He sat on the concrete, pulled the arrow from the rat, and wept. Not for the kill. For the fact that it was perfect. The SRW had not betrayed him. His body remembered the shot: anchor point under the jaw, back tension, expansion, release. The bow had done its job so well that he had no excuse. He could survive. He could hunt. He could protect.
“I’m afraid,” he finally said. “Not of them. Of what I’ll see when I aim.”
“I did.”
The leader stared at the bow, then at Elias. “You could have killed me.”
After they left, Kaelen woke from her fever. She asked if he’d found food. He hadn’t. He’d found something harder: the knowledge that precision without mercy is just machinery. The SRW had given him the power to be cruel. He’d chosen kindness. That was the draw no one talks about—not the physical one, but the moral one. sabre srw
The leader demanded the bow. “That’s a two-thousand-dollar piece,” he said. “Give it, and you walk.”
“No,” he said.
The next morning, he took the bow and walked east. Not to find Mira. He knew she was gone. He walked east because that was the direction she’d chosen, and he wanted to understand why. The SRW hung across his back, its cams clicking softly with each step.