Morning didn't bring urgency.
It brought routine.
People woke in slow waves and immediately started doing small, human things—stretching stiff backs, checking bruises, arguing over whose turn it was to hold the only decent knife while someone tore cloth into strips.
Damien let his eyes move over the camp without speaking.
The stone clearing looked different in full light. Not because it had changed—because they were finally seeing it. Low ridges cut the ground into shallow lanes. Cracks ran like seams across the slabs. The forest sat back from the stone line like it had been told to stay there.
No beast crossed that line.
Not once.
That was what the group clung to now. Not a feeling. A pattern.
Chris was kneeling near a cluster of packs, counting quietly under his breath. He stopped when he noticed Damien watching.
"We're not good," Chris said.
Damien walked over. "How bad?"
Chris nodded toward the pile. "Food's mostly snacks. Half-eaten stuff. A few cans, but they're heavy and no one wants to carry them if we have to move fast again."
Damien crouched and lifted one of the cans, felt the weight, then set it down.
"Water?" he asked.
Chris held up a plastic bottle with maybe a third left. "We've got containers, but not enough full ones. People keep sipping anyway."
Damien's gaze slid to the edge of the group.
A woman had no bag at all—just a knotted shirt slung over her shoulder. A man beside her carried two backpacks and kept shifting them between shoulders like his bones were already tired of him. Another survivor had a tote bag that looked ready to tear at the handle.
Not a plan.
Just whatever they'd grabbed when the world ended.
Tasha walked up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. "You see the way they're clustering?"
Damien didn't answer immediately. He watched it happen again—someone dragging their pack closer to the center of the camp without realizing they were doing it. Another person choosing to sit on open stone instead of near the edge, back turned to the forest.
"Yeah," Damien said. "They think this is solved."
Mark's voice cut across the clearing. "It is solved—at least for now."
He was standing with two others near the stone rise, demonstrating something. A faint thread of wind curled around his fingers, shaky but controlled enough to make people watch.
He caught Damien looking and lifted his chin slightly, like he'd won something.
"We're not helpless anymore," Mark said. "We've all got something now. That changes things."
"It changes some things," Damien replied.
Mark stepped closer. "It changes enough. We're alive. We found a place the beasts don't cross. We can breathe."
"Breathing isn't the same as surviving," Damien said.
Mark frowned like he wanted to argue, then glanced at Chris's pile of food and water and changed targets.
"We'll hunt," he said. "We'll get wood. The forest is right there."
Chris's mouth tightened. "And the beasts are right there."
Mark shrugged. "That's why we don't go alone."
A few people nodded at that. It sounded like leadership. It wasn't.
Leon slept through the talk, breathing steady. His leg was still wrapped and ugly, but he hadn't been screaming. That alone made people act like the worst was over.
Damien watched the edge of camp while everyone else watched Mark.
They were starting to do something dangerous.
They were building habits.
By late morning, the camp had shifted inward again, not by decision but by repetition. Packs moved. People sat closer. The outer part of the stone—the area closest to the forest line—thinned out.
The same place they'd stopped testing.
The same place Damien had wanted to push past yesterday.
Chris noticed him looking and lowered his voice. "If we move deeper, we'll have to carry all this."
Damien nodded. "And if we don't, we'll still have to carry it. Just later. With less food."
Chris didn't argue. He didn't have a better answer.
Tasha walked over with a snapped strap in her hand. "Anyone got cord?"
A man offered shoelaces. Someone else tore a strip off their shirt. They knotted it together into something that would hold for a day or two if they were lucky.
Damien watched the way the strap repair made people pause.
Everything they had was temporary.
They acted like it wasn't.
It happened when Damien's attention was on stone.
He was kneeling beside a low stack they'd built—half marker, half habit—when the sound hit.
Not a roar.
Not a charge.
A sharp, wet impact, like teeth meeting flesh.
A scream cut off halfway.
Damien was moving before the second heartbeat.
A blur flashed low across the stone, too fast for detail—lean and dark, about the size of a dog but moving like something that had done this before. It didn't run through the camp.
It cut in just far enough to bite.
Then it was already out, sprinting back toward the forest line, disappearing into brush before anyone could throw more than panic after it.
The injured man dropped to one knee, hands clamped around his calf. Blood spilled between his fingers, bright against the pale stone.
"Don't move," Damien snapped, sliding to a stop beside him.
The man was young—college age, maybe. Shaking, eyes wide, more offended than afraid for half a second like he couldn't accept he'd been touched.
"It was right there," he gasped. "I didn't—"
Damien pried his hands away.
Two puncture wounds. Deep. Clean. The bite wasn't wild.
It was placed.
"A predator that knew exactly how long it could stay," Damien said, mostly to himself.
Chris was already moving. "What do you need?"
"Watch the edge," Damien said. "Eyes on the forest line."
Chris went without argument, face tight. He scanned outward, jaw clenched. "I didn't see it coming."
Damien believed him.
No one had been watching the space it used.
Damien pressed cloth to the wound. "Hold this. Keep pressure."
The injured man hissed, then bit back a scream as Damien tightened the wrap.
People crowded in, talking over each other.
"Where did it come from?"
"Inside?" someone shouted, voice high. "It came from inside, didn't it?"
"No," Damien said without looking up. "From the edge."
Mark pushed through. Not panicked—angry.
"I thought the boundary—"
"It doesn't stop everything," Damien said. "It never did."
Mark's mouth opened to fire back, but the injured man cried out again and the sound cut through the argument like a blade.
Damien adjusted the binding. The wound wasn't fatal. Painful and dangerous if ignored. But it could be managed.
Avoidable.
Damien glanced toward the forest line.
Nothing moved.
No boar. No larger predator charging in to finish the job. No follow-up.
Just still trees and the empty stone between.
That's what made it worse.
The beast had come for one thing and left.
Not because it was pushed out.
Because it had never planned to stay.
Someone spoke quietly, the way people do when they're trying to make sense without admitting they're scared. "It didn't go far in."
Another voice picked it up immediately. "Yeah. It barely crossed."
Heads turned inward as if following a string.
Not because they felt anything.
Because they were imagining a map based on what they'd just seen.
Mark nodded slowly, confident again now that he had a narrative. "That thing didn't come near the middle."
Chris looked back over his shoulder at Damien. Damien didn't react.
He didn't want to give the group a simple answer.
Simple answers were how people stopped watching.
"Move camp in," someone said. "Just a bit."
"Closer together," another agreed. "Less space for it to slip through."
Tasha frowned. "Or we watch the edge like we're supposed to."
Mark shook his head. "Watching didn't stop it."
"It would've if someone was actually there," Tasha snapped.
Mark's expression tightened. "You want to keep sitting at the edge to prove a point?"
"I want us not to get picked off one by one," Tasha said.
The argument started to split the group into two instincts:
Hold position and improve disciplineMove inward and rely on distance
Damien finished tying off the cloth and stood.
He looked at the blood on his hands. Then at the thin stretch of stone near the forest line—the place no one had been standing when it happened.
He didn't say, I told you so.
He didn't say, we should have gone further yesterday.
He just watched people choose.
They shifted inward by degrees.
Packs dragged closer. A few heavy items—canned food, extra clothes—got moved by two people instead of one. Someone grunted as a strap dug into their shoulder. Another person dropped a bag with a hard thud and immediately tried to pick it back up like letting go meant losing it forever.
The outer-facing space narrowed until it looked intentional.
Safer.
Chris returned to Damien's side. "This isn't going to fix food."
"No," Damien said. "But it will make them feel like they fixed something."
Chris didn't argue.
That was the worst part. The best lies weren't spoken. They were acted out.
By late afternoon, the camp was tighter and quieter. People spoke in lower voices now, like volume could prevent teeth. The injured man lay with his leg elevated on a folded jacket, pale but awake.
Leon still slept.
Mark walked around the new camp line, satisfied, hands occasionally sparking with faint wind as if to remind everyone he could do something too.
Damien took position at the outermost edge again—where the stone met the forest line and the tracks had stopped.
He stood there alone.
Not because he wanted credit.
Because nobody else wanted that spot.
Ahead of him, the space remained empty.
The forest remained still.
And the only thing Damien trusted about the boundary was what it had already taught them:
If you stopped paying attention, something would use that moment.
Not to kill everyone.
Just to take one.