Cassian walked a few paces ahead, unwilling to let himself be bothered with what had just happened. Riven didn't mind. The word they'd seen while down there still lingered in their minds, but neither of them was ready to face what it meant.
Detected.
That couldn't have come from a failing circuit.
They kept walking.
The ground got rougher as they moved east. Broken pavement pushed up through patches of sand, and dried brush cracked under their steps. In the distance, a collapsed water tower leaned to one side, half-buried, its rusted arms reaching into the sky like broken wings.
Cassian finally broke the silence: "You know, you could say something every once in a while. People don't usually die from casual conversation."
Riven blinked. "You've been doing fine without me."
Cassian let out a dry sound: "Cryptic. That's new."
Riven didn't answer, but the corner of his mouth lifted with a faint smile.
Cassian glanced sideways. "Careful. Keep doing that and I might start thinking you're human."
Riven let out a small breath, a little more amused than he'd planned.
They reached a rusted overhang, a collapsed side structure from the tower. Cassian ducked under it, brushing dust from a corroded support beam, and crouched low beside the wall.
"Let's rest here a minute" he said, "...before the sun tries to roast us."
Riven sat across from him, keeping his legs drawn in while scanning the horizon. The wind picked up slightly, moving the heat around. For a while, neither of them spoke, they were each caught in their own thoughts, weighing what had happened and what might come next.
Then Cassian glanced at the satchel. "It hasn't done anything since?"
Riven shook his head. "Not since the substation."
"You expect it to?"
"Yeah, eventually."
Cassian let out a slow breath and leaned back like it was just another lazy afternoon. But he didn't take his eyes off Riven.
They stayed under the twisted metal for a while longer, until the sun dipped lower in the sky. Then Riven stood and brushed the dust from his coat.
"We might as well check the tower" he said, nodding toward the ruin. "We might find something useful."
Cassian followed, strangely, without a word.
The collapsed water relay had once been part of a grid, Flownet, or one of the other old infrastructures that had become nameless over time. Now it was just a skeleton. The tower leaned on its side, half-swallowed by earth and sand, its frame split open like it had been peeled back.
They climbed over the lower supports and slipped through a torn maintenance panel near the base. Inside, the air was stale but cooler.
Most of the interior had been gutted long ago, with stripped wires hanging from the walls, cracked control panels, and tagging left behind by scav crews. But one console still sat upright, shielded beneath a half-fallen service rack.
Riven approached it. He ran his hand along the edge of the console, then tapped the surface. The screen was too broken to react, but beside it, tucked between two panels, he saw a small access port with a thin datachip still slotted in.
He pulled it out and turned it over in his fingers. The casing was marked with faded utility codes: a string of numbers and a handwritten tag scratched along the side: "Route root – PNT map."
Cassian stepped closer. "You think it's worth anything?"
Riven plugged the chip into a reader clipped to his belt. The screen on the device blinked to life, glitching at first then stabilizing just enough to scroll a few lines of text.
One line stood out before the screen dimmed again:
"ROOTMAP CORRUPTED – REROUTE LOCKED"
Riven studied the screen and frowned. The data was a mess, it was fragmented and partially corrupted, but the pattern in which the lines repeated and broke, he'd seen that kind of system before.
Cassian tilted his head. "You're looking at it weird."
Riven nodded once. "It's for routing data, I think, probably part of a larger control map."
Cassian pushed: "And?"
Riven pulled the chip and slid it into a separate pouch. "It's not useful now since the data seems to be corrupted and I can't read it. But it points somewhere, so maybe it's going to be useful later."
Riven turned and started toward the exit. Cassian followed a few steps behind, kicking at a piece of collapsed fencing as they passed, bent steel, half-buried in red sand.
Suddenly, their eyes caught a column of dust rising in the distance. It looked thin but steady, unlike normal wind-blown debris.
Cassian slowed when he saw it and narrowed his eyes. "That wasn't there an hour ago."
"No" Riven said. "It wasn't."
Cassian shaded his eyes with one hand. "Could be a dry relay blowing out, or scavengers lighting a decoy flare."
"Or worse" Riven murmured.
Cassian turned slightly toward him. "Worse like what?"
Riven didn't elaborate, but his hand brushed against the satchel like a reflex, eyes still locked on the dust column.
"Right. That's reassuring" said Cassian, mostly to himself.
Riven studied the terrain, then adjusted his position slightly, angling them farther west, away from the column of dust, but still following the general direction of his route.
"We keep moving" he said. "But we stay off the open lines."
Cassian didn't argue. He fell into step beside him, glancing back once as they descended the slope.
They kept walking until the ruin was far behind them. The ground sloped down into a shallow basin, with broken concrete and rusted supports on either side. Old water pipes lined the edges, dry and unused for years.
After a while, they set up camp just past the basin, under a broken stretch of pipeline sticking out of the hillside. They used a dented solar lamp and the last of the day's light fading behind them for support.
Cassian leaned against the rusted pipe, legs stretched out in front of him, arms folded behind his head like he'd done this a hundred times. Riven sat nearby, knees drawn up, the satchel resting against his side. He checked the core again, only slightly unzipping the flap. It hadn't lit up since the substation, but the warmth was still there.
Cassian didn't speak, and Riven could feel his gaze brush over him now and then. He stared out toward the horizon, where the dust column had faded into nothing, then softly, more to the space than to Cassian, he said:
"My sister used to drink slowly, she used to say it made the water last longer."
Cassian didn't say anything.
"She hated heat tabs, the ones used for purification" Riven added. "She said they made it taste fake... even the clean stuff. She'd hold her breath when she drank it, like that made it better."
He reached down and adjusted the satchel at his side.
"Back when the grid was still partly working, she tried to trace which sectors had water flow problems. She started building a map. She thought maybe if we found the right control point, we could repair something, maybe reconnect part of the system."
Cassian glanced his way, the usual tension in his features fading a little.
Riven kept his voice steady. "She wasn't a tech. She just didn't want to sit and wait for things to fail. Most people gave up when the water stopped, but she didn't."
He paused a little, then more quietly: "I told her I'd keep going if she couldn't."
Cassian didn't speak right away. "She sounds like the smart one" he said finally.
"She was" Riven answered.
And that was all he needed to say.