Chapter 42

What passed for morning in the city now was a slow unpeeling of fog, a brightness that slid in sideways and made the whole world look half-dreamed. Carolina and Lyra lingered at the windowsill, watching as the light caught on broken glass and haphazard scaffolding. On a distant roof, a shirtless man stretched his arms to the sun. From below, you could hear the clatter of vendors setting up, hammering together their meager wares with the stubborn optimism only desperate people could muster.

Carolina lied to herself and said she’d grown used to it: the constant performance of command, the way her name traveled faster than her body, the ache in her jaw from grinding her teeth through every decision. She was supposed to be building something. Some days she thought she could see the shape of it; other days she just saw herself, monstrous and enormous, shadowing every corner with her wants.

She went to find Xander at the only place she knew he’d be: the half-disguised clinic down by the river, tucked inside an old train car sealed with tarps and duct tape. She didn’t have to knock—before her hand even reached the handle, the door slid open.

He looked terrible. Pale, gaunt, eyes with double-shadowed bruises beneath. But then, everyone did, right now. He raised an eyebrow, allowed the corners of his mouth to upturn minutely.

“Carolina,” he said, voice a notch shy of warmth.

“Can we walk?” she asked.

He didn’t hesitate. He barely even blinked, just shrugged on a jacket and nodded her out into the yard. The city was louder now, swelling with people clamping onto every ounce of freedom. Ahead, down the slope, packs of children weaved between stacks of rebar and abandoned concrete pylons. Carolina watched them, searched for the right words, found nothing to corral the chaos inside her chest.

They made it as far as the gutted playground before Xander finally broke the silence.

“Is it about the kid?” He gestured with his chin at the ragtag swarm, but his face was all calculation.

Carolina shoved her hands deep in her coat. “It’s about a kid,” she said.

His eyes flickered, and for a second she saw the boy he used to be, the one who’d followed her up crumbling towers just for the thrill. “You’re not dying,” he said.

She shook her head. “Not dying.”

He let his gaze drift to her stomach, lingered there without judgment. If anything, she sensed relief. “You sure?”

She almost laughed. “I did the stick. I did the blood test. I did the nurse with hands like a butterfly. I’m sure.”

He rolled his tongue across his teeth, thinking. “Is it a good thing?” he asked, and this time the hope in his voice was not hidden at all.

“It just is,” she said. “I’m not looking for permission.”

He studied her, then looked at the city beyond, at the little kingdom they’d failed to burn. “Do you want me in the picture?” he asked.

Carolina thought of every reason to say no. Thought of her own mother, months gone, her father, exiled by mutual hatred. She thought of how much she’d learned to want solitude. And then, inexplicably, she thought of Lyra’s hand at her elbow, the way her voice always sounded like an inside joke.

“Yeah,” she said. “If you can stand it.”

He gave a quiet, almost shy laugh. “I can stand it. I’d like to.”

She could feel his hand ready itself at the small of her back, but he thought better of it, left it hovering in the air. “It’s never gonna be what you wanted,” Carolina warned. “Not a family. Not in the old way.”

He shrugged. “Could be better. Could be worse. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

It was more than she’d ever asked for. She let him stand there, awkward and uncertain, and something about that made her want to keep trying.

*

News traveled faster than the wind off the landfill. That afternoon, she caught Lyra and Briony in the old cathedral, bickering over who’d take point on tomorrow’s supply run. The instant Carolina came in, silence took the air, and the two managed identical, suspiciously neutral faces.

Lyra said, out of the side of her mouth, “If you made up with your baby daddy, we get dibs on the name.” She didn’t look up from reloading her magazine.

Carolina rolled her eyes. “Are you planning a gender reveal party, too?”

“We could,” Briony deadpanned. “We’ve got leftover grenades.”

Lyra’s face finally cracked, and she broke the magazine in half laughing. “Red for a boy, blue for a girl! Nonbinary, we just let off a flare gun.”

Somehow, in the haze of laughter and the battery taste of the world, Carolina felt an unfamiliar calm. Like the future was an animal she could tame with treats.

They stayed up that night, taking shifts at the top of the old water tower, watching for trouble and swapping stories. Xander joined them for a while, bringing a few precious spoons of peanut butter, passing them around like communion. It was the first time in months the four of them sat together, not as a council or a warband, but as something that almost, almost looked like friends.

As the city drifted off below, Carolina perched on the ledge, Lyra’s side pressed to hers, feeling not the old ache of longing but the liminal shimmer of possibility.

“How bad do you think we’re screwing them up?” Carolina asked, nodding at the city, at the future, at the kid down the line.

Lyra whistled. “On a scale of one to end times? Average, I figure. Maybe a little less. At least they get to learn from our mistakes.”

Carolina smiled up at the cloudless, impossible sky. “What if we don’t have any more mistakes left?”

“That’s when you get soft,” Lyra said, tapping her on the shoulder. “That’s when you get boring.”

Carolina plucked a tiny, crumbling flower growing out of the concrete, handed it to Lyra, whose face went uncharacteristically gentle.

“Nah,” Lyra said. “We’ll always find ways to fuck it up. But at least it’s our mess now.” She slid the stem behind her ear, grinning like a fool.

Carolina closed her eyes, let the city’s noise build up around her, the hum of generators, the wild loop of children playing past midnight, the creak of wind against high metal. She could almost pretend it was the beginning of something whole.

Maybe legends didn’t end in fire and blood. Maybe, sometimes, they just kept going.

When morning came, she woke before the others, all breathless and raw, and watched the sun claw its way up over the ruins. She wondered what it would look like, this new world, through someone else’s eyes. She let herself want to see it.

Carolina waited. And for the first time in a long time, waiting felt almost like hope.