Asher's pov
The forest swallowed sound first.
That was the thing that unsettled me most—not the darkness, not the way the trees pressed close like ribs around a lung, but the absence of noise where noise should have been. No distant engines. No human interference. Even the birds seemed to understand this place was not meant to be disturbed.
I stepped past the last broken strip of road and into soil that had never known concrete. Pine needles crunched beneath my boots, muted, damp. The air was colder here, sharper, carrying the scent of earth and something old—something untouched. No signal bars. No satellites. Just instinct and the low hum of direction burning behind my eyes.
She was here.
Not because technology had told me so—though it had tried—but because everything in me had gone
