The sky hasn't been blue in four years.
I know this the way I know most things now — not because I calculated it, not because someone told me, but because it stopped mattering long enough ago that I stopped noticing I'd stopped noticing. The sky is grey. Rain tastes of iron. Breathing without a mask in the eastern quarter is a choice you make once and learn from, if you're fortunate enough to still be in a position to learn things afterward.
These are the conditions of the world. I gave up mourning them somewhere between the second winter and the third. Grief is a budget item, and I've been running a deficit for years.
I'm crouched behind the shell of what used to be a bus. I know it's a bus because the word TRANSIT is still faintly readable on the warped metal panel above the wheel well, the orange paint peeling in strips like sunburned skin. The interior is guttered — rusted frames, crumbled foam, the particular quality of wreckage that's been sitting long enough to become part of the landscape. It makes good cover. I appreciate anything that still does its job.
I listen.
Listening has kept me alive longer than anything else. Not speed, not strength — though I've maintained what I can of both through seven years of necessity. Not even the structural assessments my engineer's brain still runs automatically on every building I shelter in, cataloguing load paths and exit options and which walls will go first when the remaining integrity fails. Listening. The specific quality of silence before movement. The way rubble settles differently under a cautious step versus the weight of desperation. The sound of breath held too long.
The street ahead appears empty.
Appears is doing significant work in that sentence.
There's a collapsed apartment tower to my left — eight floors pancaked into what looks from here like a brutalist wedding cake, each level slightly offset from the one below, rebar skeleton poking through at angles that my old professional brain still catalogues as shear failure, progressive collapse, insufficient lateral bracing. I've written a hundred damage assessments that looked exactly like this. Walked through them with a clipboard and a hardhat, itemized the failure modes, submitted reports to people who no longer exist about infrastructure that no longer matters.
The job no longer exists. Neither does the clipboard. Neither do the people.
I wait three more minutes — I still keep precise time, a discipline I've maintained not because it's practically useful but because letting go of it felt like losing something I wasn't ready to lose — and then I move.
The city had a name once. A capital, or close to one — the pre-collapse architecture tells me that much, the wide avenues built for parades and civic pride, the monuments to things no one living cares about anymore. Now it's what survivors call The Ruin, which is what we call any large concentration of destroyed infrastructure because we've run out of the energy required to be specific.
I move through the avenue the way I've learned to move everywhere: close to the building line, never silhouetted in an open space, pausing at each intersection long enough to be sure before crossing. My pack is light. Weight slows you down, and slow gets you killed — I learned this early and stripped my kit to the essentials over the years. Water filtration. A small blade. A larger blade. Protein strips I've trained myself not to think about too carefully. Cord. Two chemical heat tabs. A first aid kit that's seen better days. The watch.
The mask over my nose and mouth is cloth layered and soaked in vinegar solution — not a proper respirator, those ran out long ago, but adequate for cutting the worst of the particulate and most of the chemical residue that still lingers in the eastern quarter. The air smells faintly sweet today. That's not a good sign. The body registers the gas that way, as sweet, right before the eyes start burning.
I have a scar on the left side of my neck from the last time I trusted sweet-smelling air. I don't make that mistake anymore.
The library is six blocks north. I've been using it as a base for eleven days, which is already too long — eleven days in one location means a pattern, and patterns mean vulnerability — but it has a structurally sound sub-basement, three exits, a section of surviving roof, and most critically a collection of pre-collapse medical texts I've been working through. The wound on my forearm is eight days old and red at the edges in a way I don't like. I've been reading about infection timelines with the focused attention of a man who understands the stakes.
I'm six blocks away when I hear the voices.
I stop.
Voices mean people. People break into three categories now: those who trade, those who rob, and those who are something worse. The ratio has shifted badly in the last year, and I've learned to weight my initial assumption accordingly.
At least four of them, from the alley to my left. Not trying to be quiet, which means either confidence or bait. I'm calculating alternate routes when I register the sound behind me — not footsteps, the absence of footsteps, the particular stillness of someone standing very deliberately in a place where rubble should be settling under their weight.
I have half a second to process this.
Then something strikes the back of my skull and the world goes white.
It comes back in pieces. Cold ground against my cheek. Weight on my arms. The voices from the alley, closer now, not bothering to murmur. I'm rolled onto my back and I count faces above me automatically — six — and I note, with the particular clarity that surfaces in extreme moments, that they are well-fed.
Well-fed.
I understand.
I don't scream. I don't beg. There is nothing useful in either response and I stopped doing things without utility a long time ago. I look up at the grey sky past the ring of faces and I feel — not fear, not anymore, fear requires a future to protect and I've been running low on those — a tiredness so complete it has passed through exhaustion and come out somewhere on the other side. Somewhere still and quiet.
I think about the people I've lost. I do this quickly, efficiently, the way I do everything now — not because they don't deserve more time, but because I don't have more time to give them, and they would understand that. They knew me.
Then I think: the sky hasn't been blue in four years.
I don't know why that's the last thought. It just is.
Then I think nothing at all.
There's no light at the end of a tunnel.
I'll say that first, because I know what people expect and I'd rather be accurate. No choir. No warmth. No outstretched hand from something radiant and forgiving. No parade of memories assembling themselves into meaning. Just the grey, and then the dark, and the dark is — fine, actually. The dark asks nothing of me. After seven years of a world that demanded everything I had and then kept asking, the dark's silence is the closest thing to rest I've had in longer than I can clearly remember.
I exist in it for what feels like a long time and also like no time, which is the only way I can describe it. No body. No hunger — and god, the absence of hunger, I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten what that felt like. No cold. No weight on my arms. If this is what death is, I understand why people find the idea of it peaceful.
I'm aware, in a vague and directionless way, that something has happened. That the road I'd concluded was ending is doing something roads aren't supposed to do.
Bending.
I'm an engineer. I've spent my life understanding the behavior of structures under pressure — the way load finds new paths when the obvious ones are blocked, the unexpected ways a system redistributes force when you assume it's failed. I've seen bridges survive forces that exceeded every calculation. I've seen buildings stand when the math said they'd fall.
I have, apparently, always known the universe was structurally unpredictable.
The dark shifts. Gains texture, density, pressure — the kind of pressure you feel before a storm, not quite sensation but the anticipation of it. And then something that uses the concept of a voice the way a sketch uses the concept of a face says nothing I can transcribe.
But the meaning arrives anyway, complete and wordless:
You are not finished.
I want to argue. I feel I've made a reasonable case for being finished. I survived longer than the math suggested. I helped where I could. I did not — except under circumstances I won't revisit — become the thing the world kept trying to make me.
But the dark is already moving. Reshaping. Doing something to the non-shape of me that feels uncomfortably like intention, and I am profoundly, deeply, bone-tiredly annoyed.
Then the pressure becomes gravity.
The dark becomes light.
And everything is very, very loud.
The first sensation is cold.
Not the wet, joint-deep cold of a ruined city in winter — that cold I know in my bones, literally, in the way cold settles into places it's lived for years. This is different. Clean. The cold of stone in a room with a fire, where both things exist simultaneously in a way that is almost comfortable.
The second sensation is sound.
Voices. Several. Urgent and overlapping in a language I don't know — and this is immediately, viscerally wrong, because I know the difference between voices managing a crisis and voices in the grip of tremendous, relieved joy, and these are the latter, and I cannot understand a single word of them.
The third sensation is the body, and this one takes the most processing.
I am small. Warm in a way that feels almost feverish — dense, concentrated warmth — wrapped in something soft, and my limbs are wrong. Wrong in proportion, wrong in reach, wrong in the way they respond to the tentative signals I send into them. Sluggish. Uncoordinated in a manner that has no parallel in my experience of existing.
I open my eyes. Or something opens. There is light, and shapes in the light, and whatever optical equipment I'm currently operating struggles to focus.
A face. Close. A woman's face, pale as winter, with eyes the color of a bruised violet sky, and tears moving steadily down her cheeks in the way of someone who doesn't know they're crying. Behind her, further back, a man — large, dark-haired going to grey, jaw like the prow of a ship, watching with amber eyes doing something complicated and controlled. The expression of a person trying very hard not to show how much something matters to them.
I know that expression. I've worn it.
Around them: firelight. Stone walls. Tapestries in deep crimson and black and silver. High ceilings. A room built by people who believed in the future enough to construct something they expected to last. I haven't been in a room like that in four years, and the wrongness of being in one now — the sheer, structural impossibility of it — takes a moment to absorb.
The woman says something. Her voice is soft and shaking with the effort of staying steady, and I don't know the words but I know the tone — the wondering, terrified, overwhelmed tone of someone experiencing something they can't quite believe is real.
I look at her. I look at the ceiling. I look at the fire.
I think: assess. What do I know?
I'm very small. I'm very warm. The woman looking at me is crying because of me specifically, and she's reaching toward my face with a gentleness that lands somewhere unexpected — somewhere I don't have a category for anymore, because the world I came from had no use for that kind of gentleness and I'd let the category atrophy.
I don't cry. I lost that mechanism somewhere in the second year. The fuse blew and I never found a way to replace it.
But I look at her violet eyes — tear-bright, searching my face for something she needs to find — and I understand, with the absolute certainty of a man who has spent his career understanding load-bearing structures, that I am now one. That whatever this is, whatever impossible and infuriating thing has happened to me, I am part of this structure now. These people. This fire. This life that is not the one I lived and died in.
I'm too exhausted to feel anything clean about that.
But I'm too honest to pretend I feel nothing.
Her hand touches my cheek — warm, careful, the way you touch something you're afraid of breaking — and she says one word. Two syllables. Said the way you say a name you've been afraid to say aloud.
I don't know what it means yet.
I file it. I'll need to learn this language. That's the first problem. Language is infrastructure — without it, nothing else can be built.
Start there. Figure out the rest after.
I close my eyes.
For the first time in four years, I sleep without keeping one ear open for danger.
I didn't realize, until just now, how much I'd missed that.
"From Ruin, We Rise."
— Words of House Dawnmere, origin unknown