For a day and another night, the Behemoth was their entire universe. The sea changed from lead-grey to a deep, tropical blue as they passed south of the ruined Hawaiian islands. The air grew warmer, thicker with the scent of alien blossoms carried on the salt wind. Then, on the second dawn, a dark line appeared on the horizon. It grew, resolving not into a simple coast, but into a majestic, jagged spine of mountains rising from the sea, their slopes a cascade of vibrant, unchecked green.
"The old shape of Japan," Wolfen said, his voice pulled from its grim reverie by the sight. "Or close enough. The islands… merged. Tectonics got ambitious after the collapse."
It was a new world, born from the death throes of the old. As dusk painted the volcanic peaks in shades of purple and gold, Wolfen stood at their high vantage point. "Time to go."
"Jump off?" Derek balked, peering over the edge at the churning water and sharp rocks hundreds of feet below. "We'll be smashed!"
"We're not what we were," Wolfen stated, matter-of-fact. "Your bones are denser. Your muscles are tuned. The Behemoth will wade into shallower water by midnight. The impact will be… manageable."
Without another word, he stepped off the ledge.
He didn't leap. He simply walked into open air and dropped, a black speck against the darkening sky.
A collective curse was swallowed by the wind. They looked at each other—at Eva's resolute face, at Maya's determined set of her jaw, at Leo's gritted teeth, at Jordan's calculated nod. One by one, they followed.
The fall was a terrifying, silent rush. The world rushed up—the Behemoth's mossy flank, then the white froth of water around its ankles, then the dark, wet sand of a secluded cove.
They landed not with splats, but with resonant THUD-CRUNCHES that cratered the ground. Sand and rock shot out in rings around their points of impact. Derek rolled, coming up in a crouch, his legs buzzing but unbroken. Leo laughed, a wild, adrenaline-fueled sound. Maya touched the ground as if surprised to be solid. Jordan immediately began assessing their surroundings.
Wolfen was already brushing sand from his sleeves. "See? Manageable."
They were on a beach at the foot of the immense new landmass. The Behemoth, unconcerned, continued its timeless march westward into deeper waters, leaving them behind.
"Now," Wolfen said, "we go south."
With Jordan's internal mapping—a perfect, three-dimensional mental chart built from the watch's data and his own observations—they moved. They were not in Japan, but on the colossal, fused land-bridge that now connected the Asian continent to the former island chain. They traveled through landscapes of surreal beauty and profound ruin. Cities of glass and steel were now elaborate, crumbling terrariums, strangled by vines and inhabited by flocks of iridescent, six-winged birds. Silent highways were cracked meadows of luminous fungi.
For Eva, it was heartbreakingly beautiful. The relentless grey and brown of the American wastes were gone. Here, life had not just survived; it had exploded, painting over humanity's graffiti with violent, exuberant color. "It's beautiful," she whispered once, watching a creature like a fox with bioluminescent fur dart through the skeleton of a bullet train.
"They are," Wolfen agreed quietly. "The animals. The plants. They didn't ask for any of this. They just… adapted."
They avoided the shambling dead not out of fear, but out of grim pragmatism. Where there were concentrations of the basic infected, there were often other things—twisted hybrids the Architects had discarded, or stranger, wilder mutations spawned by the Thantos-III strain. They were shadows moving at the edge of perception, howls that weren't canine, shapes in the trees that had too many legs. The land was alive, and not all of it was friendly.
They crossed a shattered, overgrown monument that had once marked a border, entering what the watch labeled as the Vietnam Sector.
Days blurred into a week of steady, cautious travel. The watch on Eva's wrist pulsed more insistently, the signal for Lab B3 growing stronger. The terrain began to change again, the overwhelming wilderness giving way to more frequent scars of the old war—rusted tanks half-swallowed by jungle, the stark geometry of abandoned concrete bunkers.
Finally, they crested a jungle-covered ridge, looking down into a wide valley.
There it was.
It didn't look like the sterile, white facility of their nightmares. Lab B3 was built into and around a sprawling, pre-collapse military base. High, reinforced perimeter walls topped with shimmering energy fields encased a compound of blocky, utilitarian buildings. A massive satellite dish, rusted but intact, dominated one corner. The jungle pressed against the walls but had not reclaimed it; the area for a hundred yards around the compound was bare, scorched earth, as if regularly cleansed by fire. It was a fortress. Order imposed ruthlessly upon the chaotic green.
They lay in the dense undergrowth at the ridge's edge, looking down at their destination. Somewhere in that sterile, guarded maze was Lily Rostova. And in Room 4, a secret meant for Eva.
The last leg of their impossible journey was over. The heist, the rescue, the confrontation—that was about to begin. They were no longer travelers. They were invaders.