Fifty people on foot. Twenty liters in the back.
They have been walking for four days toward a well that ran dry a month ago. Nobody has told them. They are not raiders and they are not desperate yet — they think they have almost arrived, and that is the only reason they are still calm.
You have a vehicle, a closed cargo bay they cannot see into, and about sixty liters. Fifty people drink between 150 and 250 liters a day. Whatever you do here, you cannot fix it.
What the section actually offers
- Give them twenty liters. That is four-tenths of a liter each, and two days off your own margin.
- Tell them the truth about the well. It costs you nothing, and it takes away the only thing keeping them walking.
- Say nothing and drive on.
I’m not going to tell you what any of them leads to. One of them is much worse than it looks, and it is not the one you are expecting.
This was the hardest scene in the book to get right, and the reason is that my first version had them attack the car. They wouldn’t. Fifty exhausted people who believe they have arrived do not attack anyone — and the moment I admitted that, the real danger became obvious: it’s you. You are the one carrying the information that turns them around.
Seven stops on the road ahead
Every place in this book is real. Every two weeks you get one of them: what is actually there — the spring, the ruin, the numbers, the coordinates you can open in a map — and the decision the book puts in front of you when you arrive.
What that decision costs, you find out when you play. Seven letters, then silence until there is something to try. Subscribers get the playable opening first.
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