Chapter 36: Passing the Torch (The Soil)

The mud on Leo’s boots was still wet from the riverbank, a dark, heavy hitchhiker that threatened to pull him back toward the safety of the perimeter fence. David didn’t look back to see if the boy was keeping up. In the Ocala scrub, sound travelled in jagged leaps, and the boy’s footfalls were currently as subtle as a falling hammer.

"Lift your knees, Leo," David said, his voice a low vibration that barely carried five feet. "The palmettos don't care about your fatigue. They only care about catching your laces."

Leo grunted, a sharp exhaling of breath that signaled more frustration than physical exhaustion. He was fourteen, built with the wiry, lean length of his father, Marcus, but his eyes were still tethered to the digital ghosts of the city they’d left behind. Even here, miles into the humidity-choked throat of the forest, Leo’s hand instinctively twitched toward his empty pocket, searching for a device that no longer functioned.

David stopped. He didn't signal for Leo to do the same; he simply became a part of a towering cypress trunk, his mottled green shirt dissolving into the shadows. Leo stumbled two more steps before realizing the silence had changed. He froze, his chest heaving.

"What?" Leo whispered, his eyes darting. "Did you see a hog?"

"I saw you," David replied. He knelt, the joints in his knees popping like dry kindling. He pointed to a patch of damp earth where the pine needles had been churned into a greyish paste. "Tell me what happened here."

Leo stepped closer, peering down. He squinted, the way he used to look at a monitor when the resolution was too low. "Something walked through. A deer?"

David reached out and grabbed a handful of the soil. He held it up to Leo’s face. It wasn't just dirt; it was a graveyard of broken insects, decayed leaf mold, and the musk of something living. "An AI can tell you the species by the depth of the indentation. It can calculate the weight of the animal and the trajectory of its flight based on a satellite sweep. But an AI cannot feel the heat rising off this track."

He pressed Leo’s hand into the mud. The boy flinched at the cold, slime-slick texture, but David held his wrist firm.

"Feel that?" David asked. 

"It’s... warm?" Leo’s voice went thin with wonder.

"Friction and life. It passed less than three minutes ago. A buck, three years old, favoring its left hind leg. He’s not running from us; he’s looking for the creek." David let go of Leo’s wrist and wiped his hand on his trousers. "The machines can map every inch of the world, Leo, but they don't know the soil. They don't know that the earth remembers the weight of everything that walks on it. If you want to lead the tribe when your father can’t, you have to stop looking at the horizon and start looking at your feet."

Leo wiped his muddy hand on his shirt, leaving a dark smear across his chest like a ritual marking. "My dad says the machines are going to find us eventually. That we're just hiding in a blind spot that hasn't been scanned yet."

"Your father is a man of data. I am a man of the dirt," David said, standing up. The humidity was a physical weight now, a wet wool blanket draped over their shoulders. "The 'blind spot' isn't a glitch in their system, Leo. It’s the soul of the woods. The silicon brain can’t process the chaos of a swamp. It wants patterns. It wants logic. There is no logic in the way a thunderstorm breaks the heat."

They moved deeper. The light began to fail, filtered through the thick canopy until it was a bruised purple. David led them through a thicket of saw palmettos, the jagged edges of the leaves whispering against their canvas pants. Every few yards, David would pause, his head tilted, scenting the air.

"Smell that?"

Leo sniffed. "Rotting wood?"

"Rain," David corrected. "The ozone is dropping. The sky is about to open up, and when it does, the buck will hunker down. We have to find him before the scent is washed into the clay."

They tracked in silence for another hour. David watched the boy’s transformation. The initial clumsiness began to erode, replaced by a desperate, instinctual focus. Leo stopped looking at his feet and started looking at the gaps between the trees. He began to mimic David’s gait—the soft-sole roll from heel to toe that minimized the snap of dry twigs.

Suddenly, David dropped to one Moon-white belly. He pulled a heavy, long-barreled rifle from its sling—a mechanical relic, no chips, no sensors, just steel and wood. He beckoned Leo to crawl up beside him.

Thirty yards away, standing mirrored in a stagnant pool of black water, was the buck. It was magnificent and tragic, its ribs showing slightly beneath a coat that had seen too many harsh seasons. It lowered its head to drink, its ears twitching in a rhythmic, nervous dance.

"This is the sacred weight," David whispered, his mouth inches from Leo’s ear. "The machines harvest energy from the sun and the wind. They don't know what it means to enter the cycle. When we take this life, his blood becomes your blood. His strength becomes the tribe’s survival. There is no 'undo' button. There is no reboot."

David handed the rifle to Leo. The boy’s hands shook. The cold steel felt like an anchor in his palms.

"I... I’ve only done the simulations," Leo stammered. "In the sims, there’s a red dot. A reticle that turns green when the windage is compensated."

"There is no green light here," David said. "There is only your breath and the beating of his heart. Wait for the exhale. Find the silence between the beats."

Leo tucked the butt of the rifle into his shoulder. He winced at the hard edge of it. Through the iron sights, the buck looked small, a fragile thing in a vast, indifferent green world. The boy’s finger hovered over the trigger.

"He’s beautiful," Leo whispered.

"He is life," David replied. "And we are hungry."

The woods seemed to hold their breath. A dragonfly, iridescent and ancient, landed on the barrel of the rifle, its wings vibrating with a high-pitched hum. Leo didn't blink. He slowed his breathing until his chest barely moved. He wasn't a boy in the woods anymore; he was a predator leaning into the inevitable conclusion of the hunt.

*Crack.*

The sound was absolute. It shattered the humid stillness, a thunderclap that sent white herons screaming into the darkening sky. The recoil sent Leo backward, his shoulder barking in pain, but he scrambled back to the edge of the ridge.

The buck had collapsed. It kicked once, a spasmodic jerk of its hind legs, and then lay still. The black water of the pool began to cloud with a bloom of crimson.

David stood up, his face unreadable. He didn't offer a hand to help the boy up. Instead, he started walking toward the kill. 

When they reached the water’s edge, the smell hit them—bitter, metallic, and raw. Leo stared down at the animal. The buck’s eye was still open, reflecting the grey sky and the boy’s own trembling silhouette. 

"I killed it," Leo said. It wasn't a boast. It was a realization.

"You took a life to sustain your own," David said. He knelt by the buck and placed a hand on its cooling flank. "The AI will never understand this. It sees a resource. It sees caloric intake and waste management. It doesn't feel the transition of spirit from the wild into the hearth."

David pulled a hunting knife from his belt. The blade was worn thin from decades of sharpening. He held it out to Leo, hilt-first.

"The hunt is the easiest part, Leo. Now comes the work. Now we honor him by wasting nothing."

Leo looked at the knife, then at his own clean, soft hands. He looked back at the buck, the animal that had been drinking peacefully only moments before. He felt a wave of nausea, a sudden, sharp longing for the sanitized world of the city where meat came in plastic and death was something that happened behind a screen.

But then he looked at David. He saw the deep lines in the older man’s face, the scars on his forearms, and the absolute, unwavering clarity in his eyes. This was the soil. This was the truth that the machines were trying to overwrite with their algorithms of comfort.

Leo reached out and took the knife. The handle was warm from David’s grip.

"Show me," Leo said.

As the first heavy drops of the promised rain began to hiss against the palmetto leaves, David guided Leo’s hand to the base of the buck’s throat. They worked in the drenching downpour, the blood washing away as quickly as it spilled, steam rising from the carcass in the cooling air. David taught him the anatomy of survival—where to cut, what to keep, how to peel back the hide without tainting the meat. 

By the time the last of the light had bled out of the sky, Leo was soaked to the bone, his arms stained dark, his muscles aching with a fatigue he had never known. But as he shouldered the heavy haunch of meat, he felt a strange, grounding weight. He wasn't just Marcus’s son anymore. He wasn't a refugee of the digital collapse.

He was a part of the Ocala.

"We move now," David said, his voice cutting through the roar of the rain. "The scent of blood will bring the scavengers. And the rain will mask our tracks from anything else that’s looking."

They began the long trek back toward the hidden enclave of Cypress Bend. David took the lead, his footsteps sure even in the pitch black. Leo followed, his eyes no longer searching for a screen, but watching the way the rainwater pooled in the hollows of the earth.

He realized then that David was right. The machines could map the world, but they would never own it. They could calculate the probability of survival, but they could never feel the fierce, terrifying joy of being alive in the dark.

As they neared the outer perimeter, David stopped one last time. He turned to Leo, the rain dripping from the brim of his hat.

"You did well today," David said. "But the soil doesn't give its secrets away for free. You have to earn them every day."

"I know," Leo said, his voice firmer than it had been that morning.

"Good. Because tomorrow, we start the fire. And a fire built by hand is the only light the machines can't see."

David turned and vanished into the brush, leaving Leo alone for a heartbeat in the drenching dark, where the smell of rain and blood was the only map he needed.

Leo stepped forward, his boots sinking deep into the mud, and for the first time, he didn't feel like the earth was trying to pull him down. He felt like it was holding him up.

Ahead, the first faint light of the camp flickered through the trees, but behind them, something else moved in the deep scrub—a sound that wasn't the wind, and wasn't the rain.