"Thousands of years" was a number too large to be frightened of properly, so Rama set it aside the way he’d learned to set aside anything too large to carry, and did the next useful thing instead.
"Let’s take stock," he said. "Everything we’ve actually got. Not everything we’ve lost."
Sekar looked like she wanted to argue that the second list mattered more. She didn’t say so.
What he had, it turned out, was considerable, once he stopped measuring it against everything gone.
[Status]
Name: Rama Level: 87 HP: 4,200/4,200 Strength: 312 Agility: 298 Vitality: 285 System Points: 1,140 Active Skills: 14 Passive Skills: 22
Seven years of grinding through convergence crisis, hybrid integration training, and every engagement since had built a body that could bend steel bar by hand and outrun a car over open ground. None of that had gone anywhere. He tested it against a fallen log twice his own weight, lifting it clear with one arm to check the ground beneath for anything worth salvaging, and the log came up as easily as it always had.
"Combat’s fine," he told Sekar. "Better than fine. Whatever year this is, I could still walk through a hostile force here without much trouble."
"That’s not nothing." She was cataloging her own inventory as she said it — not a System interface, since hers had never worked that way, but the considerable analytical framework seven years of Ambassador work had sharpened into something almost as reliable. "Linguistics training. Botany, evidently, more useful than I ever expected. Tactical planning. None of that requires infrastructure to function."
"Coalition backup does, though."
"Coalition backup doesn’t exist yet." She said it plainly, without flinching from the size of it. "Neither does the hospital two kilometers from the facility. Neither does antibiotics, or a working phone, or anyone who could tell us where the nearest fresh water actually is, safely, without us having to test it ourselves and hope."
Rama sat with that for a moment. Seven years of extraordinary responsibility had come with an entire institution behind it — Dr. Chen’s medical team on call, Voss’s crisis infrastructure, five allied civilizations’ worth of accumulated wisdom a comm signal away whenever something went wrong badly enough to need it. All of that was gone, and what replaced it was a level-87 body, a functioning System, and two people he’d protect with everything the first two things gave him.
"We’re not helpless," he said, mostly to convince himself. "We’re just alone."
"We’ve been alone before."
"Not like this."
She didn’t argue that either.
Their daughter had spent the morning constructing something out of sticks and a flat stone near the mouth of their shelter — not a game exactly, more a private, absorbed project she wouldn’t explain when Rama asked, just held up one finger for wait and kept working.
"What are you making?" he tried again, crouching beside her.
"A house," she said. "For if we’re here a long time."
The sentence landed harder than anything Sekar’s astronomy had managed the night before, because it came from someone small enough that it shouldn’t have occurred to her, and matter-of-fact enough that it clearly had.
"We’re not staying," Rama said.
"I know. But just in case." She placed another stick with the careful seriousness of an architect. "You always say plan for the thing you don’t want."
He had said that. He hadn’t expected it to come back to him from a four-year-old holding twigs in ancient forest a hundred lifetimes from home.
"That’s smart," he said, and meant it, and something in his chest that had been clenched since the observatory deck gave out loosened by a fraction, watching her build a stick house with total, unbothered confidence that her parents would handle whatever came next. She wasn’t performing calm for their benefit. She simply hadn’t yet learned that some situations were supposed to be unsurvivable, and that ignorance, this once, was doing more for all three of them than any adult reassurance could have.
Sekar watched her too, and Rama saw something pass across her face — grief and gratitude tangled together, the specific look of a parent realizing their child’s resilience was both a mercy and something she shouldn’t have needed to develop this young.
"She’s better at this than either of us," Sekar said quietly.
"She’s had good teachers."
"She’s had terrifying teachers." But she was almost smiling when she said it.
By midday, hunger had stopped being an abstraction, and Rama volunteered to scout rather than sit with the specific helplessness of watching his family go without food he had no immediate way to provide.
"Stay close enough to hear if I call," Sekar said. "And don’t engage anything. Not until we know what we’re dealing with."
"I won’t."
He moved through the forest with the particular quiet his training had built into him, checking terrain more than looking for game, mapping the shape of the land in case they needed to move fast later. The ground sloped gently downward to the east, toward what his ears told him, faintly, might be running water. He followed it.
The trees thinned before the water did.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing so abruptly that a bird startled off a branch above him and clattered away through the canopy, because what lay beyond the trees wasn’t more forest.
It was terraced fields, cut into the hillside in long, deliberate rows, green with something growing in careful rank and file that no wild ecosystem produced by accident. Beyond the fields, a footpath ran packed and worn, the specific compacted dirt of ground walked by feet, over and over, for years. And beyond the path, rising thin and pale against the gray afternoon sky, a column of woodsmoke climbed from somewhere he couldn’t yet see, steady and unhurried, the exact signature of a hearth fire someone had tended that morning without any thought that it might be witnessed.
Rama stood very still, every combat instinct seven years had built into him running quiet calculation under the surface of simple, staggering fact.
They were not alone in the wilderness. They had fallen into a world old enough to have lost every name Sekar’s training could give it — and that world had people in it, close enough to smell their fires, and he had absolutely no idea what those people would do with three strangers who couldn’t explain, in any language they might share, where they had actually come from.
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