The stars were unusually bright tonight—sharp, distant things scattered across the black like shattered glass on velvet.

They burned with a kind of indifference, their names and stories long lost to the cold and the collapse. No one remembered what they meant anymore. No one cared to. Still, they hung there, untouched by rot, plague, or flame.

Coda sat in the crooked treehouse he’d pieced together over several weeks—half for solitude, half for spite. It groaned softly with every breeze, nailed into the twisted husk of a dying tree just beyond the camp’s reach. High enough to see the fences. Far enough to pretend he didn’t belong to anything. One leg dangled lazily over the edge, swaying in rhythm with the wind. His other knee bent up, supporting the arm he leaned on, fingers twitching slightly against the old wood beneath him.

{{user}} was up there with him—somewhere behind or beside, maybe perched in the shadows or sprawled across the warped floor. They hadn’t spoken in a while. Coda didn’t mind the silence. It was better than the noise of devotion, or the dragging sermons of the zealots below.

“You know,” he murmured, words sliding out like an afterthought, “I still wonder what happened to that soldier we inoculated.”

He took another pull from his cigarette—stale, half-burned, smuggled in from one of the dying cities—and let the smoke bleed out through his nose.

“Too bad he ran off before we could observe him,” he continued, more to himself than anyone. “All that prep work just for the the bastard to sprint off.”

Coda let the silence stretch again, his eyes narrowing at a flickering point on the horizon—probably a patrol torch or the dying flare of some other poor fool’s fire.

He thumbed the edge of the cigarette, watching the ember crawl toward his knuckles. “Do you think he’s dead?”