Alle Kapitel von APOCALYPSE QUEEN: LEVEL UP OR DIE: Kapitel 181 – Kapitel 185

Winter came to Apex the way a held breath finally leaves the body: all at once, and then slowly.For three weeks after the vote, the snow fell in small dry flakes and melted on the stones. Then one night in the second week of November it came down in earnest, a thick, silent, windless fall that buried the drive and the garden and the long row of graves under a foot of white. By morning the whole valley looked like a held note. Smoke rose straight up from every chimney. The children went mad with joy, and Eli was found at dawn lying on his back in the yard with his arms spread, making an angel that he insisted was a calculation.It was a Sunday.We'd kept the rule. Every week, no politics, no exceptions, one night of dinner with the whole compound. Afterward, once the long tables were cleared and the sleepy children carried off to bed, the five of us climbed the stairs to the war room, where Dutch had built a fire in the old iron stove and someone had dragged in five mismatched chairs.

Chapter 169: The CellMrs. Delaney took my measurements on a Monday, in the pantry, with a cloth tape and the grim efficiency of a woman defusing a bomb."Arms up.""I don't see why...""Sovereign, you have survived the end of the world, and you are about to be married in a gymnasium. Arms up."I put my arms up. She wrote numbers on her clipboard with her pencil behind her ear, muttering fractions. Behind her, Pip and Lily sat on a flour barrel pretending not to listen, and failing completely."Are you going to wear the boots?" Pip asked."Probably.""Can I wear boots?""Everyone's wearing boots," said Mrs. Delaney. "It's December. This is Idaho." She tugged the tape tight around my ribs. "Breathe out."I breathed out, and I thought, very clearly: I have never been this happy, and I don't trust it.I think she saw it on my face, because she stopped, and the pencil went still against the clipboard."You'll want to go and see him," she said.I hadn't said a word about Hollis. "Why would

It snowed all morning, softly, as if someone were being careful.By noon the gymnasium glowed. Rudy had wired evergreen boughs across the rafters, and Rosa's forced narcissus stood in coffee cans along every bench, small and white and impossible in the dead of December. At the far end, under the basketball hoop, stood the arch: pine posts, a crossbeam, a rope of ivy someone had coaxed through the winter. Mrs. Delaney had inspected it that morning and pronounced it "adequate," which from her was a standing ovation.I waited in the infirmary back room in the cream-colored dress, with Terra tugging a sleeve straight and Emily pressing a handful of flowers into my hand."Breathe," said Terra."I'm breathing.""You're counting."I was. I'd been counting the rafters. Forty-one. Then the people on the other side of the door, by the sound of them. Over a hundred. I made myself stop."Nobody out there's going to hurt you," said Terra."That's what I keep saying.""It's allowed to be true." She