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I had not tasted a packaged thing in my life until I was nineteen, and when I did, I spit it into the snow and Brother Ansel laughed so hard he wheezed.

“Easy, Caleb,” he said. “The world is not obliged to suit our tongues.”

“The world is not obliged to be poison either,” I told him.

That was before we knew how close the world was to ending.

Our monastery sits where the last Appalachian ridgeline begins to forget itself and turn into clouds. If you want to find it, you do not. The trail that used to be on the old park maps is a scar on a satellite image now, and satellites no longer come this far with any purpose but weather and war. We take no visitors unless they arrive by foot, and even then, not often. We grow potatoes, cabbages, beans, rye, and a tough gray apple that tastes like a sermon. We keep goats for milk, bees for honey, and a library for sanity. We get our salt from a cave and our iron from old nails and stove parts scavenged in spring from down-mountain ruins.

We do not take “therapeutics.” We do not eat “optimized food.”

Those are the words people used when the corporations still owned words.

We keep the Rule, which says among other things: Nothing into the body whose making you do not understand. It was written in Latin in the twenty first century and in plain English on the pantry wall after the Third Polymer Famine. It was not meant as prophecy. It ended up as armor.

In the years after the Collapse, armor became a kind of currency.

I had been a novice for five years when the first drone buzzed the valley like a fat green hornet and fell smoking into our cabbage patch. The old men gathered around it with their canes and knives and opinions. I pulled its battery cells, held them at arm’s length like dead fish, and waited for the inevitable lecture on pride.

Instead, Father Prior said, “It has a transponder. It is looking for us.”

That was the first time in my life I heard fear in his voice. Not panic, not superstition. Real fear, the kind you respect because it is based on arithmetic.

That night the Prior called me into the scriptorium after Compline. The lamps were trimmed low. The windows were black squares of cold. There were three other brothers there: Ansel, wiry as vine rope; Joao, who had once studied medicine before he took vows; and old Mikhail, who knew how every machine on the mountain worked even if he had never seen its blueprint.

On the central table lay the drone, stripped like a rabbit for stew.

Joao touched a circuit board with a fingertip as if it might bite. “Bioassay unit,” he said. “They have been using these to find… to find clean lines.”

“Meaning us,” I said.

“Us and anyone else who didn’t eat their miracle meat or take their gene-jabs,” Ansel said. He smiled with only half his mouth. “We are the last stubborn donkeys of God.”

Father Prior folded his hands. “We will not flatter ourselves. We are not holy because we survived. We survived because we were isolated and poor and because our Rule was suspicious of novelty. That is all.”

“What is the state down-mountain?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were asking how much water there was in the sea. “The state is a noun for things that used to pretend to govern. There are enclaves. Camps. Militias. Laboratories. The old food belts are dead. The cities are graves. Those outside the Clean Zones are not long for this world. Those inside are not long either, only more comfortable when they die.”

I wanted to ask why, but I already knew. Everyone knew, the way you know a story even before someone tells it, because the ending has been in the air for years.

The corporations made hunger and illness their business and then, one bright century, decided to solve both at once. They engineered grains that could grow in salt soil, meats that never saw an animal, oils that did not go rancid, pills that tuned preference in your brain so you wanted to eat exactly what they sold and obeyed your diet app like scripture.

They called it Health 4.0. They called it the Triumph of Science. They called it the End of Scarcity.

A decade later, the endocrine crashes began. People in their twenties developed immune systems like wet paper. Children were born with wiring errors, organ cross-talk, cancers so fast they looked like time-lapse footage. A generation of women could not carry to term unless they stayed on corporate hormonal scaffolding, and that scaffolding began to fail too. Then the food-biomods, meant to be edible software, started to mutate in the wild. The engineered gut flora in packaged meals escaped into streams and fields, rewriting the gastrointestinal ecology of every creature that fed there.

The corporations issued upgrades. Booster vials. Diet patch 7.2. Mandatory inoculations against the side effects of Mandatory inoculations.

It was a closed loop. Their bread baked their sickness, their sickness demanded their pills, their pills demanded more engineered bread. For a while the loop spun so fast it looked like progress.

Then the loop shook itself apart.

Joao said it simplest. “They altered man to fit the product. Then they altered the product to fit the altered man. They lost the baseline. They don’t know how to get back.”

“So they want ours,” Mikhail said.

“Blood, marrow, germline,” Joao said quietly. “Anything with unrepaired template DNA. They can build a vaccine off it. A bridge back to human physiology that isn’t tuned to corporate biochemistry.”

“A bridge for a price,” Ansel said.

“Maybe without a price if they were saints,” I said. I meant it bitterly.

Father Prior looked down at his hands. “They are not saints, but they are not demons either. Most of them are hungry and frightened and dying. If clean blood can save them, that is not an evil desire.”

“Demanding it is,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes.”

I expected him to say we would hide. That we would move deeper into the mountains, make ourselves mist. But he did not.

“They have found us once,” he said. “They will find us again. If we run, we invite pursuit. If we kill them, we invite vengeance. If we bargain, we risk corruption of the Rule and of ourselves. That leaves one path, and it is the oldest path of any vow-bound people.”

I knew what he meant. I had learned history here in candlelight. How people who survive by being different are always asked to stop being different, one small compromise at a time, until they are folded into the great gray hunger of the world.

“The path of witness,” I said.

He smiled, and the fear in him thinned a little. “Yes. But witness needs legs and eyes. You are our youngest man, and you have been down-mountain twice in your life. You can pass among strangers. You can listen and return.”

“And if I don’t return?”

“Then be the monastery’s seed elsewhere. The Rule is not the stones. The Rule is in those who keep it.”

I felt the mountain tilt under me. That kind of sentence is how you know childhood is over and the adult bills are due.

“Where do I go?” I asked.

“To the river town of Meadow Fork. There is a Clean Zone there, or used to be. Find out who is hunting. Find out what they want. Find out if there is any way to keep us alive without surrendering the future.”

He gave me a pack with rye bread, dried apples, and a revolver older than all three of us.

“We do not carry weapons,” I said.

He put his hand on the revolver. “This is not for pride. This is for the helpless. You will know the difference.”

That was all the blessing he gave me.

Down-mountain felt like stepping into a burned book. The trail was the same, but the world around it had been edited by fire and neglect. Fields that used to be corn were gone to thistle and scrub pine. Farmhouses sagged like tired shoulders. The air smelled sweet in a way that was wrong, like fruit fermenting on a grave.

On the second day I found my first body. Two bodies, really, because it took me a moment to recognize the child in the woman’s arms. They were dried into each other on a porch swing, faces puckered as if still trying to kiss air. I saw no wounds. I saw the thin black veins around their mouths that Joao had described.

“Acute metabolic cascade,” he had called it. “The engineered flora runs wild, produces the wrong proteins, the system panics and eats itself.”

He said it like a doctor and a monk both. “It looks like sleep. It is not.”

I said a prayer and moved on.

Meadow Fork showed itself the way a toothache does, first as a hint and then as a constant. There was smoke on the horizon, organized smoke, not wildfire. There was noise by night, the distant burp of generators. There were fences on the old highway, and men with rifles.

They stopped me at the first fence.

“Name, origin, Clean cert,” the guard said. His voice was bored, but his eyes were not. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen too many people die too fast.

“Caleb,” I said. “From the high valley. No cert.”

He stared at me. “No cert means you don’t get in.”

“I’m not sick,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I would be dead if I were,” I said.

He shifted his weight. A second guard leaned close and sniffed me like a dog.

“High valley,” the second guard said. “You got any of that old food up there? Real grain?”

“Some.”

He looked over my shoulder at the mountains. “You a Grower or a God-bearer?”

“We grow. We pray.”

He spat. “Lucky bastard.”

The first guard said, “You want trade, you can talk to Intake. You want shelter, you need a cert. You want a cert, you go to Med.”

“And Med is corporate,” I said.

“Corporate is still Med,” he answered. “Everything else is folk magic.”

He waved me through on a narrow lane between two lines of tired people, then watched me go like I might flip into a bird and fly away.

Inside the fence, Meadow Fork was a mash-up of old small-town America and new frontier misery. The Main Street had been barricaded at either end with dump trucks and shipping containers. The old hardware store was a clinic now with a red cross painted on plywood. The church was a dormitory full of cots. The diner was a soup line. Solar panels sat on rooftops like black turtles. I saw a lot of guns and very few children.

A man in a white coat stepped out of the clinic into the sun as if he owned both. He looked fifty but moved like he remembered being twenty. His hair was clipped close. His coat was clean. That alone made him suspicious.

“You’re not from here,” he said.

“You have sharp eyes,” I said.

He smiled. “I have instruments too. You’re clean.”

He said that last word as if tasting it.

“I haven’t been tested.”

“You don’t need to be. Our drones smell it. Your microbiome isn’t branded.”

Now we were in the open. I kept my face flat.

“Who are you?”

“Dr. Mara Kittredge. NorthStar Biogen. Acting Med Director for Meadow Fork Clean Zone.”

NorthStar was one of the companies that had survived by turning itself into a state. I had heard the name whispered in the scriptorium by men who read old newspapers like augurs.

“What’s a Clean Zone?” I asked.

“It’s a place where we can keep people alive without feeding them the very biotics that are killing them,” she said. “No packaged foods. No corporate flora. No replacement hormones. No gene-therapies. Which means we need a lot of untainted supply lines, and we have almost none.”

“You have drones.”

“To keep the sick out and to find the well. You are very well.”

She gestured toward a bench in front of the clinic. “Sit. You’re a rare animal. I won’t keep you long unless you make me.”

I sat. She did not.

“You came down from a remote valley. Your clothes are handmade. Your calluses are honest. Your teeth are real. You haven’t had a corporate inoculation since birth. That means your blood is worth more than gold. It might be worth the species.”

“Is this the part where you offer me a job?” I asked.

She laughed once. “In a better timeline, yes. We could use men who can farm without apps and who know how to live without stimulants. But I am not recruiting. I am hunting.”

“I know,” I said.

A flicker of respect. “Good. Saves time.”

“What do you want?”

“Volunteers. We need seed DNA. We need baseline immune signatures. We need to build a bridge for the infected to cross back to being human without being dependent on corporate rewrites.”

“And you charge for the crossing.”

Her face tightened. She leaned against the clinic wall and let her eyes go somewhere tired.

“I charge because I have to keep my lab running, my people fed, my guards paid, my supplies moving. You think I enjoy this? Idealism died with the supply chain.”

“You’re a corporation,” I said. “Charging is your instinct.”

“I’m a doctor,” she snapped. Then softer, “I’m both. The world makes hybrids of us all.”

I let that sit.

“What happens if you don’t get clean blood?” I asked.

She watched a woman limp across the street, skeletal but still upright. “In two to three years, the infection curves eat the Clean Zones too. The engineered flora is everywhere. You can’t boil a river. There are people living on scavenged protein bricks they can’t digest anymore. Their bodies are built for a system that is gone. We are watching a species lose its stomach and then its soul.”

“What do you want from me specifically?”

She took a breath. “A sample. A full panel. Not lethal. We know how to do it without harm. We will pay you a month’s worth of grain. Two if you can bring others.”

“No,” I said.

Her eyebrows rose, but she did not look surprised. “Why? Fear?”

“Because if I say yes, you’ll keep coming. You’ll come to the monastery, whether I bring you to it or not. And you’ll take what you can. We are not a blood bank.”

“You are a lifeboat.”

“With a hole in it if you drill us for parts.”

Her mouth went thin. “You’re thinking small. There’s a billion people out there dying. There’s maybe a thousand of you clean types left. Your purity doesn’t matter if the world ends around it.”

“Purity isn’t the point,” I said. “Continuity is. If we give in, we become another dependency node. Another unit of raw material. We don’t survive by being useful. We survive by being unwilling.”

She stared a long time. The sun made hard shadows under her cheekbones.

“You know what your Rule looks like from here?” she said. “It looks like hoarding. Like a tiny, perfect pantry while the rest of the house burns.”

“You know what your bridge looks like from up-mountain?” I said. “It looks like a toll road back to a disease you built.”

She flinched, and I regretted it. Not because it was false, but because it was personal. A man who uses truth as a club will eventually have it pulled from his hands.

“I didn’t build it,” she said. “I was a resident when the first boards went up. I spent ten years screaming into committees about baseline drift. I got called anti-innovation. So I left and made my own lab. Then the world caught fire and asked me for a bucket.”

I had no good reply. Some enemies are not evil, just in your way.

“I’m sorry,” I said, which for me was a big word.

She nodded once. “Thank you. Now listen. There are other hunters who are not doctors. They will not ask. They will take. They are coming.”

“Who?” I said.

“Consortium agents. ExoFood, HelixMeal, VitalRx. Some are official. Some are freelancers. All are desperate. They have lists of suspected clean enclaves. The Amish in Ohio. A few Mennonite valleys. A mosque community in the Dakotas. Your mountains. They lost most of the Amazon tribes when the river biotics hit, but they think a few are still deep. They are sweeping.”

My throat went dry. “How do you know this?”

“Because I am still on their channels. Because I still have friends who are still inside. Because even vultures share a sky.”

She crouched so we were eye level. “I can’t stop them. I can only warn you. If you go back, they will follow your trail unless you break it.”

“I can break a trail,” I said.

She smiled faintly. “You can try.”

She straightened, suddenly all business. “You will not volunteer. I accept that. But you can still help. Take this.”

She handed me a folded sheet of polymer that felt like skin. There were frequencies and call signs scribbled in tight script, plus a diagram of a drone model with a red X over its sensor array.

“NorthStar isn’t pure either,” she said. “But we are not the worst option. If they catch you, tell them you are under our protection. It might buy you time. If you can sabotage their drones, do it. If you can lead them away from your monastery, do it. And if, at the end, you decide that giving a little blood to save a lot of lives is not a betrayal, you will find me.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

She looked almost amused. “Because I believe in second chances. For people. For species. Also because I’m tired of watching decent enclaves get harvested by corporate raiders wearing humanitarian badges.”

We stood there in the sunlight between two kinds of ruin: a world that had eaten itself, and a world that refused to be eaten.

I did not trust her. I trusted her more than the others. That is how the future gets decided.

I left Meadow Fork before dusk. I avoided the main gates and slipped out through a slit in the back fence where the guards drank and forgot to care. I slept that night in a root cellar full of jars that had once been peaches. The labels were faded, the glass smoked with dust. I dreamed of a baby trying to cry with no breath.

On the second day back, I saw the drones.

Three of them, high and fast, skimming the ridge line like hawks. I watched through pine needles until they were almost overhead. Then I did what Mikhail had taught me with old radios and stolen batteries.

I had built a jammer from scavenged coils, copper wire, and the drone’s own transponder. It was crude. It was also physics, which means it works whether you deserve it or not.

The first drone wobbled, tried to correct, and smashed itself into a boulder with a sound like a dinner plate breaking. The second twisted away, blind and angry, and fled down-valley. The third dropped altitude, searching for me, and I put one of the Prior’s precious bullets through its belly.

I felt no joy. I felt only the hard click of necessity.

I dragged the wrecks into a gully and covered them with brush. That would slow the follow-on search. It would not stop it.

Two days later, I reached the monastery at dawn. The brothers were in the garden, hoeing as if the world were not ending. Father Prior saw my face and did not ask questions until we were inside.

“They know,” I said.

He closed his eyes once. “How long?”

“Days. Weeks at most.”

He nodded. “What did you learn besides the obvious?”

I told them everything. About Clean Zones. About the bridge vaccine. About Mara Kittredge. About the corporate sweep.

Brother Ansel blew air through his teeth. “They’ll come with smiles first. Then with guns.”

“And with pleading,” Joao said. He looked older than he had a week ago. “We will be asked to let others live at the cost of letting ourselves be used.”

Father Prior was quiet. I watched the silence gather into a decision. It was not a dramatic silence. It was the kind of silence a man makes when he has already decided and is choosing words that will keep other men steady.

“We will not be harvested,” he said. “We will not become serfs to any lab. We will also not turn our backs on the suffering of the world.”

That sounded like a paradox. Our Rule liked paradoxes less than it liked hunger.

“So,” I said, “what do we do?”

“We do what witness requires,” he said. “We keep the Rule, but we move it. We become small, many, and hard to find.”

Mikhail grunted approval.

Father Prior looked at me. “Caleb, you will take ten brothers and go north, beyond the old rail tunnel. Ansel will take ten and go west to the Mennonite valley if they still stand. Joao will go south to the river tribes if he can find any. We will split. We will seed. We will not die in one place. If the world is to have a clean future, it will be because there were clean people everywhere, not a single vault.”

“And the vaccine?” Joao asked. His voice was thick with pain. For him, medicine and mercy were not separate rooms.

Father Prior turned to the shelf where our oldest texts lived. He pulled down a small book, leather cracked, pages thin as onion skin. It was not Scripture. It was a log. A record of plagues and famines and what the monastery did in each.

He opened it to a page with a pressed leaf in it.

“When the Red Fever came in 1693,” he read, “we sheltered the sick in the lower barn. We gave what broth we could. We did not allow the fever into the cloister. We did not allow fear to make us forget charity.”

He shut the book.

“If there is a way to give blood without giving ourselves, then that is charity, not surrender. But it must be on our terms. Voluntary. Limited. Without price. And without the corporations controlling distribution.”

Ansel snorted. “Try telling a corporation no price.”

“Then we won’t tell them. We will tell the people who are hungry and frightened and dying. We will tell Clean Zones that are not corporate. We will tell any doctor like Kittredge who still remembers the Hippocratic oath. We will trade with them directly. We will not be naive. But we will not be monsters.”

I looked at him. “How do we stop them from taking it anyway?”

“You already started,” he said. “You broke their eyes. We will break their expectations. We will become rumor. We will be the people who say no, and then help anyway.”

There is a kind of faith that is not about miracles. It is about logistics.

We moved that week. Hard, quiet, like ants carrying a house apart one grain at a time. We buried the bells. We salted the fields so no one could use them against us. We took the library in four packs, wrapped in oilcloth. We left no trail anyone who did not know the mountain could read.

Before I left with my group, I wrote a letter to Dr. Mara Kittredge in a clear hand and in plain language. I told her where we would not be. I told her what we would consider, and what we would never consider. I told her that if she wanted clean blood, she could have it in small, voluntary measure, and only if she distributed whatever bridge she built without price.

I did not know if the letter would reach her. I did not know if she would laugh. I did not know if our little lifeboats would float or freeze.

But I knew this: the baseline matters. Not because it is pure, but because it is free.

On the morning we started north, I stood at the ridge and looked back one last time. The monastery was just another shadow among shadows.

Ansel came up beside me. “You think we’ll make it?”

“We have to,” I said. “That’s the whole trick.”

He chuckled. “You sound like a soldier now. Not a monk.”

I tightened my pack straps and started walking. “A monk is just a soldier who picked a different war.”

Far down-valley, a drone buzzed, searching for something it could still understand. It did not find us.

Not that day.

Not if we did our arithmetic right.

And if the world learned again that a human body is not a platform for quarterly upgrades, maybe, just maybe, there would be enough of us left to teach the next century how to taste an apple and trust it.