Harlan left at dawn. The moment he stepped outside, the north wind hit him in the face—sharp, cold, like it was testing whether he was actually ready to go alone. To the east, a thin pink line promised a clear day.

  He walked by himself—first time in a long while. Snow crunched loud under his boots.

  Freedom. No Re’s stick. No grumbling. No cleaning cages. Just him and the world—an old feeling he’d forgotten.

  But once the house disappeared around a bend, the snow stopped looking so white. Everything went quiet. The sky seemed to dim.

  Harlan caught himself looking back. His hand found the revolver’s grip on its own. The cold metal steadied him. A little.

  *Easy, Harlan. You can do this.* He ran through every technique he’d learned, one after another.

  Then he exhaled and kept moving, dragging the sled behind him. He roughly remembered where he needed to go. Straight to the stream, then over the pass, then farther—toward the rocky gullies where, according to the old man, kharirr grew.

  *Or I could just bolt… Go back to Garret. The old man probably won’t chase me…* Doubt wormed into his chest.

  *No. I can’t. I promised. Garret, Re. And I can’t fool the old man anyway. His temper’s rotten, but he’s given me a lot.* Harlan made the call. *Damn it. I follow the plan. Then I’ll see.*

  That day passed quietly. Harlan walked steady over the hard snow crust, took a few short breaks. Before sunset he set up camp.

  The fire refused to catch.

  *Come on,* he cursed silently. *Fine. We do it like this.*

  He struck a match. When the flame took, he used the Field to guide a stream of air, fanning it like a bellows. The branches finally caught. He could boil water.

  Between rocks and sparse bushes, it was dead quiet—no rustle, no birds. But once darkness fell, the silence turned heavy. He doused the fire, switched on the heater, and crawled into the tent. He didn’t even lie down at first. He sat and listened to the dark until his eyelids grew heavy.

  *If I grind myself down, any attack will turn me into food. Sleep.* He lay back, still listening for a long time before he drifted off.

  Sleep didn’t come clean. He dozed, jolted awake, dozed again—ten times in one night.

  *Maybe I should turn back?* His head throbbed. *No. The old man will skin me alive. He’ll laugh for a year.*

  “Captain Shits-His-Pants,” Harlan muttered into the dark, mocking Re’s voice.

  He forced himself up, packed camp, and moved on.

  *I need some kind of alarm for nights. I won’t last like this.*

  ?

  The next day was the same: long marches from dawn to dusk with short breaks. Then camp again.

  An idea had come to him on the trail, and now, right after dinner, he put it to work. Harlan pulled out two tin cans he’d used for provisions.

  “Forgive me, Re. No idea how hard these are to get out here.” He shoved the food into other containers, then punched holes in the can bottoms with his knife for tying.

  He took a couple of bolts—the ones he carried for daily Field practice—and dropped them into the cans. Makeshift bells.

  He shook one. The sound was sharp, loud, and grating.

  *Perfect.* Harlan grinned to himself. *Why didn’t I think of this earlier?*

  He sharpened a few sticks and drove them into the snow around the tent as makeshift stakes. With thin cord, he hung the can-bells from the stake tops. They dangled freely, still in the quiet air. Then he ran his main rope low to the ground—ankle height—forming a triangular perimeter around the tent. He tied that rope to the bases of the hanging cans. Now if anything hit the line, it should yank a can and raise a racket.

  He tested it with a light kick. The cans answered at once, bolts clanging hard against tin. It worked.

  Satisfied, Harlan killed the fire, turned on the heater, and crawled into the tent. The revolver lay close, like last night. But this time he didn’t sit there listening to the dark. He went straight to sleep.

  He hoped that if someone—or something—came into his camp, he’d hear it.

  With that thought, he fell into deep, unbroken sleep for the first time in two days.

  ?

  Morning found him rested and strong.

  *I have to tell Garret about the alarm,* he thought, pleased, as he packed.

  That was his third day alone. It went exactly as planned, no trouble. A calm night. Then the fourth day of endless marching, another stop…

  On the evening of the fifth day, he couldn’t set up his alarm. The terrain was too rocky. Stakes wouldn’t bite, and there were no trees or bushes nearby.

  Only two options came to mind: trust blind luck, or pack the fully set camp and move somewhere he could rig the alarm.

  He was so exhausted he didn’t even want to think about it. He was almost ready to risk it when he remembered Garret’s voice.

  *Ignorance and laziness kill more people in the Wildlands than beasts do.*

  Harlan exhaled hard and started breaking camp. Half-blind in the dark, he moved almost at random, hauling everything three hundred—five hundred meters off.

  But there he managed it. Crawling into the tent, he lay down with satisfaction and fell asleep almost at once.

  The dream was bad—he’d seen some version of it before, more than once this past year. His past came in a twisted chain.

  He was back in a stone tunnel, swinging a pick.

  “Anyone who misses quota gets no bonus,” a voice echoed, but the foreman was nowhere to be seen.

  Harlan walked toward the voice and—stepped out by a fire. Thorren crouched over an electric heater.

  “I’ll get this thing running, or I’ll smash it to hell on the rocks,” the big man said, half joking, and thumped the casing with his fist.

  “Let me see,” Thomas said, appearing like a shadow behind him.

  “And you’re a specialist?” Thorren grumbled, turning.

  “Thorren, don’t!” Harlan shouted.

  Too late. The big man turned—and took a bullet straight in the face.

  “No!” Harlan slammed a kinetic impulse into the traitor, then drew his revolver and fired.

  One shot. Two. Three. Seven… the rounds never ran out. He kept firing without stopping. Blood everywhere. The air stank of powder and something sharp, metallic.

  The traitor looked at him like nothing happened and laughed, predatory.

  Harlan woke drenched in cold sweat, shaking. Thomas’s laughter still rang in his ears, mixing with the real clatter outside.

  No time to pity himself. The bell-cans were going mad. Something had tangled in the trip line.

  *MONSTER. If it hits the tent, I’m done.*

  He grabbed the revolver, checked the cylinder by instinct, and burst outside.

  In the weak glow of the heater bleeding through the canvas, he caught a glimpse of it—large, compact, graceful. Like a giant cat, only its long fur carried a deep blue sheen that blended with the rocks. The predator had snagged itself in the line. The cans kept shrieking while it tried to free a hind leg.

  The moment Harlan appeared, the beast stopped. It gave a short guttural growl, like stone grinding on stone, and then—simply ripping the rope and stakes free—lunged at him.

  Harlan, still half inside the nightmare, didn’t get his magic up in time. He did the one thing he could—threw himself aside and hit the snow hard. The blue blur tore past. Packed crust slammed his back. The sled chains chimed nearby.

  Flat on the ground, he raised the revolver and fired twice.

  Bang. Bang.

  The animal yelped—but didn’t retreat. It pivoted fast, dropped its massive head low, and charged again, aiming for his throat.

  *Too close. I won’t make it.* Panic locked him for a heartbeat.

  Then another memory surfaced—Thorren, his kinetic strikes, hurling predators away.

  Harlan didn’t think. He dumped every ounce of stress and fear into a single impulse and turned it into raw kinetic force. Not the precise, guided strike Re drilled into him—this was wide, brutal power. Thorren’s style.

  The beast, already within a meter, howled and flew back ten meters. Something thudded. A body hit snow. The tin clatter died instantly.

  Harlan gasped for air. Pain lanced through his skull. Backlash—worse than anything he’d felt in a long time, maybe ever. His whole body ached from the violent movement and the fall. He rolled, forced himself to a knee, then stood.

  Silence pressed down. Under starlight and the pale wash of the moons, he couldn’t see the beast.

  Only its heavy, ragged breathing and a low broken growl came from the dark. Wounded. Alive. Waiting.

  Harlan aimed toward the sound, gripping the revolver in both hands. He knew it could leap any second—one last desperate charge.

  Then he saw them: two yellow points, glowing in the black, catching the faint light. A soft growl. The eyes drew closer.

  No time to think. Harlan held his breath for a heartbeat and then emptied the cylinder on the exhale—five shots straight into those lights, steering the bullets with Field resonance.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  A long, terrible scream. Then a wet rasp—cut off mid-sound. Silence.

  Harlan stood still. Only then did he notice his fingers—numb from cold and strain. He stared at his hand.

  *Did I…?*

  Another thought followed, sharp as a blade: *What if I missed? What if it wasn’t even a beast? I dumped a full cylinder into the dark on pure emotion…* He swallowed hard. *Careful. Don’t let emotion drive.*

  He drew his spare revolver. “No time to reload.”

  On shaking legs, he walked toward the last rasping breaths.

  A few dozen meters in, he found it. The big cat-like predator lay in bloodied snow, barely moving. The yellow eyes were dull. A weak, broken breath still came.

  Harlan’s stomach dropped when he saw it was a pregnant female.

  *In another world… Re would’ve gone out of his mind with joy,* he thought. The hermit didn’t have anything like this. He’d patch it, drag it back to the menagerie, study the mutations. But Harlan couldn’t transport it safely. He couldn’t heal it. And all-in-all he had a different task.

  He stepped close and finished it with a single controlled shot to end the suffering.

  *I’m sorry. I didn’t have a choice.* He gave the rounded belly one last look.

  Then he turned and trudged back toward camp. Each step landed like a hammer in his head. But he had to move. A corpse and gunfire would draw other predators from all around. He was alone. He couldn’t gamble.

  Breathing hard, he tore camp down in a rush.

  ?

  He walked for a long time through the dark, roughly toward where kharirr grew. Or so he thought.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  He made his first stop only at dawn. Rest wasn’t an option—he had to repack everything he’d thrown onto the sled. It took two hours.

  *If I packed like normal, I’d be done in forty minutes.*

  But lost time wasn’t the worst part.

  He’d gotten turned around. And the sullen sky, thick with cloud, gave him nothing to read.

  *Compass.*

  He dug through his gear. It wasn’t there.

  *Did I lose it during the rush?* Cold sank into his chest.

  *Track back while the prints are still there…* His mind swung wildly. *Bad idea. Dangerous.* He forced himself to slow down. *Map. I have to make the map work.*

  Snow started falling.

  *Now the way back is gone.*

  He studied Re’s map. *I was following the riverbed—or a stream. I didn’t cross it in the dark, so I should still be on the left side, moving north. If I go right, I hit the stream. Unless I’ve been drifting left the whole time…*

  Re’s “map” looked more like a molecular lattice sketch than a navigation document. “Rocks here,” “depression here,” “moss grows here”—great for a botanist, useless for a man trying not to die in a snow desert. The scale was approximate, and there were no real landmarks. Nothing like “a tooth-shaped boulder.”

  “All right.” Harlan spoke aloud, forcing logic into his voice. “If the stream is to the right, I go east. Sun’s hidden, but it’s that way.”

  He dragged the sled.

  The day stretched into an endless grind. Snow plain gave way to boulder fields, then back to loose snow up to his knees. Harlan pushed on, waiting for water sound, for a dark line of channel.

  An hour. Two. Four.

  Only snow and gray rock.

  By evening the sky darkened, blending into the ground until everything became one gray mass. Landmarks vanished.

  *I should’ve reached water by midday,* he thought, and this time the chill down in his spine wasn’t the wind. *Maybe the stream froze and got buried. Maybe I crossed it without knowing.*

  Harlan stopped. The map trembled in his hands. His throat tightened.

  He spun the map around, trying to force the landscape to match. *That ridge… is that it? Or just another pile of stone?*

  “Calm down!” he snapped at himself. The sound died pathetic in the empty space.

  He sat on the sled, shut his eyes, and stayed still for several minutes. When the surge passed, he turned constructive again.

  *If I didn’t find the stream, I drifted too far left during the night. So I need to cut harder right. Or I misunderstood the ravine entirely.*

  He camped where he stood. Too late to push farther. He set his tin alarms like a machine. The night passed in a fever haze. In his half-sleep, the compass “vanished” on purpose, the map lied, and Re had sent him out here to die.

  Next day he changed course. He walked, staring at every stone, searching for anything familiar.

  By noon, the wind shifted. Harlan caught a smell—faint, but unmistakable. Iron and offal.

  Predators. He grabbed his revolver and crouched.

  The smell led him. Two hundred meters more. Around a tall rock—and he stopped dead.

  A small clearing, trampled and drenched in blood that had frozen into dark red ice.

  In the center lay what was left of the huge cat.

  Harlan stepped closer, sleeve over his nose. Not much remained. Someone—or something pack-hunting and very hungry—had stripped it almost clean. Thick bones chewed through. Ribs jutted up like broken cage bars. The snow was stamped with countless paw prints.

  “Damn…” Harlan breathed.

  He recognized the place. There—twenty-five meters out—were traces of his old camp. That was where his tent had been.

  He’d made a massive loop. Two days of brutal marching, panic, and nerves—just to return to the starting point.

  Harlan sank onto the sled and let out a short, broken laugh.

  “Navigation genius, that's me.”

  But the laugh faded fast. He stared at the gnawed skeleton. If he’d stayed here then—or if he’d returned a little earlier, when the feast was in full swing—his bones would be lying beside it.

  *All right.* He pulled out the map and pencil. *At least now I know exactly where I am. I’m here. Zero point.* He swallowed. *Maybe I can still find the compass. If I get lucky.*

  The compass never turned up. But the map finally made sense. He knew where he’d come from the first time, and where he’d gone wrong.

  “The stream is that way.” He pointed with certainty—toward the direction that had looked like “back” before. “I just made a loop.”

  Harlan stood. Fear receded, replaced by anger at his own stupidity and a cold, hard resolve. He tightened his pack straps, gave the remains of his first trophy a last look, and walked on.

  This time he wouldn’t get lost.

  ?

  The travel slid back into a bleak routine. He moved north, always checking behind him.

  Cold resolve smothered panic, but not paranoia. He’d seen predator tracks and what they’d done to the cat. That meant the quiet was a lie. He had to be ready for a sudden hit. Every few hours he stopped to listen. Any rustle, any snow-creak he would’ve blamed on wind before now felt like danger.

  Nothing attacked him.

  The stream veered right. He followed new markers, but he didn’t lose the line, even in blowing snow.

  Four days later he reached the target zone. The land changed—flat white gave way to gentle slopes. Here, among rocks, small bare patches broke through where moss fought the snow. The mountain foot was scored with frozen rivulets. Even the air felt a little damper, which made no sense.

  “Kharirr… kharirr…” Harlan checked Re’s schematic and scanned the area. “It has to be here.”

  He searched for hours, methodical, combing every meter. A couple of plants looked close, but he compared them to his sketches and rejected them.

  *Re said it grows everywhere in this area.*

  By evening, tired and frustrated, he decided to camp. Dusk was close, but not yet dark.

  *To hell with it. Morning. In this light I’ll miss it anyway.*

  He pitched his tent in a gap between two boulders and lit the compact heater. After dinner, nature called. Harlan walked to a nearby pile of stones.

  He unzipped and started relieving himself on a bush by the rock.

  *Tomorrow I go farther north…* His mind was already planning.

  The bush jerked.

  Harlan jumped back—there’s nothing more helpless than a man in that position. No beast was there. Instead the plant itself had folded its leaves.

  “Wait…” Harlan leaned in, stunned. “Oh, there you are, you bastard.” He hissed. “I just pissed on my trophy.”

  Kharirr looked so harmless it was hard to believe Re valued it at all, or that it could be found like this. Harlan finished quickly and zipped up. He pulled his drawings from his back pocket. No doubt. This was kharirr.

  He started to reach for the shovel—then stopped.

  *No. It’s dark. I’ll damage the root. Tomorrow, daylight, container.* He hesitated, then added, grimly, *And let it… air out.*

  Satisfied he’d finally found the damned plant, he set his alarm and returned to the tent.

  *Tomorrow I head home.*

  At the first pale streaks of dawn, Harlan climbed out. He went straight to the rocks.

  The spot was empty. Only a small, trampled circle of snow.

  “What the—?” His head snapped around.

  Five meters away, farther from camp, the same little bush sat in the snow. A thin groove trailed behind it.

  “It moved,” Harlan muttered, a mix of irritation and disbelief. “Where do you think you’re going? Come to daddy.”

  He pulled out the dense container, a garden trowel, and thick work gloves.

  He crouched and slid the trowel under the plant.

  That was when kharirr acted.

  Harlan had been sure the gloves would protect him. But a thin, almost invisible leaf twisted like a snake and bit into his bare wrist where it peeked out from under his sleeve.

  It felt like something grabbed his nerve from the inside.

  A burning numbness followed instantly.

  He managed only a short, strangled sound before dropping to his knees. His own weight became unbearable. His vision blurred, nausea hit like a wave, and then—black.

  He came to soon after, but he couldn’t move.

  Snow, rocks—everything swam into a gray smear. His head rang. His stomach clenched in spasms. He lay on his side, drooling helplessly as saliva froze at the corner of his mouth.

  Through the haze he saw motion. Kharirr—like a small spiteful creature—rustled its roots over the snow.

  It was leaving.

  *Kharirr—Harlan: 1–0,* flashed through his mind, bitter. *Fine. Just wait.*

  Five long minutes later, pins and needles stabbed his fingers. Feeling returned in his hand. The paralysis receded. He could wiggle his fingers, then his arm. Gasping, he pushed himself up against the sled. His vision still swam. His body shook.

  *Every time… every time I black out, I could get eaten, stabbed, or left to die. Twice in a week. First a beast, now a flower. Am I that lucky?*

  Then a colder thought struck hard enough to make him sweat under his coat.

  *What if the kharirr didn’t “run”? What if it stayed and kept poisoning me?*

  He saw it in his mind—leaning over him, tapping leaf-bites into his throat, his face, again and again, while his body stiffened in the cold and life drained away.

  Harlan flinched, then forced himself to move. Cold resolve snapped back into place. He checked the revolver—just to steady his nerves. Loaded.

  “Come here, you little maniac,” he rasped, rubbing his numb wrist. “Not this time.”

  On heavy legs, he approached the plant. Carefully, in gloves, he used the trowel to loosen the soil around the roots. This time he allowed no carelessness, shielding his wrist with his other hand. Slow. Methodical. He lifted it with the root clump intact and lowered it into the container.

  The plant smelled faintly unpleasant.

  He knew why.

  *You ride at the back of the sled,* he decided.

  Then he pulled out the fertilizer packet Re had given him.

  “Here you go, you crawling piece of trash. Eat.” He dumped a generous amount into the soil and—still muttering a few choice curses—sealed the lid tight.

  *Done. Now we’re even.*

  He had at least five days for the return trip, and he was sure he’d make the deadline.