Chapter 13: Faction Zone
"This is not a campsite," Bertram said, slowing.
Figures moved between the fires, more people gathered in one place than any of them had seen since the drop, and Lucas felt something cautious tighten in his chest at the sheer scale of it.
This many survivors meant this many chances for things to go wrong...
They made it maybe a few steps into the clearing before someone noticed them.
"Hold." A man stepped into their path, armed and flanked by two others who moved with unhurried confidence. "Strangers don’t just walk into camp. You’ll need to state your business."
"Passing through," Lucas said carefully. "Heading for the Gateway. We didn’t know this was here."
The man studied all four of them for a long moment — the blood, the exhaustion, the general state of people who’d clearly walked out of something violent before he spoke again.
"You’ll need to see the Lord first. Confirm who you are, get permission to stay the night." He gestured toward the largest structure at the clearing’s center, a wide tent lit from within by warm firelight, banners of some kind hanging limp at its entrance.
"This way. Try anything stupid, and it won’t just be me you’re dealing with."
Lucas exchanged a glance with Iris, then Bertram, then Callum. All three of them wearing some version of the same wariness he felt settling into his own chest.
"After you," Lucas said and followed the man into camp.
Up close, the Faction Zone looked less like a survivor’s camp and more like a small, fortified kingdom.
Rows of tents stretched further than Lucas had first guessed organized into blocks. cook fires clustered near a central water source, weapons and armor stalls near the perimeter, a rough logic to the sprawl that spoke of weeks of trial and error rather than days.
The man who’d stopped them at the edge led them through it without much conversation, ignoring the stares that followed all four of them until they reached the largest tent at the clearing’s center.
"Wait here," he said, and ducked inside.
He emerged a minute later, holding the flap open. "Colt will see you."
’What is this? Some kind of old timey fantasy novel?’ Lucas thought in irrigation.
Colt turned out to be a broad-shouldered man somewhere in his mid-forties, greying at the temples with the kind of weathered calm that suggested he’d been in charge of something even before the sky broke open.
He sat behind a table cluttered with maps and tally sheets, and looked up at all four of them with an assessing gaze that reminded Lucas uncomfortably of Iris’ first once-over back at the fire.
"New arrivals," Colt said. That was not a question."Names. Abilities. Where you’re headed."
They gave it — Iris first, then Bertram, then Callum, each offering the barest necessary detail. When it came to Lucas’ turn, he gave the same answer he’d given a dozen times now.
"Ignition. Fire-based." He left it there.
Colt’s eyes lingered on him a moment longer than the others, unreadable, before he made a small notation in one of his ledgers and set it aside. "Heading for the Gateway, I assume. Everyone is."
"That’s the plan," Lucas said.
"Then you’ll want a night’s rest before you go." Colt gestured vaguely toward the tent flap, toward the sprawl of firelight beyond it. "You’re welcome to stay the night," he said. "Rules are simple. You eat what’s rationed, you sleep where you’re assigned, you don’t cause trouble, and you don’t leave the perimeter after dark. We’ve lost people to things... terrifying, harrowing things."
"Understood," Iris said, before any of them could say something else.
"Good." Colt’s gaze flicked briefly to Lucas. "You four look like you’ve been through something."
"Bora nest," Bertram said. "Five of them."
That got the first real flicker of reaction out of Colt — a raised eyebrow, something almost like respect. "Five’s a lot for four people to walk away from clean. You’re either very good, or very lucky."
"Bit of both," Lucas said, causing Colt to study him a longer than the answer probably warranted before letting it go.
***
It didn’t take long walking the rows of tents afterward for Lucas to notice the shape of how things actually worked here.
Every meal ration passed through hands that answered to Colt.
Every water skin refilled at the central well did so under the watch of two guards who logged names in a ledger no one else seemed to have access to.
People moved freely enough, talked freely enough, but every resource that kept a person alive in this place funneled back through one man’s authority, quietly and completely, in a way that made the whole camp feel less like a community of equals and more like a kingdom running on the goodwill of its king.
"You’re staring," Iris said, falling into step beside him as they made their way toward the tents assigned for the night.
"Just noticing things." Lucas kept his voice low. "Everything here... It all runs through Colt. Every bit of it. He built this on purpose."
"Somebody’s smart," Iris said. "Camps that don’t organize don’t last. And this is a Faction. It’s larger and more organized than a measly camp"
The tents assigned for the night were communal.
Long canvas structures meant to sleep six or eight to a row, bedrolls laid shoulder to shoulder with barely enough space between them.
Bertram and Callum had already claimed spots by the time Lucas caught up, and Iris was settling her bow within easy reach of her own bedroll when Lucas turned to the nearest guard instead.
"I need a separate tent," he said. "Just for tonight."
The guard — young, tired-looking, clearly not paid enough in whatever currency this Faction ran on to deal with special requests blinked at him. "Everyone sleeps in the communal rows. That’s how it’s assigned."
"I understand that. I’m asking for an exception."
"There’s no exceptions." The guard’s tone hardened. "You sleep where you’re told, same as everyone else."
"It’s one night. I’m not asking for a favor, I’m asking for space."
"And I’m telling you, that’s not how this works." The guard’s hand drifted, not quite threateningly, toward the weapon at his hip. It was more like habit than intent, but Lucas noticed it all the same. "You want special treatment, take it up with Colt in the morning. Tonight, you sleep where everyone else sleeps."
Lucas felt Iris’s eyes on him from across the tent row. Felt Bertram’s too, and knew exactly how this looked from the outside: a stranger making demands on his first night in someone else’s Faction, refusing hospitality that everyone else had accepted without complaint.
He couldn’t explain the real reason. ’Something killed me in my sleep once already, and I have no way of knowing if it can happen again in a camp full of strangers.’ sure it sounded like he was just paranoid but it was a reasonable fear...
However, he knew tfhat sentence would get him laughed at at best, or flagged as unstable at worst, and neither outcome helped him.
"Forget it," Lucas said finally, jaw tight. "I’ll sleep here."
The guard looked at him with an expression that clearly read: ’this one’s going to be a problem.’
He lay down in the communal row that night between Callum and a stranger he didn’t know, sleep refusing to come easily as every distant sound in the dark sharpened by memory kept him awake.
***
Morning came without incident, which felt, after everything, almost suspicious in itself.
Lucas spent the first hour of daylight doing what he probably should have done the night before: talking to people who’d clearly been in this camp longer than a single night, piecing together the shape of things one careful conversation at a time.
"Factions aren’t all equal," an older woman told him, mending a torn strap near one of the cook fires without looking up from her work. "Ours is mid-sized. There’s bigger ones out past the horizon, just before the Gateway. Ones that’ve absorbed three or four smaller Factions already. Word is the biggest Factions get first pick when it comes to Gateway access."
"Well it’s probably just a rumor..." Lucas muttered.
"It could be but everything’s political when survival’s on the line." She finally glanced up at him, something almost sympathetic in her expression. "You’re new. Give it time. You’ll understand the shape of it soon enough or you’ll get swallowed by somebody who does."
Lucas thanked her and walked away turning the picture over in his mind — resources as leverage, Factions as fiefdoms, survival itself quietly reorganized into something that looked less like cooperation and more like an economy no one had explicitly agreed to but had no other choice.
The gods were probably eating this up.
’Sick bastards.’
He found Iris, Bertram, and Callum near the camp’s edge not long after, all three of them looking as restless as he felt.
"So," Bertram said, without preamble. "You look like you’ve had a morning."
"Learned some things." Lucas dropped down beside them. "This whole setup — Factions, Leaders, all of it. It’s bigger than just survival. It’s a hierarchy. Bigger Factions get priority at the Gateway apparently.
"Comforting," Callum muttered.
"And last night wasn’t great for you," Iris added, watching him carefully. "Word’s already going around about the tent thing. Colt’s people don’t love being told no."
"I noticed." Lucas rubbed a hand over his face, exhaustion from days without proper sleep clawing at him. "I’ll deal with that. Right now I want to know what we’re doing next. We can’t sit in a Faction Zone that’s already side-eyeing me over a sleeping arrangement."
"Agreed," Bertram said. "Gateway’s still the goal. Question’s whether we push on our own or try to attach ourselves to a bigger group heading the same direction."
"After everything we’ve survived without help," Iris said, "I don’t love the idea of suddenly needing it now."
"We don’t need it," Lucas said. "But if what I heard is true, we might need to move faster than we planned, before this go south."
Callum glanced toward the center of camp, toward Colt’s tent, toward the guard who’d argued with Lucas the night before still watching their small group from a distance with obvious, unhidden suspicion.
"So we leave soon," he said. "Like, soon soon."
Lucas nodded. "Soon, soon"
[Ding!]
The notification bloomed in front of all four of them at once, causing the conversation to die instantly.
[Number of Survivors remaining: 242]
Nobody said anything for a long moment. Lucas did the math without wanting to... the last number he’d seen, back during the descent.had sat at 342. A hundred people, gone, in the handful of days since.
"A hundred," Callum said quietly. "A hundred people. Since we started."
The silence that followed was heavy. The camp around them had gone quiet as well, the same notification rippling outward across every survivor in the clearing, conversations dying mid-sentence as people processed the new information.
Then, from the direction of the central tent, a voice rose loud enough to carry across the entire clearing.
"Everyone! Gather up!"
Colt emerged from his tent flanked by two guards, climbing atop an overturned crate that put him at a height everyone could see, as the entire camp turned toward him..
"You’ve all seen the number," Colt said, v. "I won’t pretend it doesn’t mean what you think it means. A hundred people didn’t make it since the last count. That’s not something I’m going to soften for anyone."
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Colt let them settle before continuing.
"Which is why, starting now, this camp is going into full lockdown for three days. No one leaves. No one enters without vetting. We reinforce the perimeter, we pool every resource we’ve got, and we make damn sure our numbers don’t shrink any further before we move as one unit."
"Move where?" someone called out from the crowd.
"Toward the Gateway. In three days, once we’ve confirmed the surrounding area’s secure." Colt’s gaze swept the crowd, briefly, deliberately landing on the four newcomers standing near the fire’s ashes before moving on.
"I know some of you were planning to move faster, on your own. I’m asking you not to. The horror outside these perimeter isn’t kind to small groups right now, and I intend to make sure fewer of us end up as part of the next count."
He stepped down from the crate to a ripple of largely relieved murmurs, guards already moving to begin whatever reinforcement he’d ordered, and the camp shifted almost visibly around them settling into the shape of people bracing for a wait none of them had planned on.
Lucas stared after him, jaw tight.
"Three days," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "Locked down here for three days."
"Guess our plan just changed," Bertram said.
Lucas didn’t answer right away, watching the guards begin sealing the clearing’s perimeter and watching dozens of
strangers settle into the reluctant safety of a cage with good intentions.
’Three days,’ he thought. ’Three days is a long time to be somewhere I already don’t fully trust.’
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