The old helicopter coughed and caught.

The first rotor turned. Slow.

Then faster and faster.

The second rotor woke and matched it. Dust lifted from the floor in rings. The loose plastic on the crate stack flapped and snapped.

The machine shook and then smoothed down into a steady tremor.

Sera rested her palm on Luci’s head and felt the vibration come up through his skull and into her arm. She looked at Zubair’s hands. They were steady on the stick. She liked that. It gave her just a bit of confidence that they weren’t all going to die.

Elias watched the hangar mouth and counted shapes that would never move again. Lachlan rolled his neck and grinned at the way the world started to hum around his bones. Alexei narrowed his eyes and held the wind where he wanted it.

Heat from the burning yard surged once, pushed a hot breath through the door, tried to climb the air Zubair needed.

Zubair lifted his hand off the collective for half a second and leveled his palm at the mouth of the hangar.

Fire laid down.

The breath passed. The lane stayed clear.

He set his hand back and eased the throttle up.

The rotors blurred. The floor trembled. The nose wagged and then found center. Snow and ash spun in a tight funnel at the hangar mouth.

They slid forward two feet. Then three.

Zubair’s eyes did not leave the lane of clean air Alexei held using the moisture in the air. His heel eased a pedal. The tail answered. The machine drifted exactly where he wanted it.

"Hold," Elias grunted over the noise, eyes on the edges.

"Holding," Zubair replied, everything inside of him focusing on this one task.

Sera put her other hand on Luci’s ruff. The wolf shoved his head harder into her palm and grumbled low like a satisfied engine.

The skids kissed the threshold and lifted by a finger’s width.

The yard opened in front of them—fire, snow, wind, and a strip of black concrete that ran between ruined buildings into a night that had no lights left in it at all.

Zubair fed the transporter more fuel.

The machine slid out into the storm of heat and ash and rose slow, steady, straight, the doors at their backs still groaning on their tracks, the flames bowing aside from their path because he decided they would.

They cleared the threshold.

The rotors dug clean air.

The nose tipped just a bit.

And then they were moving.

------

The helicopter rose into the heat like it wanted to tear itself free of the world.

Smoke boiled through the yard, turned to ribbons by the rotors overhead.

The transport climbed higher, slow at first, then steadier as Zubair eased the controls and pulled them above the burning wreckage below.

The firelight made the windows glow red, the flames shrinking to thin tongues on the rooflines before the smoke swallowed them whole.

Zubair kept his hands loose, his shoulders steady. The machine obeyed without a fight.

Inside, no one spoke.

The transport’s hum pressed against ribs and teeth, a constant tremor that said they were flying but not far from falling.

The cabin smelled of oil and steel and blood that didn’t belong to anyone in the helicopter. Ash streaked the windows where the wind smeared it into gray shapes.

Sera sat against the right wall, Luci’s head heavy across her boots like his weight alone would keep her in place.

Her eyes stayed on the dark through the glass.

Not back at the fire and the destruction they had left behind. Not on the men across from her. Straight ahead, where the wind kept carving the world into strips of white and black.

Elias leaned near the left door, his rifle flat across his knees, his eyes on the horizon.

Lachlan sprawled beside him, his machete resting against the seat, grinning like he’d found the view funny in some private way.

Alexei sat near the back, arms crossed, watching the snow move under them with the same flat calm he gave everything.

The machine climbed through the smoke layer and out into clean night.

The rotors bit colder air, and the wind shoved them hard enough that Zubair leaned into it. He kept his jaw set and his hands still, like the air itself was an animal he refused to let bite.

Below, the world showed itself.

Endless ice.

Not flat. Not smooth. But a sea of white ice as far as the eye could see.

Ridges ran like scars across the surface where glaciers had split and crawled apart.

Black cracks veined the white. Frozen rivers bulged like trapped muscles under the snowpack. Some of them shifted even now—slow, heavy movement that left gaps big enough to swallow trucks.

Shapes moved on the ice.

The first one lifted its head near a fractured ridge.

A bear, but too big be recognizable by anything other than its size.

Its shoulders rose higher than the wrecked guard towers back at the lab.

Fur hung in clotted ropes down its sides. It turned its muzzle toward the helicopter, its black eyes catching light that wasn’t there, and then it sank back to all fours and kept moving.

The ice groaned under its weight.

Farther out, a pair of saber-toothed cats stalked a herd of something with too many antlers and not enough fear.

Snow blew over them all, turning the chase into gray silhouettes that flashed teeth and muscle before the wind erased the picture again.

There were no roads. No towns. No lights.

The world below didn’t look like it had ever belonged to people.

Humans were officially extinct in Country N.

The helicopter pushed south.

Wind cut across them hard enough to make the cabin shudder, and Zubair adjusted without a word.

The tail swung a fraction, then steadied again. His eyes stayed on the horizon where the night made a black wall ahead of them.

Lachlan leaned toward the window, cupping a hand to the glass like that would stop the dark from glaring back. "The big teddy bear down there just looked at me wrong," he shouted over the engine.

Elias didn’t glance over. "Wave at him next time. See if he waves back."

"Pretty sure he had hands," Lachlan said, grinning.

Alexei tilted his head, eyes on the ice far below. "Pretty sure he had friends."