The waypoint was called Highmoor.

  Nobody had named it officially — names came later, when places lasted long enough to deserve them. But the survivors who'd found it first had started calling it that and it had stuck the way things stuck when people needed something to hold onto.

  Thabo had found it in month three last time. Spent eleven days here learning the northern routes, mapping the gate formations, building relationships with the people who'd organised it before everything fell apart at Level 5.

  He knew every entrance. Every weak point. Every person who'd been here in the last timeline.

  Most of them were already here now.

  The complex sat on elevated ground — old farm infrastructure that someone had been smart enough to fortify early. Stone walls reinforced with salvaged materials. A water tower that still worked. A main hall that could hold thirty people if they weren't too particular about personal space.

  Thirty-seven people when Thabo's group arrived.

  He counted automatically. Couldn't help it.

  His mother counted too. He caught her doing it as they came through the gate — her eyes moving across the yard, quick and systematic. She'd been doing that since Chapter 5. Since the notebook. He hadn't taught her to do it.

  She'd just started.

  The welcome was cautious.

  A woman named Dlamini — no relation, she clarified immediately, watching his face for a reaction — had organised the complex in the ten days since the system hit. Mid-forties. Former logistics manager for a mining company outside Pretoria. She had the specific competence of someone who had spent decades moving large things from one place to another and had simply redirected that skill at survival.

  She looked at Thabo's group the way she probably looked at unexpected deliveries. Not unwelcome. Just requiring assessment before integration.

  He gave her what she needed — numbers, class breakdown, supply inventory, route information. She gave him in return — current gate activity in the northern sector, survivor groups she'd made contact with, the supply situation, the two people she'd lost in the first week and how and what she'd changed because of it.

  Professional. Efficient. He'd liked her in the last timeline.

  He liked her now.

  His mother had her notebook out before the conversation was five minutes old.

  Dlamini noticed. Glanced at the notebook. Then at Thabo. Then back at his mother.

  "Your group is organised," she said.

  "We're learning," his mother said.

  Dlamini looked at her for a moment. Then nodded once — the specific nod of someone recognizing a peer.

  Good.

  He settled the group while the afternoon light held. Rooms assigned. Watch rotation integrated with Highmoor's existing schedule. Kagiso and the twins absorbed into the perimeter system without friction — Kagiso's Keen Eye immediately useful on the northern approach where the terrain was broken and difficult to read.

  Aisha found the supply room within twenty minutes of arriving and had reorganized the rationing system within an hour. Nobody asked her to. Dlamini found out, inspected the result, and reassigned two people to work under her without comment.

  Lena sat in the corner of the main hall and watched everything.

  Three fingers when Thabo passed her.

  Three fingers back.

  Whatever it meant it was consistent and she seemed satisfied by it and he'd stopped needing it to mean something specific.

  His mother found him at the north wall at dusk.

  She had the notebook. She always had the notebook now. But she was holding it differently than she had before last night — not open, not ready to write. Just present. The way she held things that mattered.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  "She's good," his mother said. Meaning Dlamini.

  "Yes."

  "She lost two people in the first week."

  "I know."

  "You knew her before."

  He glanced at her.

  She looked back. Patient.

  He'd stopped being surprised by how fast she put things together. "Last timeline. Yes. She made it to Level 4 before—" He stopped.

  His mother waited.

  "Before things went wrong at the settlement there."

  She nodded. Didn't push. Just added it to whatever she was building in her head — the map of the last timeline that she'd been constructing since he started talking last night.

  "What do we need to do here," she said.

  "Rest. Resupply. Let my shoulder recover properly. Figure out the northern route."

  "How long."

  "Three days. Maybe four."

  She considered that. "And your level."

  His shoulder had been loosening all day — Fortified Recovery doing its slow work, the range of motion coming back incrementally. But slow. Too slow. He needed to fight. Needed the acts. Needed his body to close the gap.

  "I'll work on it tonight," he said. "Gate activity north of here. I can run it solo. Controlled exposure."

  She looked at him.

  "I'll tell you before I go," he said.

  She held his gaze for a moment.

  Then she opened the notebook and wrote something.

  He didn't ask what.

  The problem arrived with the morning.

  Not a gate. Not a monster. Not a system notification.

  A person.

  He was standing at the entrance to the main hall when Thabo came in from the night run — three solo gate clears, shoulder holding, Level 3 now, the gap starting to close. He was tired and his side ached and he wanted water and food and six hours of horizontal.

  He saw the man and stopped.

  The man saw him and stopped.

  Recognition landed on both sides simultaneously.

  The blockade. Three cars across the road. A man who hadn't lost anyone yet and hadn't learned what mistakes cost. Thabo had pointed his fear in a useful direction and driven through the gap and not looked back.

  He'd looked back now.

  He looked different.

  Same face. Same build. But different in the way people got different when something had happened to them that they weren't ready for. His eyes had changed most. Whatever had been in them on the road — fear wearing the mask of aggression, the specific look of someone two days in who hadn't lost anyone yet — was gone.

  Something harder had replaced it.

  He'd lost someone.

  Thabo could see it the way he could see spawn patterns and gate formations now. The particular way a person held themselves after the system had taken something from them that they weren't getting back.

  The question was what he'd learned from it.

  The man's jaw tightened.

  "You," he said.

  Thabo met his eyes. "You made it."

  "No thanks to you." His voice was controlled. Measured. The voice of someone who had decided how this conversation was going to go before it started. "You pointed us at that gate. Told us we needed to move before dark."

  "You did need to move."

  "Three of my people didn't make it out."

  Thabo held his gaze. "I'm sorry."

  "Are you." Not a question.

  The main hall had gone quiet. Not suddenly — gradually, the way spaces went quiet when something was happening that people wanted to watch without appearing to watch. He could feel the attention without looking for it.

  His mother was in the hall.

  He didn't look at her.

  "What's your name," Thabo said.

  The man looked at him for a moment. "Vusi."

  "Vusi." Thabo kept his voice even. "The gate was forming. I told you the truth. You needed to move."

  "And my people who went toward it instead of away from it?"

  "Made a mistake."

  Something shifted in Vusi's face. Not anger exactly. Anger would have been easier. This was something colder. More deliberate. The expression of someone who had already decided where the blame lived and wasn't interested in revising that assessment.

  "You knew what was in that gate," Vusi said. "You knew what it would do."

  "I knew what type it was. I didn't know—"

  "You knew." Quiet. Certain. "The same way you knew about the spawn windows. The way you knew about the scout variants. The way you know things nobody else knows." He paused. "You pointed us at that gate and three of my people walked into it and didn't walk out."

  The hall was very still.

  Thabo looked at him.

  He wasn't wrong. Not entirely. Thabo had known the gate type. Had known the general threat level. Had pointed them toward it as a redirect — a direction to point their fear so he could get his group through the blockade without confrontation.

  He hadn't known three of them would go toward it instead of away.

  He hadn't known because he hadn't stayed to make sure.

  That was the truth underneath Vusi's truth and both of them knew it.

  "What do you want," Thabo said.

  Vusi looked at him for a long moment.

  "I want to know how you know what you know," he said. "And I want to know whose side you're on."

  The hall held its breath.

  Thabo held Vusi's gaze.

  He didn't have an answer for the second question that would satisfy this man. He wasn't sure he had one that would satisfy himself.

  "I'm on the side of the people behind me," he said.

  Vusi looked at the group arranged behind Thabo. At his mother. At Kagiso. At Aisha and Lena. At the Khumalo twins and Patricia and Mama Joyce and the two neighbours.

  Then back at Thabo.

  "So was I," he said quietly.

  He turned and walked out of the hall.

  The space he left behind was loud with everything nobody said.

  Thabo stood in it for a moment.

  Then he felt his mother beside him.

  Not touching. Just present. Close.

  He looked at the door Vusi had gone through.

  I want to know whose side you're on.

  The question sat in his chest where it hadn't been before.

  Not because he didn't have an answer.

  Because Vusi's version of that answer — protecting his people, making hard calls, pointing fear in a useful direction — had looked exactly like Thabo's version from the outside.

  And three people hadn't walked out of a gate because of it.

  His mother opened the notebook.

  Didn't write anything.

  Just held it open.

  Waiting for him to be ready to talk.

  He wasn't ready yet.

  But he would be.

  One step, he thought.

  Then the next.