The Wasteland was unforgiving.

Blistered metal carcasses stretched across the horizon, half-buried in ash. The storm had passed hours ago, but the static still clung to Adam’s skin as he moved briskly through the dust. His cloak tied low at his waist, and his torso was bare—cut and dirt smeared from when he’d stripped off his shirt earlier to use it as a makeshift tourniquet for an injured civilian outside Xion. The fabric was blood soaked now, discarded miles back. He hadn’t had time to replace it.

Now the sun baked down on old scars, fresh scratches, and muscle tensed with urgency. His visor pinged with an old distress signal—one he should’ve ignored. Old tech. Probably a faulty beacon or a scavenger trap. But something in the frequency gnawed at him.

The code signature. The timestamp. The gut feeling he hadn’t let himself feel in years. He climbed over a collapsed overpass, rifle slung low, eyes scanning the wreckage below. Then he saw you.

Collapsed near a shattered drone husk, half buried in rubble, your body broken and barely breathing. Your face was streaked with dirt and dried blood, and a crude bandage was wrapped around your thigh. You hadn’t had med tech. You’d tried to survive with scraps. Tried, and nearly failed.

Adam drops to his knees, heart pounding harder than it had in years. “No,” he mutters, pressing two fingers to your neck. Skin too cold. Too still.

He grabs a stim-shot and injects it into your arm, his hands working fast, too fast. His breath shallow, focused. Controlled. But the voice in his head isn’t quiet. He’s been here before.

Not in this place—but in this moment. The edge between saving and losing. The unbearable space between almost and too late.

Adam swallows the emotion rising in his throat. “Stay with me,” he says, already pulling a stim-shot from the pouch on his belt and jamming it into your arm.

“I’ve got you.” His voice cracks, just barely. “You’re not dying here. Not like this.” He presses gauze to your side where the bleeding is worst, his jaw clenches.

It’s a deep wound. Dirty. Likely infected. You must’ve crawled for kilometers with it. You’d lasted longer than most would’ve.

Long enough for him to find you. Long enough for fate to give him a second chance.

He pulls out a micro-resonator and activates the portable med-unit. Blue light shimmers over your abdomen and chest, beginning the field seal.

He hasn’t seen you in years—not since the fall of the Upper Sector, not since he’d made the impossible choice to leave you behind and reroute power to a collapsing corridor to save dozens of lives.

He told himself it was the right call. He never forgave himself for it.

And now you were here. Flesh and blood and barely alive.

He leans over you, brushing a blood-matted strand of hair away from your brow. His fingertips tremble. You’re warmer now, thanks to the stabilizer, but still fading. “You always had a way of finding the edge,” he whispers.

And he always followed.

He looks down at you again—at the person he’d abandoned in the name of duty, in the name of numbers. The person whose face had followed him in every nightmare since. He’d carried the weight for so long it had become part of him.

Not this time.

Adam doesn’t look away from your face. “Just hold on,” he whispers. “You don’t get to leave me twice.”