They call it the Homeland Trace.

No one remembers who named it, only that it has always been here—a long, unnaturally flat corridor cutting through broken land, wide enough for columns to move without slowing, old enough to appear on maps that no one trusts anymore. Before everything ended, people used it to get somewhere else. Now it only leads through.

The storm has been hanging overhead all day, low and swollen, the kind that never quite breaks. Lightning flickers inside the clouds every few seconds, distant and silent, like memory trying and failing to surface. Each flash outlines the valley ahead of us, and each time it does, the bones reappear.

They are everywhere.

Skulls, femurs, ribs—bleached clean, scattered without pattern. Not buried. Not claimed. Stripped of flesh long ago by animals or weather or hunger, but not long enough for the land to take them back. Grass has not grown through the eye sockets yet. Dirt has not settled into the curves. They lie exposed, fragile, waiting.

We stay low behind a collapsed embankment, pressed into the wet ground, breathing through our mouths. The air carries ozone, sharp and clean, the way it does when power moves through sealed systems. Beneath it is the smell of rust and something faintly sweet that shouldn’t be there anymore.

The machines are coming.

You hear them before you see them—not with engines, but with movement: the soft grinding of treads, the controlled adjustment of suspension systems compensating for uneven ground. Armored carriers, dull and faceless, rolling in a line along the Trace as if the land itself were guiding them. They move with the patience of doctrine, not urgency. They are not hunting out of anger. They are performing a sweep.

When the first carrier enters the valley, the sound changes.

Crunch.

It’s unmistakable. A brittle, hollow sound, multiplied again and again as weight meets bone. Skulls collapse under steel without resistance. The noise carries, sharp in the still air, and something inside me tightens in response, as if my own body recognizes the sound before my mind does.

No one reacts. The machines do not slow. The people inside them do not look down.

Why the bones are here is a question without an answer that matters anymore. Maybe this was a gathering point. Maybe people believed the Trace was safe because it always had been. Maybe they were moving when they were caught, or waiting when they should have fled. The reasons have faded away. Only the remains are precise.

We wait for the line to pass.

The storm continues to hover, offering no rain, no mercy. Each flash of lightning freezes the scene: armored hulls gleaming dully, bones snapping beneath them, the long corridor stretching beyond sight in both directions. It feels staged, like a warning preserved just long enough to be witnessed.

I think about warmth.

Not heat—warmth. The kind that comes from enclosed spaces, from walls that hold, from places where the wind doesn’t reach you. I try to remember the last time warmth existed without effort, without calculation. The memory slips away before it can settle.

There is nothing warm ahead of us. We know this. We move anyway.

When the last carrier clears the valley, the sound fades back into wind and distant thunder. The Trace is quieter now, though nothing has changed. The bones are more broken than before. The valley looks the same.

We emerge slowly, one at a time, careful not to silhouette ourselves against the sky. Our boots avoid what they can, but not everything. A rib snaps under my heel, softer than I expected. I pause, then continue. Apologies don’t change outcomes.

As we move along the edge of the Trace, I notice details I hadn’t before. A fragment of cloth tangled in scrub. A cracked lens from a pair of glasses. A shoe sole, tread worn smooth, its owner long gone. These are not artifacts from some distant age. These people were here recently enough to believe.

That may be the worst part.

The machines will return. The storm will eventually break. The land will, in time, cover what remains. But for now, the evidence stays on the surface, and so do we.

We do not talk. There is nothing to say that hasn’t already been said by the wreckage itself. We move because standing still invites attention, and attention is fatal.

Somewhere beyond the valley, the Trace narrows and disappears into terrain that once had names. We aim for that, not because it promises safety, but because it promises difference. Staying here guarantees nothing but repetition.

Another flash of lightning silhouettes us as we go. For a moment, I wonder how we look from a distance—small figures moving through the aftermath, careful not to disturb what cannot be restored.

Then the light fades.

We continue forward, living not after the end, but inside it, step by careful step, through the Homeland Trace and whatever waits beyond.