of the river, the ground climbed into a rough shoulder of stone. Boulders jutted out at odd angles, and scrub clung to any crack it could find. Above that, the slope cut into a taller ridge, its top lost behind the branches of a scatter of trees.
In the side of that ridge, halfway up from the water, the rock folded inward.
At first it looked like a darker patch of stone. Then my eyes caught the shape properly.
A shadowed hollow. No. Bigger. A mouth.
A cave.
It sat back from the river, a short slanted ledge of rock winding up to it from the bank. The opening was not huge, but I could have walked in without ducking.
My body reacted before my thoughts caught up.
Shelter, it said. Out of the wind. Out of the dew. One direction to watch.
My head followed a heartbeat later, with a quieter thought.
Or something else's shelter.
I stood there, breathing, the two ideas pulling in different directions.
The sun edged lower while I hesitated. The air cooled another fraction. My damp suit remembered that happily.
I took a slow breath in through my nose and let it out.
"Thinking time is up," I told myself. "We are not sleeping outside if we can help it."
The ledge up to the cave was not friendly.
I picked my way along in small careful steps, fingers brushing the rock wall for balance. In one place the stone fell away sharply towards the river. I tried not to look down too long or imagine what it would feel like to slip.
The knife bumped against my hip as I moved.
I did not take it out yet. If anything was inside the cave, it had heard me already. This was not a stealth operation. This was a tired, waterlogged person clambering up a rock face in a suit that squelched.
At the flat space outside the opening, I stopped and listened.
The river had become a muted backdrop. Air from the cave mouth brushed my face, faint and cool.
Stone. Old air. A hint of damp.
No animal stink. No sour rot. No sharp, metallic smell of a fresh kill.
Not proof of safety. Just a vote.
"Alright," I murmured. "Let us see what you are hiding."
I thumbed the side of my helmet again.
The emergency systems did not have power for a full torch, but somewhere in the faded wiring they understood that people occasionally needed to see where they were putting their feet.
A small light flicked on above my right eye. It was not bright. It pushed the dark back a few metres in front of me in a pale cone.
I stepped inside.
The first few paces were the hardest.
Light from outside thinned behind me. The world narrowed to stone under my boots, stone to either side, and the little slice of ground in front of me where my makeshift headlamp reached.
The ceiling was high enough that I did not feel it pressing down. The walls were uneven, bulging and pinched in places as though the rock had slumped while it was still soft, then frozen mid fold.
I moved slowly.
The floor sloped upwards for a few metres, then levelled out. The sound of the river faded even more, replaced by a thicker, emptier quiet.
My suit light brushed across something on the ground and I stopped dead.
Marks.
Not deep, but clear enough in the fine dust that had settled here.
I knelt and leaned closer, angling the light.
They were not boot prints.
They were not bare human feet either.
Three forward points, one shorter pad at the back, like a heel. Each mark spread wider than my hand. The spacing between them was wrong for a person. Longer stride. Different balance.
Whatever had made them had walked through this place more than once. The dust held several sets of overlapping impressions. Whatever it was, it was heavy. And it was big enough that I did not want to meet it in a narrow tunnel.
The prints led deeper into the cave, back into the dark my light could not push aside.
The back of my neck prickled.
I looked over my shoulder.
The mouth of the cave showed as a pale cut in the gloom. Outside, the sky had shifted another shade closer to evening. A strip of the river glimmered from here, silver and restless.
Out there, I would be cold and exposed and easy to see from a long way off. If whatever made these prints roamed outside at night, it might find me anyway.
In here, I could pick a place, set my back to the wall, and at least hear something coming.
It was not much of a choice.
I moved inward, but only until the entrance was still visible behind me as a lighter patch of grey.
Along the left wall, the floor rose into a narrow ledge of rock. It was just high enough that if I lay on it, I would be off the main floor, out of the clear path of anything walking through.
I tested it with my weight, then climbed up and sat.
Solid.
The suit sighed faintly as I settled. The emergency strip in my vision flickered once, then steadied. Power was low. Leaving the lamp on would be a stupid way to die.
I took the ration bar from my chest pocket and stared at it.
Part of me was hungry. Another part felt too tight, like I had swallowed a fist and it was lodged behind my ribs. Eating meant admitting this was not a bad dream I could wake from.
Practical habit won.
I tore the wrapper with my teeth and bit off a piece. It tasted like sweetened chalk with a suggestion of fruit.
It was incredible.
As I chewed, I let my eyes adjust and clicked the lamp off.
Darkness settled in.
Not absolute. Enough of the outside light filtered through the entrance to give the cave a dim outline. Edges and shadows slowly took shape.
The prints on the floor were just darker smudges now.
I shifted so that my back was flat against the wall and my feet were braced on the rock in front of me. If I had to move fast, this would give me something to push against.
The knife lay folded in my hand, cool metal against my palm.
I listened.
Water, far away.
The faint movement of air through the cave mouth.
My own breathing.
Nothing else.
Time stretched.
My thoughts drifted back towards the hill. Towards the ring of people around him. The way his presence had pressed on my nerves as if my body knew something my mind hadn't caught up with.
The way he had looked at me when I refused to kneel.
I stopped the memory there.
There would be time to fall apart over that later. If I made it to later.
Right now, staying alert was enough. Staying breathing. Staying in one piece until the world made a little more sense.
I rested my head against the stone and forced my shoulders to loosen.
Somewhere deeper in the cave, right at the edge of hearing, something dripped. Water, falling at slow, patient intervals.
The cave was not empty.
But for the moment, it was quiet.
I closed my eyes, not to sleep yet, just to rest them, the knife still in my hand, the river's memory humming gently at the back of my mind.
Outside, the strange sky darkened. Inside, shadows thickened around the entrance.
I had shelter.
I had a knife.
I had a river to follow when the light returned.
If morning came and nothing crawled out of the deeper dark to end me, I would walk until my legs gave out or I found proof this world had people. That was the whole plan.
For the first time since the hill, the future in front of me was not a knot of broken timelines, or a roaring corridor, or a voice standing outside everything I understood.
It was simple.