Ch. 61

The wind off the canal cut her face, but it wasn’t the kind of cold that ever stopped Carolina. She and Xander crossed the frozen slab of street together, boots making that frozen-hollow knock that sounded at once so present and so far away. Past the last fire barrel, past the two kids huddled in the wreckage of an upturned bus, right into the winter-gutted shell of what used to be a library. The city was always a palimpsest, one ruined past scribbled over another.

They tracked the footprint code Wyn had left: stripes of chalk on a mailbox, a tangle of colored flag tape low on a hydrant, a spiral of broken glass under the stoop. The entrance to the stash was through a hollowed-out book drop, the inside slicked with someone’s old blood, too dried to worry about.

Xander held the lid for her. “After you, boss,” he said, grinning even as his knuckles whitened on the handle.

She dropped down, landing bad on her right ankle, but barely flinched. The air below stank of mildew and mold, the ghosts of ancient books, the rot of a city that never imagined it could fail.

The second they were both inside, Wyn stepped from the gloom, wide-eyed and wire-tense, Lyra tucked behind and nursing her bandaged arm. Morgan stood sentry in the stairwell, eyes glassy from exhaustion or something they'd dosed themselves with to keep moving.

“You made it,” Wyn blurted, in the too-loud voice of relief that knows how close it came to not being true.

“Where else would we go?” Carolina said, resting her hand on Xander’s back. He was already scanning the perimeter, counting threats, never able to stop peeling every moment down to its vein.

Morgan’s face cracked the ghost of a smile. “For a second, thought you’d both not made it,” they said. “It’s ugly out there.”

Carolina turned to Wyn, fixed her with a look. “Why here? Last we heard, it was flagged a red zone.”

Wyn smirked, all bright nerves. “Which is why we came. You see anyone else lining up for the potential of slow, hallucinatory death by airborne spores? Thought not.” Beside Wyn, Lyra shrugged and made a face that neatly split the difference between ‘genius’ and ‘utter moron.’

They collected in the center of what had once been a children’s reading room. The floor was crawlspace and jagged edge, piles of shredded paper, walls smeared with slogans, some ancient and some made last night. Wyn’s medicine kit lived in a rusted breadbox, which they now deployed with clinical glee. Lyra’s wound required another flush—scalding water, then a stripe of the neon-blue gel Wyn hoarded like gold.

Xander observed the procedure, a quiet golem in the half-light. His focus only flicked when Lyra rocked back on her heels, inhaled sharply as the chemicals fizzed in her cut.

Carolina took the opportunity to sweep the room, clock the exits, test the heft of a busted fire extinguisher hanging on a frayed wire. She used to hate this kind of waiting—sick, wasting time—but now she felt the luxury in it. To be in a room with people who knew you. To have even one hour when the world wasn’t hunting you down.

“Why’d you stay?” Lyra asked, voice thin with the effort not to show pain.

Carolina raised an eyebrow. “You know why.”

“Could have run. Could have gone south. Lost us.”

“Could have,” Carolina agreed. “But I’m stubborn.”

Xander snorted. “You think you’re the stubborn one? Please.”

Morgan, rebandaging their own hand, said, “We’re all pigheaded. That’s the secret ingredient.”

Wyn, already lost to another experiment, didn’t even look up. “Secret ingredient is hope,” they muttered. “Even if you can’t stand the taste.”

They weathered the night on the floor, each challenger bunked against their own pile of books, the old library smell mixing with the wet citrus of the fever balm Wyn dabbed under everyone’s noses. Outside, the city screamed and howled, but in here the world shrank to the radius of their warmth.

Sometime in the dead hours, Carolina woke to find Xander’s lips at the nape of her neck, his hand a slow, deliberate weight on her belly. He thought she was still asleep—she could hear the hush in his breath, the reverence and hunger. He fit himself around her, and for the first time in years she let herself melt, let the ugly edges go dull.

She rolled to face him, saw the shadow of his old scars in the moonlight. Kissed him—slow, thorough, forgiving. “We can’t,” she whispered.

He held her tighter. “We have to, or we lose ourselves.”

In the corner, Lyra and Wyn snored in staggered harmony. Carolina pressed her body closer, Xander’s thigh hard between hers, the press of hunger and comfort impossible to separate now. She clung to him, and he to her, and the night shifted around them, like the world could be remade by the heat of two desperate bodies refusing to let go.

At dawn, Morgan roused them with a hiss. “We’ve got company.”

They scrambled upright, barely decent, Wyn’s kit jammed hastily into pockets. Carolina, hair wild, still tasting Xander on her lips, led them up the ravaged stairwell, past the walls of collapsed words and children’s drawings. Outside, the city was shrouded in morning mist, pale light refracting off the broken glass. Shapes moved at the street’s edge—mercenaries, or syndicate, or maybe just another batch of kids trying to live through the day.

Carolina weighed her odds, squared her jaw, and signaled the move. With Lyra wounded, Wyn barely walking straight, and Morgan’s hand torn to ribbons, it was on her and Xander to clear a path. She grabbed the length of pipe she’d stashed and spun it once, feeling the cold resolve settle in.

“Last time we did this, we lost three friends,” Xander said, low under his breath.

She met his eyes, unblinking. “Last time, we weren’t us.”

Wyn grinned, teeth blue from some new chemical. “We’re going loud or soft?”

“Loud,” Carolina said.

They blitzed the open, sprinting through the debris, Morgan laying down cover with flares filched from the basement. The first three hostiles folded after a wordless exchange—too young, too tired, not paid enough to risk it. A fourth barely got his gun up before Xander knocked him flat. Carolina vaulted an overturned cruiser, yanking Lyra with her, and felt the old exhilaration drag a yelp from her chest.

At the edge of the block, they angled west, toward the canal, where rumor had it there was a boat, a real boat, with a working engine and enough room for six.

Wyn kept up, barely. “Shit, shit, shit,” they muttered with every stride, but kept moving. Lyra bit down on her sleeve to keep from crying out. Even Morgan, teeth bared with effort, ran faster than she’d ever seen.

When they crested the last snowbank, the canal glimmered, arterial and alive beneath the crust of ice. And there was the boat: hunched against the dock, painted in Tyvek and styrofoam, its frankensteined motor already coughing to life. Carolina laughed, wild and loud, pure relief.

“We made it,” she gasped.

Wyn was first on the boat, then Lyra, then Morgan. Xander hovered, watching her back, until the last instant. Carolina felt the world narrow to a pinprick—the city, the cold, the decades of betrayal and heartbreak—and then she jumped, and he caught her, and they landed together, hearts an arrhythmia neither one needed to correct.

The escape downriver happened in silence but for the choking outboard and the sound of Morgan laughing, unstoppable, as the city peeled away behind them.

Two miles later, they found a slip between the trees, pulled the boat onto the black ice, and huddled in the lee of the hull. Wyn collapsed immediately, asleep before they hit the ground. Lyra curled into the crook of Carolina’s arm and didn’t let go. Xander watched the river until the sky went true blue, then turned back to her, no need for words.

Carolina pulled him down, and this time, the kiss was about now, and tomorrow, and all the impossible hells they'd crawled through to get here.

For the first time in her life, she let herself believe in it. In hope that hurt, in a promise that didn’t sound like a lie. She watched the others sleep, and the river run, and knew this wouldn’t last. Nothing ever did.

But while it did, it was beautiful.

That night, tucked between Xander and Lyra, with Wyn’s snores sawing the stars open overhead, Carolina thought: I could stay here.

Maybe not forever, but for a little while.

A little while, she realized, was all the life the world ever gave you. And for the first time, that was enough.