Chapter 1: The Last Bandage

The ash had been falling since before dawn, and Mara Holloway was already sick of it.

It didn't fall like snow, not really. Snow was soft and quiet and kind of polite about it. This stuff drifted down gray and thin, and it got into everything. Her teeth. The seams of her gloves. The back of her throat, no matter how tight she wrapped the scarf. Three winters of it now, and she still woke up some mornings with that taste in her mouth, like she'd licked the bottom of a cold fireplace.

She crouched behind the counter of what used to be a Brightwell Pharmacy and went through the shelf one more time. She already knew what was there. She'd counted it twice last night, once more at sunrise. Four rolls of gauze. One half-empty bottle of antiseptic. A bandage that was meant for a child's knee, with faded cartoon rockets on it.

One bandage. That was the last one.

"Okay," she said out loud, because talking to herself was cheaper than going quiet. "Okay, we make it work."

The pharmacy had a hole in the roof the size of a car, and the gray light came straight through it and landed in a pile on the floor. Somebody had been in here before her, a long time ago. The shelves were tipped and the glass was crushed into the tile, and in the back there was a smear of something dark that Mara had decided, on day one, not to think about. She'd swept a corner clean anyway. A sleeping bag, a camp stove, a tin cup. A little wall of broken shelving she'd propped up against the draft. It wasn't home. She didn't do home anymore. But it kept the wind off, and that counted for something.

She pulled her left glove off and flexed her hand.

The scar ran straight across the palm, shiny and pink and tight, from the base of her thumb all the way to the edge. It still pulled when the weather turned bad, and the weather was always bad. She'd gotten it the first night, the night the sky lit up, when she'd grabbed a door handle that was already glowing. She hadn't even felt it. That was the thing she kept coming back to. She'd walked three blocks holding onto that hand like it belonged to somebody else, and only later, when the shaking started, did it hit her.

She was a nurse. She should've known better. She'd told herself that a hundred times, and it had never once helped.

Mara wrapped the hand with the last of the good gauze, the way she did every morning, then pulled the glove back on. Her red cloak hung over the counter, drying.

She'd stitched it herself out of a wool blanket she found in a church basement two winters back. It was ugly and lumpy and the left sleeve was a different shade of red from the right, but it held heat like nothing else she owned. She'd made it in the dark with a needle from a sewing kit that still had its little plastic tag on. She was kind of proud of it, if she was honest. She'd never say so.

Then her stomach growled, loud enough to echo.

"Yeah, I hear you," she muttered.

Breakfast was half a tin of peaches. She ate them slowly, with her fingers, and she let the syrup sit on her tongue because it was the only sweet thing she'd had in nine days. Somewhere above the hole in the ceiling the wind was picking up. It made a low sound in the beams, almost like humming. She'd gotten used to that, too. You got used to everything. That was the awful part.

On the shelf above the counter, wedged between a dented pill organizer and a snow globe she couldn't bring herself to throw out, there was a seed.

It was just one. A little flat brown thing, maybe the size of her thumbnail. She'd kept it in her pocket for three years until the pocket wore through, and then she'd moved it up here where she could see it. Tomato, she thought.

Could've been a pepper. She'd never planted it, because there wasn't anything to plant it in. The ground outside was frozen solid and buried under ash, and the few green things that did come up now were not the kind of green you wanted to get close to.

She wasn't sure why she kept it. Some days she thought it was stubbornness. Other days she thought it was a joke she was telling herself, one that wasn't very funny.

She touched it with one finger, the way she always did, and then she moved on.

There was work to do. There was always work. She dragged the map out from under the sleeping bag, a road atlas with half the pages gone and the rest covered in her handwriting, and she spread it over the counter. Every street she'd walked. Every building she'd checked. Red X for raiders. Blue circle for water. A little black dot wherever she'd found a body, which was more places than she liked to count. Three years of it, all in pencil. Her whole world drawn out as small as a dinner plate.

She knew those streets better than she'd ever known her own neighborhood. Funny how that worked.

Mara traced the highway north with her thumb. Past the burned-out overpass. Past the long gray lake. Past the place where the road just stopped, cracked straight in half, with the other side sitting a foot higher like the earth had hiccuped. She'd been up that way exactly once. She'd turned around at the ridge.

She didn't let herself look at what was written past the ridge. Just two words, small, in her own handwriting, and she'd gone over them so many times the pencil had worn a groove in the paper

.

Cradle Valley.

She knew what was there. She knew it the way you know where a bruise is, without looking, without pressing. She just didn't go near it.

Because if she went, and it was empty, then that was it. Done. There'd be nothing left to keep not-knowing about.

Mara folded the atlas shut, hard, and shoved it back under the bag.

"Not today," she said.

It was funny, though. She'd said that every day for three years, and she'd never once noticed what day it was until right then, when she bent down for her boots and saw the little notch she'd cut in the counter edge with her knife. Counting days. Tally marks in groups of five, all the way down the wood. She didn't remember starting it. It had just turned into a habit, like checking her pockets, like breathing.

She counted without meaning to. Then she counted again.

Christmas Eve.

It was Christmas Eve. She'd gone almost the whole morning and not thought it once.

Mara sat back on her heels and let out a breath that came out white and shaky. There wasn't any reason it should hit her so hard. It was just a date. It was a Tuesday, or a Thursday, or whatever the hell it was now, and the calendar on the pharmacy wall had been frozen on some random April since the fire. Nobody celebrated anything anymore. Nobody had the spare calories.

But she saw it anyway, as clear as if it was happening in front of her. A kitchen. A real one, with yellow light and a burnt smell from the oven. A paper chain that somebody had been taping up across the window, and somebody else, small and furious, insisting it was crooked. A man's voice, low and amused, saying it's fine, Wren, it's perfect. A boy's laugh. A boy who should've been standing right there, right at the edge of the memory, and wasn't.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye, hard, until she saw sparks.

"Stop it," she said. "Stop. We're not doing this."

The wind moaned in the rafters. The ash kept coming down through the hole in the roof, soft and steady, piling up in the corner like it had somewhere to be.

Mara pulled on her red cloak, tucked the single bandage with the cartoon rockets into her inside pocket, and stepped out into the gray to see what the day had left her.