Marcus sleeps like someone who made peace with dying a long time ago.
He's stretched on the cot in Unit 17, boots still on, one arm over his eyes. Eli is curled on a pallet of folded blankets beside the water drum, breathing in little hitching waves that always make me think he's falling, even when he's still. The storage unit hums with its own quiet—metal cooling, the faint tick of settling concrete, the ache of a world trying to remember what silence used to sound like.
I lie with my back against the wall, knees up, pistol between my palms. I tell myself I'm keeping watch. Really, I'm keeping from closing my eyes.
Because if I do, I'm back there.
The smell hits first—burnt grease and cold metal, copper and mildew. Neon buzzing like a trapped insect above a door that should have stayed shut.
I blink once, twice.
The unit dissolves. The map, the cot, Marcus's slow breathing—all of it slides away.
And I'm standing on broken asphalt at the edge of the highway, alone, staring at an abandoned truck-stop diner whose sign still tries to live.
EAT HERE, the half-dead neon insists, letters stuttering sickly red and blue. The rest of the world has gone gray, but this sign refuses to go quietly.
The parking lot is a graveyard of long-haul trucks and cars, their doors left open, as nature slowly works its way into the rubber and paint. Weeds push through cracked concrete in stubborn green veins. The sky hangs low and heavy, that perpetual color of a bruise the world adopted as its new normal after all the grids failed and almost everyone, the poor, was left on their own. The connected? Oh, they were just fine. They had reserves, places to live that the poor would never see or exist in unless you were the hired help, necessary to keep the wealthy comfortable. But even those were the fortunate few.
I'm exhausted in that way that bends your bones. I haven't slept more than an hour at a time in days. My muscles shake with each step, but I keep moving because stillness is an invitation in this new world. If infection is a slow fire, sleep is the gasoline.
Shelter. I need shelter.
The diner sits a little back from the road, attached to a crumbling truck-stop complex: showers, laundry, fuel pumps that will never pump again. The front windows are smeared opaque with grime. The door hangs crooked on its hinges. A paper sign inside reads OPEN 24 HOURS in cheerful red letters, but the hours are all broken now.
"This is a bad idea," I tell no one. Lily would have agreed or laughed or both.
A gust of wind rattles the metal awning in response.
I step forward anyway.
The bell above the door gives a half-hearted jingle as I push my way in. The sound is wrong in the quiet, like a joke told at a funeral.
Inside, the air is colder than outside and damp in a way that coats my tongue. Tables stand where people left them, mugs turned on their sides, plates fossilized with what used to be food. A laminated kids' menu lies face-up on the floor, its maze unfinished. Someone's jacket slumps over the back of a vinyl booth like its owner just stepped away to pay.
Or to die.
I move slowly between the tables, staying low, pistol loose but ready in my hand. The floor is sticky in places, gritty in others. Glass crunches under my boots, soft and careful but still too loud.
"Hello?" I call out, hating the word as soon as it leaves my mouth.
It gets eaten by the room. No answer. Just the faint, constant buzz of the neon sign outside, bleeding through the dirty windows.
I remind myself of the checklist: Clear space. Identify exits—test for infection.
And under all of that: find a place where I can let my eyes close for more than a heartbeat without losing them forever.
I step behind the counter.
The laminate is chipped and stained, ringed with the ghosts of spilled coffee. The cash register drawer is hanging open and empty. Someone once stole all the money from it, believing that money still meant something.
I'm about to move on when something catches the light pattern of pale scratches in the wood just under the lip of the counter, the part you only see if you duck down.
I crouch. Or Lily crouches. I don't know anymore. I feel like I'm seeing through my eyes and Lily's body.
At first, it looks like random gouges. But then my brain clicks a gear, and letters begin to form.
SOUTH STAIRS BAD.
DON'T REPEAT.
My throat turns dry.
It's carved deep, angry, as if whoever wrote it wanted the warning to embed in the wood and stay. The words are narrow and cramped, gouged by someone using a knife they weren't supposed to have or a fork they stole from a table.
Whoever they were, they were alive long enough to leave a message.
I drag my finger lightly over the grooves. The letters fit under my fingertips too well. For a second, my chest tightens with a familiar, unwelcome thought:
This is her. This is Lily's kind of warning.
She used to carve notes into the wooden underside of our shared desk at home. Don't trust Mrs. Jameson. Dad's lying. Check the vent.
Always in places no adult would look. Always like a trail of breadcrumbs, only I was meant to see.
My pulse stutters hard.
"Did you write this?" I whisper.
The diner doesn't answer.
I push myself up and scan the room again, this time looking not just for danger but for her—signs of her brand of survival—a broken sugar shaker on the floor. A napkin dispenser was shoved just a little off-center, like something was hidden behind it once.
The radio catches my eye.
It sits at the far end of the counter, an old-fashioned relic with a cracked plastic face and a dial that probably hasn't moved in years. It shouldn't be working. There is nothing else around here.
But the tiny red power light is on.
My skin prickles.
Very carefully, I reach out and turn the volume up a notch.
Static floods the air, harsh and thick, swallowing the neon buzz. For a moment, it's just noise. Then, beneath the static, something shapes itself—distorted syllables, like someone trying to talk from the bottom of a well.
"…—ily…"
I freeze.
The hair on my arms stands up. My heart slams against my ribs, wild and too loud.
I lean closer.
"Say that again," I breathe, as if the radio is a person who can be reasoned with.
The static crackles, rises, and falls. The sound flickers in and out, but then it comes back clearer, like a mouth finally finding the right shape.
"Lily."
It says my sister's name.
Not mine. Hers.
Every instinct screams at me to rip the plug out of the wall, to smash the radio, to erase the wrongness of that voice. But I don't move.
Because a part of me, the dangerous and desperate part, wants to believe this is her. That somehow she's alive inside the circuits, reaching for me.
"Lily, can you hear me?" the radio hisses again. "Lily, respond. South stairwell compromised. Do not—"
Static chews off the rest.
I swallow hard, throat burning.
Lantern.
This has Lantern all over it. Old broadcasts. Recorded loops. Traps meant for operatives smart enough to decode them and stupid enough to trust them.
My hand finds the pistol grip and squeezes. Sweat slicks my palm.
"I'm not her," I say quietly, even though no one asked. "Not exactly."
Somewhere deeper in the diner, behind the swinging doors to the kitchen, something thumps.
Not building settling. Not wind.
A different sound. Wet. Heavy.
I raise the gun and turn toward the noise, every nerve waking up.
The radio keeps talking, dragging static-laced pleas into the room.
"Lily… if you're alive… if anyone is there…"
Another thump.
And under it—so faint I almost miss it—something else.
A sound that doesn't belong to radios, infected or collapsing buildings.
A child's cry.
It's small, strangled, and raw. A voice that shouldn't still exist in this ash-gray world, calling from somewhere past the kitchen doors.
Every part of me gets cold.
I could turn and walk out right now. I could take the warning under the counter and the carved letters as a sign this place is a repeat of someone else's mistake. I owe no one here anything.
But the cry comes again, higher, cracking at the edges.
"Please—"
The word slices through the static, through my fear, through the part of me that learned early not to touch other people's disasters.
My fingers tighten on the pistol. My pulse counts out the seconds between cries.
I step around the counter and move toward the kitchen.