They went back for the others before dark.
Damien didn't ask Sara's permission. He told her they were going, told Chris to stay, and left before the conversation could become a negotiation. She watched him go without objecting. That was either trust or a calculation. He didn't waste time deciding which.
Tasha came with him and one of Sara's people — a man named Brett who didn't speak much and moved like he'd stopped being surprised by anything two days ago. He carried a short-handled tool that had been half a garden spade before someone broke it down and rewrapped the grip.
The walk back was faster than the walk in had been.
Damien noticed that. The path felt shorter going back, which meant it had felt longer coming because he hadn't known where it was going. The terrain hadn't changed. His read of it had.
The camp was where he'd left it — clustered toward the center of the stone, packs stacked in loose groups, the injured man elevated on folded cloth. Mark was standing at the edge of the organized space when they returned, watching the treeline.
He turned when he heard their footsteps.
"Well?" he said.
"We're moving," Damien said.
Mark's expression shifted slightly. Not surprise. Readiness. "How far in?"
"Far enough." Damien looked past him at the group. "Start breaking camp."
Mark stepped closer and lowered his voice. "What are they like?"
"Organized," Damien said. "About twenty. They've been there longer than us."
"And they're fine with us just walking in?"
"They're fine with us trying," Damien said. "There's a difference."
Mark held his gaze for a second, then nodded once. He turned and raised his voice. "Pack up. We're moving."
No argument. A few relieved looks. Someone laughed under their breath — not humor, just pressure releasing.
Damien went to Leon.
He was awake. That was the first thing. His eyes tracked Damien's approach without the delay that had been there yesterday, which meant the sleep had done something.
"We're moving camp," Damien said.
"How far?" Leon asked.
"Twenty minutes. Flat stone the whole way."
Leon nodded and started pushing himself upright.
"Stretcher's still---"
"I can walk," Leon said.
Damien didn't argue. He watched Leon get to his feet and take his own weight, watched the way his jaw set, watched the subtle test of the bad leg before he committed to it.
He walked.
Slowly. With one hand near the stone wall they'd built as a marker. But he walked.
Tasha moved in on his other side without being asked, close enough to catch him but not touching him. Leon didn't acknowledge it. She didn't make him.
They moved out in a loose group, heavier packs divided without ceremony. Mark took one that had been dragging on someone half his size and slung it over his shoulder without comment. The cans went into the middle of the column where multiple people shared the weight.
Brett led. Damien took the rear.
The stone clearing stretched ahead of them, pale and familiar now in the way terrain becomes familiar — not comfortable, just known.
Sara's camp registered their arrival the same way it had registered Damien's scouting group: heads turning, movement slowing, hands settling near tools without lifting them. Assessment without alarm.
Sara stood at the edge of the organized space with her arms crossed and counted the incoming group without making it obvious she was counting.
Damien watched her reach the total and recalibrate. Twenty-three people was different from five.
"That's more than you said," she told him.
"That's what I said," Damien replied. "Twenty-three. Two injured."
Sara looked at Leon, who had stopped walking and was standing on his own, one hand at his side, expression flat.
"One," Leon said.
Sara looked back at Damien.
"He's stubborn," Damien said.
She didn't smile. But something in her posture shifted — less formal assessment, more the particular tiredness of someone who recognized a type. "We don't have the space to absorb twenty-three people into what we've built without something breaking."
"We're not asking you to absorb us," Damien said. "We're asking to work alongside you."
"That's what everyone says before they start doing things differently," she replied.
Mark stepped forward. "Then set the terms clearly. We don't need to guess."
Sara looked at him for the first time. Took him in — the way he held himself, the faint curl of wind that moved around his hands even when he wasn't directing it.
"Wind," she said.
"Yes," Mark said.
She looked at his face. Whatever she read there, she moved on from it quickly. "Terms are the same as I told your man earlier. You eat what you help gather. You go out in groups. You don't make fire outside the designated pit. You don't argue near the edge."
"That last one," Mark said. "The edge of what?"
"The camp line," Sara said. "You raise your voice near the forest boundary, you stop. You take it inward."
Mark considered this. "Why?"
"Because it draws attention," Sara said. "And the attention it draws is patient."
Mark didn't nod. But he didn't push back either.
"Fine," he said.
Sara looked at Damien. He gave her nothing. That seemed to satisfy her more than agreement would have.
"You set up on the east side," she said. "Brett will show you the placement."
The integration was not clean.
It was also not a disaster, which was the realistic range of outcomes.
Damien's group brought twenty-three people with twenty-three different ideas about how things should work, twenty-three different tolerances for uncertainty, and twenty-three different instincts about whose authority meant what. Sara's group had spent enough days together that their habits had calcified into something that felt like rules even when it wasn't.
The first friction was the fire.
Someone from Damien's group built a small one on the east side before they'd been told where the pit was. Sara's camp noticed before Damien did. A woman named Petra — thin, fast, with the particular economy of movement that came from not wanting to waste anything — crossed the camp and stamped it out without saying a word.
The man who'd built it stared at her.
"There's a pit," Petra said. "Over there."
"I didn't know---"
"Now you do," she said, and walked back.
Damien watched the man's face cycle through indignation and then land somewhere quieter when he looked around and realized that nobody from Sara's camp had reacted like it was an incident. They'd just handled it and moved on.
That settled something.
The second friction was packing.
Sara's group moved in a specific way when they staged supplies — everything accessible, nothing stacked where it would have to be dug out in a hurry. Damien's people stacked things the way people stack things when they're tired and want to put them down. Chris caught the problem before Damien had to and spent twenty minutes quietly restaging packs with two of Sara's people, learning the logic without asking to have it explained.
Damien watched him figure it out and didn't intervene.
The third friction was Mark.
Not an argument. Not a confrontation. Just Mark moving through Sara's camp with the particular awareness of someone who was mentally mapping everything he saw — exits, resources, how many people were where. It was the same thing Damien did. The difference was that Mark didn't try to make it invisible.
Sara noticed.
She came to stand beside Damien near the stone structure at the camp's center, which was what people did when they wanted to talk without it looking like they were talking.
"Your man with the wind," she said.
"Mark," Damien said.
"He's going to want to run something."
"Yes," Damien said.
She was quiet for a moment. "Is that going to be a problem?"
Damien thought about the honest answer. "Not immediately."
Sara accepted that the way she accepted most things — without relief and without alarm. "He capable?"
"Yes," Damien said.
"So were the last two people who decided they had better ideas," she said, and walked back toward her camp.
Leon sat apart from both groups.
Not dramatically. He'd chosen a spot near the east edge of the camp where a low ridge provided something to lean against, close enough to the organized space that nobody would flag it, far enough that he didn't have to manage anyone else's reaction to him.
He was eating. Small amounts. More than he should have needed.
Tasha sat down near him with her own food and didn't comment on his portion.
"You all right?" she asked.
"Tired," he said.
That was true. It was also insufficient. His leg had stopped hurting somewhere on the walk over, which should have been a relief and instead sat wrong in his chest. The bite site felt warm. Not infected-warm. Something else.
He kept his eyes on the camp.
New people sorting themselves into unfamiliar space. Sara's group recalibrating around the mass of incoming bodies. Damien moving through it without appearing to manage it, which was its own kind of management.
"The stone structure," Leon said.
Tasha looked toward it. "What about it?"
"Something's different about it."
Tasha studied it for a moment. Pale, vertical, unremarkable at this distance. "Different how?"
Leon didn't answer immediately. He wasn't sure how to say it without saying more than he wanted to.
"The air near it," he said finally. "Feels different."
Tasha glanced at him sidelong. "Different from what?"
"From everything else," he said.
She looked at the structure again. Then back at him. She didn't push.
Leon finished his food and looked away from the structure.
Whatever it was, it wasn't his problem right now.
Right now his problem was that his leg had stopped hurting and he didn't know why, and he was hungrier than the food he'd just eaten should have left him, and the smell of the forest from forty meters away was so clear he could have mapped it with his eyes closed.
He kept that to himself.
He was good at keeping things to himself.
Dark came.
Watch rotations were discussed between Sara and Damien in practical terms — how many positions, how long, who was capable. Mark inserted himself into the conversation at the natural moment and Sara let him, which told Damien she'd already decided he was less dangerous included than excluded.
The fire pit burned low in the center of camp.
People settled into the particular stillness of exhaustion that wasn't quite sleep — bodies down, eyes moving.
Damien took the late watch.
He stood at the camp's outermost position and listened to the forest.
The stone held the dark differently than soil did. It radiated the day's residual warmth upward in slow, even pulses. The moss in the cracks gave off their faint green sheen.
Nothing moved at the treeline.
Behind him, the camp breathed.
Forty-three people now — his group, Sara's group, the injured, the functional, the ones already learning the new rhythms and the ones still fighting them.
It was not safe.
It was more viable than it had been yesterday.
Damien understood the difference.
He stood there and held it without letting it become comfort, and the forest stayed where it was, and the night moved through without cost.
For now, that was enough.