Repairing Vajra was going to take time. It always did.

But this wasn’t Shen Cong’s first rebuild. He’d brought Vajra back from near-total damage once before, during the apocalypse storm — piece by piece, system by system, working through it until the truck was whole again. He knew the process. He knew his own patience.

The electrical system came first. No power meant cold food, dead screens, and no progress on the radio studies he’d been putting off. Everything else could wait for electricity.

July 13th.

Power restored. Solar panels back up and charging. The lights came on. The laptop came back to life.

In between guided Activity sessions — slow, careful work threading energy into Vajra’s damaged systems — he propped the laptop on his knees and worked through the radio reference collection. When his concentration flagged, he climbed to the roof with a nearly-expired bottle of Nanguo milk drink and a bag of walnuts from the Carrefour haul, cracked the shells one-handed, and sat in the wind.

The wind out here carried a noticeably higher concentration of ambient Activity since the storm. He’d started thinking of it as nutrition — something the air provided that he could absorb passively just by being outside.

Life is what you make of it, even at the end of the world.

At night he watched the stars.

The rain had scoured the atmosphere clean. The sky after the flood was clearer than anything he’d seen since childhood — Cygnus, Lyra, Aquila, Sagittarius, Scorpius, Ophiuchus, Hercules, Corona Australis, Capricornus, Delphinus, Equuleus. He identified them one by one, working outward from the Summer Triangle: Vega, Altair, Deneb, the three brightest points overhead, easy anchors for everything else.

One star. Two stars. Three.

He hadn’t counted stars since kindergarten. Pre-apocalypse life hadn’t left much room for looking up — school, then the warehouse, then the endless preparation, always something immediate demanding attention. Out here in the silence, with nothing urgent left to do after sundown, the stars turned out to be genuinely interesting company.

A streak of light crossed through Ophiuchus and vanished.

The corner of his mouth twitched.

A meteor. Of course.

In the old world, a meteor meant a wish. Now it just pulled at something dark and unresolved in his chest. The shower that had ended civilization — where had it actually come from? What had it carried? Why had it done what it did?

The stars kept their own counsel. The wind moved across his shaved head and gave him nothing.

“If I hadn’t shaved, my hair would be everywhere right now.”

Thwack.

The slingshot sent a small stone across thirty meters of open ground and cracked the empty Nanguo bottle cleanly, knocking it five or six meters further out.

He picked up another stone. Drew back the eight-strand elastic. Another crack — the bottle bounced another seven or eight meters, now sitting forty-odd meters away.

In close range he could do whatever he wanted with it: punch through, or hit the base just right to send it rolling. Both felt equally effortless. The Activity-enhanced reflexes and muscle control had elevated his slingshot from “excellent” to something he didn’t have a word for yet.

He’d been watching Z Nation again on the laptop the previous night — the one about the survivor group escorting Murphy, the man with zombie virus antibodies, across the country to the last functioning lab in California. One of the group’s members went by “10K,” named for his goal of killing ten thousand zombies, and his slingshot work was legitimately impressive. Headshots on moving targets, consistent, fast.

Shen Cong’s current benchmark was matching 10K’s level. With the Activity advantage, he figured he’d probably exceed it without too much trouble.

Though if he was being honest, he identified less with 10K and more with Murphy — the guy who got infected and survived, who started turning into something new, who existed in the space between human and whatever came next. That resonated.

He also saw a bit of Citizen Z in himself — the character who stayed back at his base with a massive communication setup, trying to reach survivors, trading information rather than fighting his way across the country. Citizen Z had a dog, too. So did Will Smith’s character in I Am Legend.

Everyone in these stories has a dog.

He thought about Madame Roland and her famous line: “The more I know of people, the more I love my dog.”

“Liberty, liberty,” he muttered, slinging another stone. “How many crimes are committed in your name.”

The bottle flew.

He had a pile of small stones gathered from the drainage channels nearby and a goal of driving the bottle two hundred meters out before he stopped for the day. He reached for the next stone, pulled back the sling —

The bottle vanished.

Something had come out of nowhere, snatched it off the ground, and leaped onto a nearby boulder. It was crouching there now, holding the plastic bottle in its front paws, chewing on it.

Shen Cong was through the roof hatch and back inside Vajra before he’d consciously decided to move.

He sealed the hatch, opened a side viewport, and looked through the glass.

A rabbit.

More or less the size of a domestic rabbit — not the dramatic scale increase he’d seen in Burrowers or Gnawrats. Looked almost ordinary, honestly. But it was currently eating a plastic bottle. Gnawing through the sides methodically, chewing the fragments, swallowing them. In under a minute, the entire bottle was gone.

That is definitely a mutated rabbit.

He watched it for a moment, then made a decision.

He wanted a live specimen.

The dead creatures he’d studied so far — Burrowers, Fangwolves, Gnawrats — had given him three useful data points: edible Activity-rich meat, metallic Activity cores in the dense bone structures, and across-the-board intelligence reduction with increased aggression. But corpses had limits. To understand how the Activity was actually reshaping living biology, he needed something alive. Something he could observe over time, run tests on, compare against its own baseline.

The rabbit was small, apparently not very dangerous, and right there.

He tied a piece of Fangwolf meat to a length of rope and dangled it out the window.

The rabbit, which had apparently decided that plastic was merely the appetizer, immediately redirected its attention toward the meat.

While it ate, Shen Cong fashioned a quick noose from wire and a steel rod, reached it out through the window, and dropped it over the rabbit’s neck with the kind of precision that came from twenty meters of slingshot accuracy translated into a slightly different skill set.

Click.

The noose cinched. The rabbit made an indignant sound — goo goo — twisted toward him with what appeared to be genuine outrage, then turned back around and kept eating the Fangwolf meat.

The intelligence on these things is something else.

He tightened the wire, got the pitchfork under the rabbit while it was still chewing, lifted it into the cargo section, and dropped it into a steel bucket temporarily while he welded together a proper cage. Half an hour’s work. The rabbit complained the entire time.

Subject acquired.

He bound its legs and got to work.

The rabbit continued to express its displeasure throughout the examination. Shen Cong ignored it. In practical terms this animal was either a research subject or a future meal, and either outcome was acceptable.

First observation: no metallic Activity core.

He pried open the rabbit’s mouth and checked the incisors carefully. They were slightly enlarged compared to a normal rabbit’s, but the color was wrong — yellowish, organic-looking, none of the dark silver metallic sheen he’d seen on Fangwolf fangs, Burrower mandibles, or Gnawrat incisors. Whatever made those structures special, it wasn’t present here.

Second observation: claws also unremarkable.

Slightly sharper than a domestic rabbit’s, but again, no metallic quality. No Activity core.

Coat, skin, general physiology — nothing dramatically different from a normal rabbit, at least on visual inspection.

And yet the Activity was clearly present. He could feel it moving through the animal — the same sense he had of Vajra’s systems, or of the ambient energy in the air around him, but biological. A living thing with Activity distributed through its tissues.

He’d been developing a theory about the relationship between Activity and radiation for a while now. The evidence kept stacking up: every major storm brought surges of both radiation and Activity simultaneously. When the storm passed, both dropped together. The Geiger counter and his own Activity sense tracked each other almost perfectly.

They had to be related. He couldn’t prove it definitively — the equipment wasn’t there — but his own sensitivity to Activity had given him a secondary data source. When he reached out with that sense, what he perceived felt electromagnetic. Possibly radioactive in some technical sense. The Activity in the rabbit, the Activity bleeding off Vajra’s frame, the Activity drifting in the open air — all of it registered as the same kind of phenomenon, just at different concentrations and in different substrates.

He couldn’t take Activity from a living creature directly. He could absorb what it shed passively — the ambient bleed from its biology — or he could eat it. Those were the options.

He himself was doing the same thing constantly, shedding trace amounts of Activity into the environment around him.

He typed two words into his notes and stared at them.

Metal.

Electromagnetic radiation.

He sat with that for a while, frowning at the screen, something assembling itself at the back of his mind that wasn’t quite ready to become a thought yet.

(End of Chapter 13)