Ruins

Heron expected her to say more, to go on and on, moralizing in classic Kira style, but she let go of Heron’s arm and stepped back into the night, returning to Samm and Marcus and the others. Heron stopped, watching the line of refugees march past her in the snow, and then she turned and walked away into the city.

The buildings were dreamlike in the darkness—dull, black shapes, their outlines softened by snow and dim moonlight. Heron moved through them silently, haunting the world like a living ghost. Her stealth training was so ingrained, her skills so perfectly honed, that she left no footprints as she walked, no signs, no traces whatsoever of her passing.

If she didn’t choose to leave a mark, no one would ever be able to tell that she’d been there at all.

Another shape appeared in the falling snow, low and lean. A wolf or a wild dog, sniffing hungrily through the dim gray void in a desperate search for sustenance. Heron raised her rifle silently, ready to kill it on instinct as a potential threat. Her finger hovered over the trigger. She watched the wolf stop, tense as a spring, and then burst into motion, racing through the street after a tiny white target—a cat or a rabbit, both hunter and hunted kicking up a frenzied spray of snow in their wake. The wolf pounced, shook its head three times, and the rabbit was dead in its jaws. Dark blood dripped down to the snow.

This is life, thought Heron. Not a peace treaty, not an idealistic dream, but a grim dance of death and survival. The strong live on while the weak—the ones too small or too foolish to fight back—die in agony and blood. Kira wants a world of rabbits, safe in their warren, happy and communal and oblivious to reality, but the real world is out here. A hunter in the snow. Life is a lone wolf, scratching out a living with teeth and claws and a heart of stone. The wolf shook its prey again, ensuring the kill, but didn’t stop to feast right there in the street. It looked up, still oblivious to Heron’s ghostly presence, and padded off between the drooping houses and the snow-covered boulders of old, sagging cars. Heron followed it, curious to see where the wolf deemed it safe enough to pause and eat its kill. It slipped through holes in fences, jumped over fallen trees and power lines, and all the while she followed it, watching, waiting. At last it came to its den, a crawl space below a dilapidated house, and crawled through the narrow tunnel it had dug through the snow. Heron crept up behind it, peering in softly.

The wolf laid the rabbit on the floor and watched in maternal silence as four small cubs yipped and snapped at it, eager for a meal. The mother turned toward the entrance, looking straight at Heron, and her dark eyes gleamed green in the dim, reflected light.

Heron watched the children eat, and she cried.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Kira struggled through the snow, clinging to the stretcher they’d rigged to help carry Green. The Partial army was too close, and the night too cold; if they stopped they’d be cut down, or freeze to death, and so they kept walking, step after step, inch after inch, while their feet bled in their shoes and their hands froze in their gloves and the relentless storm howled around them. One mile. Two miles. Five miles. Soon almost everyone was pulling a stretcher, each one cobbled together from whatever they could find in the frozen houses on the side of the road: brooms and mops and shirts and dresses. They draped the stretchers with blankets, trying to keep the injured from freezing, and relied on their own exertion to save themselves.

On the sixth mile after the last blown bridge they were hailed by the first line of defense along the Rockaway peninsula. The land here was barely a thousand feet across from ocean to bay, and the tattered remnants of the Defense Grid were dug into homes and makeshift bunkers, headquartered in an old public school. They brought the refugees there and lit fires to warm them, pulling out all their stock of food and water. Another thirty people had died of hypothermia, and one man’s feet were blackened and dead from frostbite. Kira let the soldiers help and crawled into a corner under a dry blanket to collapse into sleep.

When she woke the next day she was shocked to still be alive.