He had no idea who these women were. He did not know why they lived in the dead zone or why they spoke in that strange dialect. But he knew one thing for sure.
He was still alive. He was inside their closed territory. And now the real work began.
Classic reconnaissance under pressure. The woods thickened around them. Fog wrapped the old trees and turned them into pale, ghostly shapes.
The women moved fast and with total confidence, picking their way through deadfall and hidden ravines. Max logged every turn and every landmark. A broken branch. A rock shaped like a skull. A stream stained red with iron.
He built a mental map point by point. After two hours of steady walking they reached a gorge. Hidden behind sheer rock walls, it opened all at once, like a crack in the world itself.
At the bottom, enclosed by cliffs and forest, lay a settlement. Dozens of solid wooden houses stood there, dug partly into the earth. Their roofs were covered in sod.
Smoke rose from vents in the roofs. In the center was a broad circular square paved with flat stone. And everywhere there were people—or rather, women only.
Women of every age, from little girls to old grandmothers. They carried water, worked hides, mended nets, sharpened weapons. There was not a single man in sight.
No machinery. No electricity. It looked like the eighteenth century preserved in a pocket of wilderness. As if time had stopped here and decided not to move on.
When Radmila led Max into the square, the whole settlement froze. Dozens of eyes fixed on him. Curiosity, distrust, caution, and open hostility all mixed together.
Several teenage girls stepped back as if they had seen something forbidden. From the largest house, set on a slight rise, an older woman emerged. She was well past sixty, with gray hair loose over her shoulders.
Her face was lined, but her back was straight as a bowstring. She wore a cloak of wolf pelts. In one hand she held a long staff topped with a raven’s skull.
The crowd parted for her in respectful silence. “Mother Dara,” Radmila said, bowing her head. “We found him near Black Rock. He fell from the sky in the storm.”
Dara walked up to Max slowly. Her pale, faded eyes studied his face. She took her time, examining every feature and scar.
Max looked right back. He saw not just an old woman, but authority in its pure form. The kind that holds people not by force alone, but by something deeper.
“Fell from the sky,” Dara said slowly. Her voice was soft, dry as leaves. “Iron birds of outsiders sometimes fall. The outsiders usually do not survive. This one did.”
She raised a hand and touched his injured shoulder—the same one he had reset the night before. Her fingers were strong and hard. She pressed directly into the damaged joint.
Max did not flinch, though pain shot through him. “Tough,” Dara said with approval. “A fighter.”
She turned to Radmila. “Did you bring his weapons?” The younger hunter dropped Max’s rifle, belt, and knife at Dara’s feet.
The old woman looked at the cold metal with open contempt. “Dead things. They make people weak.” Then she looked back at Max.
“By our law, you are an intruder. A man who sets foot on this land is supposed to die. We have hidden from your world for generations to protect our blood and our forest.”
“But our prophecy says something else. One day the sky will spit out one who will become either our ruin or our shield. The man marked for us.”
Max stayed quiet, still reading the room. An isolated matriarchal clan, steeped in ritual and waiting for a chosen figure. Perfect ground for manipulation, if you knew where to press.
But it was too early to press. Better to listen. “I don’t believe in prophecy,” Max said calmly. “I believe in logic and training.”
“You can kill me now and waste an arrow. Or you can use what I know. The world outside is changing whether you like it or not.”
“You can hide, but sooner or later the outside world will find you. And when it does, your bows won’t save you.” The crowd stirred uneasily.
Radmila tightened her grip on her spear, eyes narrowing. “He’s too bold, Mother,” she said through clenched teeth. “Let me finish this now.”
“He’s a disease.” Dara lifted a hand and the murmuring stopped. She looked at Max, and there was interest in her eyes now, not anger.
“Logic and training,” she repeated, testing the words. “You speak like a man who is not afraid of dying. But words are wind. This land believes in sweat and blood.”
“Do you want to live, outsider? Do you want to prove you can be useful?” she asked.
“I want to survive,” Max answered honestly. “As for being useful, that depends on circumstances.”
Dara struck the stone with her staff. The crack echoed over the square, dry and final.
“You will face three trials,” she declared. “Three nights. Pass them, and you live. Fail even one, and your body goes into the bog.”
Max gave a small nod. “I’m listening.”
“Your first trial begins tomorrow at sundown.” Dara turned and started back toward her house. “Untie him. Give him water.”
“If he tries to run, kill him.” Radmila stepped up to Max and cut the bindings at his wrists with one clean stroke.
He lowered his arms and worked the stiffness out of his hands. He looked into her eyes and saw plain, unfiltered hatred. She did not want trials.
She wanted him dead, immediately. Right then Max understood the balance of power. Dara wanted a resource, something new that could strengthen the clan.
Radmila saw him as a direct threat to her standing and influence beside Mother Dara. There was a crack in the leadership. To survive, he would have to do more than pass their old tests.
He would have to break the system from the inside, using its own rules against it. He stood in the middle of the square under a hundred hostile stares. He was a stranger in a sealed world.
No radio. No modern weapons. A shoulder he had reset only hours earlier. But he still had something more dangerous than a rifle. A cold, disciplined mind.
And his operation had just begun. They led him to a holding hut—a half-buried cell dug into the slope at the edge of the settlement. Its walls were made of thick logs fitted tight together, smelling of damp earth and old pine.
The heavy door shut with a scrape, and a thick wooden bar dropped into place. Inside was dim light and a narrow strip of daylight under the roofline. Max did not waste time checking corners or testing the door.
Pointless. He sat on a rough bunk covered with a stiff deer hide and closed his eyes. He needed to steady his breathing and quiet the ache in his shoulder.
He also needed to organize what he had already seen. First: population. On the way through the square he had counted roughly eighty people, about thirty of them women of fighting age.
Second: weapons. No firearms at all. Metal was scarce. Most spear and arrow points were bone or stone, but expertly made.
The bows were composite, and at short range they would hit hard. Third: hierarchy. This was an absolute matriarchy, reinforced by long isolation and rigid belief.
Dara was the ideologue and strategist. Radmila was the field commander and tactician. And there was already a visible fault line between them….
