CHAPTER 74: SIX MONTHS BEYOND THE WALL [1]

6 months later...

Fort Aegis learned how to breathe.

It’s been over 6 months since the apocalypse started, and the quarantine zone that was hastily set up by the remnants of the US military adapted.

It wasn’t the frantic, panicked gasps of a city on the brink anymore, neither was it the Kill Road’s metronome of gunfire, and also not the constant sprint of survival, but it was now something slower and heavier, something more orderly.

The fortress inhaled rations and refugees at dawn, exhaled work details and patrols by noon, and held its breath every night, listening to the dark.

Over a hundred thousand souls now moved inside the concrete ribs like blood through veins, and the whole machine pretended it was a body and not a bunker waiting out a storm.

Yes, Fort Aegis now had over 100,000 survivors inside its walls.

This number seemed high, but once you realize the millions of people that once lived in this region of the world, you would understood the brutal nature of the apocalypse’s culling.

And as the quarantine zone changed and adapted more to the apocalypse, Ethan learned to breathe with it though he hated it a little more each day.

He stood on the upper catwalk of Block J-4.

With his elbows planted on the cold railing, he looked down at the morning queues.

Lines of civilians surrounded the ration depot in patient coils, flanked by soldiers with matte rifles and the bored vigilance of men who knew routine could kill you just as quick as chaos.

Children clutched metal bowls with both hands as they waited for their turn to receive their daily ration.

A man in a patched coat argued softly with a quartermaster over the weight of canned beans. Somewhere else, a steam whistle moaned as a boiler came alive in the machine bay.

The air smelled like oil, yeast, soap, and the bitter tang of disinfectant.

Six months is a long time to pretend you’re finished running.

Ethan rolled his right wrist and felt the ghost ache of the Exo-Spike Gauntlet as if the gear had left an imprint deeper than bone.

It’s been six months but the Wheel still pulsed faintly behind his eyes, not intrusive, but never sleeping. When he focused, it answered with a warm hum, like a patient light that seemed to say. ’I remember everything you’ve survived’.

He remembered the first week inside the walls, the "onboarding", a gentle word that hid the truth.

Civilians were cataloged, weighed, and tasked from the onset with no care given to the mental traumas accumulated during the journey of survival to the quarantine zone. It was efficient, but cruel.

Awakened? They were measured. A rank stamped next to your name could decide if you lived behind a rifle or behind a desk.

"Awakened Cole, right?" The intake officer asked, his voice like chalk. "E- Rank initial. Civilian, pending review". He crosschecked with the database.

"Fort Aegis reserves the right to requisition Awakened in time of crisis."

Well, Ethan registered into the quarantine zone as a civilian.

The reason for that was because he decided to finally let himself take a breath. After the traumatic charge to the quarantine zone, he wanted to rest.

So, he decided to officially stay as a civilian.

They gave him a lanyard and a smile that felt like a lock clicking. Then the restrictions came next; use of ability as a civilian was prohibited except in emergency cases.

Then, he’d nodded in understanding and smiled back.

He walked out with a pass that was really a leash.

Again that night, the Wheel whispered in the emptiness of a barracks room that was not yet home to him.

~----~

[Checkpoint Reached: Fort Aegis]

[You have been registered as an "Unstable Variable".]

[Warning: Observation Protocol Initiated]

~----~

This same notification.

He didn’t tell anyone about it. Reid had seen his face anyway, and he understood right away but Reid said nothing, because he understood the weight behind certain silences.

Ethan watched a loader bot wobble past on repurposed forklift treads, a child patting its dented flank as if it were a tired dog.

The world had grown strange enough to make that tender. Six months, and still the strangeness deepened.

"Hey," a voice said at his shoulder, low and easy. "You come up here to brood or to hide from paperwork?"

Ethan glanced over.

Reid leaned against the rail with the weight of a man who’d traded fields of fire for floors to mop and bills to count. He wore a casual gray utility jacket with rolled up sleeves; his hands were too clean.

And most eye-catching was a barkeep’s leather apron that hung from one hand, with a dish towel from the other.

Like him, Reid also decided to stay as a civilian and he now had a tavern.

"You have paperwork?" Ethan asked.

"Turns out taverns breed forms," Reid said. "Licenses, quotas, lists titled ’acceptable substitutions’ that somehow never include whiskey."

His mouth twitched. "Morning crowd wants thin beer and stories, evening crowd wants thicker beer and silence. Well, I provide both."

"You love it," Ethan said.

Reid’s eyes slid to the queues below, to the patrol that ghosted along the line like a shark fin. "It keeps me where people are," he said. "And it keeps me from pointing rifles for men I don’t trust".

"How’s business?" Ethan eventually said. "Besides the... thinness."

"Full," Reid answered. "Though it’s quieter than it should be."

They stood for a while without speaking.

The fortress groaned, settling. On the far wall, beyond the admin stacks and barrack rows, the black shoulder of the headquarters tower cut into the pale sky. Even the clouds seemed to go around it.

"Travis is off shift?" Reid asked at last.

Ethan nodded. "He pulled a double last I heard. He says the med wing breathes more than the fort does".

"He would say that," Reid smiled. "He’s the only man I’ve met who can complain while saving lives and make both sound like a punchline".

Ethan chuckled and looked down the catwalk toward the infirmary block. "He’s... famous now, you know. ’Surge Hands’, that’s what they call him. The kids chant it when he walks past."

"Good," Reid said. "Let them chant for a man who puts people back together, that’s at least commendable".

"And Jonas?" Ethan asked.

"He’s now in the army’s K-lot," Reid said. "Rotating wall teams. He’s... making religion of the gym between patrols".

"I saw him a few days ago. He smiles like he’s winning a fight the rest of us can’t see."

"And Holt?"

"He’s teaching tracking to squads that want to learn," Reid said. "While also teaching resentment to those that don’t."

His mouth thinned. "He says the city changes the way it leaves footprints. The Rift makes new alphabets, and he’s still learning the letters."

Ethan hesitated. "Kara?"

Reid didn’t look at him. "No word from her in months".

There were occasional rumors in the quarantine zone that she’d tried out for an Awakened cohort that worked off-the-books beyond the walls.

Others said she’d walked out alone and never looked back, now a ghost with a spear and a death wish.

Ethan didn’t listen to rumors though.

"You should come by tonight," Reid said at last. "The tavern. There’s a new batch of almost-ale," he chuckled. "Shit tastes like regret but goes down honest".

"Can civilians loiter?" Ethan asked in a dry tone.

Reid’s mouth twitched again. "They can in my place".

At that moment, a siren suddenly coughed, once, then twice, keeping the tone short, not the long wail the walls used when the world tried to climb them.

The sound turned heads anyway.

Afterall, Fort Aegis had almost died a month ago.

Ethan felt the memory rise like a bruise. The C Rank had come at dusk like a moving cliff, too big for the lanes the wall had learned to cut, and too smart to die the way the others died.

It had taken three sally teams, two Awakened cadres, and something they called a subsonic hammer from a bunker.

The wall had lived, the fort had lived, but the tally of dead at the aftermath of the disaster had taken a week to count.

In the days after, the fortress learned a new word in whispers... C Rank. It was the first C Rank monster that Aegis Fort had ever encountered, and it almost fell to the experience. It was an experience that all of them would never forget.

"Still thinking about it?" Reid asked softly.

"It’s hard not to," Ethan said. "We watched Pike chew people, we watched the Behemoth step on cities. But this... the fort bleeding, it felt like watching a lung collapse or the second destruction of the world".

"And now?" Reid said.

Ethan looked at the headquarters’ tower again. "Now it feels like the lung healed wrong."

A runner skidded onto the catwalk, breath burning, with a clipboard slapped to his chest by a strap.

He nearly barreled into them and stuttered to a stop when he realized who Reid was. Everyone knew Reid in this neighborhood, even if they pretended tavern keepers were invisible.

"Sir," he blurted. "Notice for Block J-4. There’s a Council brief at noon".

"All Civilians with Awakened designation are to report for audit and reassignment review."

Reid stared at the boy until the kid remembered to breathe.

"Understood". He said.

Then, he sighed.