Chapter 26

Prairie Fire

The command room looked smaller than it had from the corridor.

One long table, a few chairs, a hand-drawn map nailed to the wall and thick with inked marks and arrows. In the corner, tin crates were stacked beside a wood rack—clay pot and cups on the upper shelf, curled papers jammed below. Boards sealed most of the window; a slit of sun was all that reached the tabletop.

Footsteps in the hall.

The door opened. Everyone inside turned.

Lila leaned against the wall by the door, short curls tucked behind her ears, that bright edge of a smile already closing half the distance.

White Wolf stood by the map, gray-white hair and beard like thin frost in the light.

Lin Ce was curled on a low stool in the corner, an armful of papers against his chest, vest pockets bulging, the tired look still on his face.

The middle-aged man at the table wore a neat light shirt; an old-cut gray stand-collar coat hung on the chair back. He set his papers down, rose half a step to meet them, and pushed up his glasses.

Nova came in at Eren's side.

The man spoke first, mild. "Eren, Nova—sit."

He took two coarse clay cups from the rack, poured water, and handed one to each of them.

"Introductions. My name is Shen. I run this branch. Call me Mr. Shen—or Old Shen, if you like."

White Wolf snorted by the map. "Only Lila calls him that around here."

Eren took the cup, smiled, and sat opposite. The knife wound still hadn't healed, and the weakness after surgery sat on top of it, so his movements ran a half-beat slow.

Mr. Shen looked at his face, then at the bandage at his side. "You're still hurt, and you only came off the operating table yesterday. Calling you in this early was rude of us."

He tipped a hand at the map. "We're rushing it because the branch starts moving in the next couple of days—people and gear in batches."

"Moving?" Eren looked up.

Mr. Shen nodded. "You know about Ron. He was here a good while. Handled a lot of intel and routes. We can't tell how much he leaked, so we plan for the worst."

His knuckles tapped the map's edge. "So this post gets abandoned within a few days."

The room went quiet for two seconds.

Nova looked at Eren and whispered, "Do we leave with them?"

Eren motioned him quiet.

"I've read White Wolf's report."

Mr. Shen took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, put them back.

"You're not one of ours. But you helped us a great deal." A beat. "On behalf of the Ash Army's Old Mine branch—thank you."

Eren said nothing, only nodded.

"I'll be blunt," Mr. Shen said. "We aren't short of hands. People with abilities who can still think clearly in a mess and move when it counts—those, we don't have many of."

He looked at Eren.

"I'd like you to stay."

It came too fast. Eren only managed a wave of the hand. "I've got a kid with me. Might be awkward."

"I know." Mr. Shen nodded. "I've heard what Nova can do. I mean both of you."

Eren watched him and did not answer at once.

Mr. Shen's voice eased. "You just got here and I'm already saying this. Of course you'd have doubts."

Eren didn't deny it.

"Doubts are fair," Mr. Shen said. "In your place I'd think twice. A place that just got penetrated, and we turn around and recruit outsiders—looks rash. Hard to trust."

He glanced around the room. "I should explain. After Ron, we ran checks on every outsider. You included." His eyes went to Lila.

Lila straightened a little from the wall. "I told Old Shen how we fought together at the mine mouth. If you were planted by the other side, you had no reason to jump in."

White Wolf leaned on the map edge, arms folded. "Same read."

Mr. Shen nodded and took the floor back.

"So the decision wasn't casual."

"Back to it—I think staying helps Nova a lot." He glanced at the boy. Nova was staring at the papers on the table. "Safer here than outside. People who'll teach him to read and write, and how to stay alive. That matters for a kid."

Nova looked up, eyes bright for a second, then straight at Eren.

"And your problem." Mr. Shen opened a hand toward Lin Ce as he spoke.

Lin Ce spoke from the corner, quiet and even. "About the shoot in you—I've briefed Mr. Shen. Yesterday was only the first step. Sample results will take a while. The recovery needs watching. If anything shifts, you need hands and gear on call. Hard to pull that together outside."

Eren's gaze dropped to the pale gray lines on his left hand.

Mr. Shen didn't push. He waited for Eren to sit with it.

Nova moved first, edged closer to Eren, voice low. "Maybe… we stay and see? At least they can treat your hand."

Eren turned his face. He neither nodded nor shook his head.

He looked up at Mr. Shen. "I appreciate the offer. But I still don't know what your army is after."

Mr. Shen set his palm on the notebook cover. "That's the right question."

No one spoke.

Mr. Shen adjusted his glasses and opened a page tucked in the notebook.

"You've walked a lot of ground," he said, watching Eren. "Ten years. Ever find it strange—any village that got the power back up?"

Eren thought. "No."

"Heavy machines?"

"Seen leftovers. Nothing that runs."

"Right." Mr. Shen's finger pressed the page. "Survivors should include techs, engineers, scientists. So why is rebuilding this slow—or stalled?"

That question actually caught Eren.

He'd turned it over before. Day-to-day had swallowed him; he'd never dug in. Just buried it.

"You might think—too few people left, fewer who know the work, everyone busy staying fed," Mr. Shen said. "That's part of it. Not the whole truth."

A beat.

"The bigger piece: someone's wrecking it on purpose."

Eren's brow knotted. He didn't know what to do with that.

Mr. Shen tapped the notebook and went on.

"You might think I'm talking nonsense. Take a settlement south of here, six hundred or so, with an old-world electrical engineer in it. Took him a long time to cobble a generator out of scrap."

"Before it ever ran properly, someone blew it at night. Engineer gone—no body, no word. We looked at the blast residue. Not homemade."

White Wolf put in from the map. "Plenty like that. I ran into one up north. Old shortwave relay just got working. Second month, the people were gone."

Nova drew his shoulders in.

Mr. Shen kept on. "Power, smelting, chemicals—anything that touches the industrial threshold gets ruined."

"And the ones who could lead a rebuild." He turned a page. "Anyone who sticks their head up doesn't last. They vanish."

The room sat quiet a good while.

Eren's brow stayed tight.

He thought of the towns he'd walked these years—places with old plant bones still standing, and hands enough to rebuild, and somehow they never got off the ground. He'd blamed empty bellies, broken will, or bandits too thick.

So there was something to Shen's talk. And something off.

Eren looked at him. "You say someone's wrecking it. What proves that?"

Lila clicked her tongue by the door. "You—"

Mr. Shen lifted a hand and cut her off.

He drank, set the cup down. The bottom hit the table hard—sharp in the quiet room.

"You're familiar with Ron," Mr. Shen said. "Modern comms in their hands. Guns and rounds we can't make."

Eren's brow went deeper. The rounds at the mine mouth had been real enough. You could still call them leftover stock if you wanted to.

He didn't push further.

The room went still again. No one asked.

Mr. Shen waited, then opened another page. A wrinkled hand-drawn map was stuck to it—details unclear, landmass outlines roughly right.

"Back to ten years ago."

"Nova may not know. Eren—at your age you should remember what the news said about that asteroid. About five kilometers across. Likely impact point, mid-Pacific. Plenty of people would die. But one rock tearing the plates into what we've got now—does that sound right to you?"

Eren had nothing for that.

"I'm no expert on it," he said.

"Neither am I. By common sense, though—one asteroid taking out a continent is already a stretch. How does it rip the ground under our feet like this? Doesn't track." Mr. Shen said, "Later, some of our people pieced together a theory."

He tapped a line on the drawing with the pen cap.

"Their take—the impact was only the start. What the rock brought in was the real key." Mr. Shen said, "What you see everywhere now as Crystone—gray, blue, the lot. Seeds of it scattered into crust cracks with the hit and grew: swelling, eating rock, forcing the cracks wider, driving geology change after change."

Eren's mind followed him—the emergency broadcasts that had run for days, then quakes, tsunamis, and ash, wave after wave.

"Not just Crystone." Mr. Shen added, "Some regions grew silicon-based creatures that move and hunt. You've walked far, Eren. You should've seen plenty."

Eren's breath caught half a beat. He knew all of that—and he was still living with the shoot, whether or not you called it silicon-based.

He followed the line. "Makes sense. But what's it got to do with what we were just talking about?"