But he hadn’t protected Mira.
One night, three days into the collapse, he found a group of survivors huddled in a library. Among them was a girl with Mira’s sharp jawline, wearing a tattered university hoodie. She wasn’t Mira. Her name was Kaelen. She had a fever, a festering wound on her calf from a piece of rebar, and a copy of The Art of War she was using as a pillow.
The leader stared at the bow, then at Elias. “You could have killed me.”
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. sabre srw
Elias looked at the SRW. Its limb bolts were still perfectly tuned. The string, which he’d waxed the week before the collapse, still had that honeyed glow. He could have handed it over. The bow was just carbon, foam, and aluminum. It wasn’t his daughter. It wasn’t forgiveness.
Now, the bow leaned against a shattered window frame in a city that had forgotten its own name. The grip, worn smooth by his own hand over three years of pre-collapse practice, felt like an extension of his palm. The SRW didn't hum with power; it hummed with memory.
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. But he hadn’t protected Mira
The leader demanded the bow. “That’s a two-thousand-dollar piece,” he said. “Give it, and you walk.”
“So why are you here instead of out there getting us food?”
He never fired it again. But he never unstrung it either. She wasn’t Mira
Kaelen laughed, then winced. “Everyone’s afraid. The bow doesn’t care.”
He’d named it Greyhound —not for speed, but for the way it would lock onto a target and refuse to look away.
But the bow wouldn’t let him forget. Every time he drew the 45-pound limbs, the tension wasn’t just in the carbon—it was in his chest. The SRW had a dual-cam system, perfectly synchronized, which meant forgiveness. It was designed to correct minor errors in form. Elias had loved that about it. You could be shaky, tired, grieving—and the bow would still send the arrow true.
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.