On the Hunt

Above ground, the storm had settled into a bruised, ugly sky—low clouds swollen with heat, lightning flickering behind them like an animal pacing inside a cage. The ruins of Los Angeles lay smoldering beneath it, shards of skyscrapers jutting up like broken ribs.

And moving through the wreckage came the troops.

They were not soldiers in the old sense.
No flags, no insignias of a once-proud nation.
These were the reassembled forces of what remained of the collapsed regime—commandos clad in matte-black armor, their helmets lit with thin, red scanning lines. They moved with the rigid precision of men trained to obey, not to think.

They swept the streets in tight formations, boots crunching over shattered glass, burnt asphalt, and the brittle bones of former civilization.

“Thermal sweep again,” the lead officer ordered, voice crackling through static.

A soldier raised a handheld reader.
A grid of heat signatures pulsed and danced across the screen.

Nothing human within twenty meters—only cooling ruins and the occasional scurrying creature brave enough to exist in the open.

But they knew she was out here.

They knew both of them were.

Maren.
Silen.

Two names whispered through the ranks like specters—rumors tied to rebellion, unexplained resistance pockets, encrypted signals the troops never fully decoded. Every commander had a different theory:

They were fugitives.
They were symbols.
They were dangerous.
They were illusions.

But the higher-ups, the remnants of the same bureaucracy that had sleepwalked the nation into collapse, believed the two were linked by a kind of underground myth—or worse, that they were catalysts capable of reigniting rebellion across the wasteland.

And so the troops hunted.

Through dead intersections.
Through the hollowed-out carcasses of malls.
Through the rubble-packed canyons of skyscrapers burned black by time.

The storm above growled again.

A drone whirred overhead, sweeping a spotlight across the wreckage. When it passed over a crumbling freeway column, the light caught for a moment on something faint—subtle footprints in the dirt and ash leading away from the city.

Fresh ones.

A soldier knelt, brushing a gloved hand across the track.

“Two sets,” he whispered. “One light. One heavier.”

The officer’s visor flickered with the reflection.

“Maren and Silen,” he growled. “Close.”

He raised a clenched fist, signaling the squad.

Weapons powered up with soft, predatory hums.

“Move. Quietly. They can’t have gone far.”

As the squad advanced, lightning illuminated the sky in a harsh, electric flash.

And for a half-second, the light cast a long shadow on a distant ridge—too tall, too still, watching them with an understanding they hadn’t yet learned to fear.

But by the time the soldiers looked again, the shadow was gone.

Only the storm remained.