All Chapters of The Year Before The Dark.: Chapter 1 - Chapter 4

Ruby POV"Cesare, open the door."I hit the glass of the loading office with the flat of my hand, and the glass shook under my palm. The office was built into the gatehouse, with one window set in the outer wall facing the road and another looking back into the hall.Cesare was standing three feet away on the other side of the glass, close enough that I could see steam rising off his mug. He looked at me for a long moment, then drank from it.Above the docks the sun was a pale smudge behind the dust. It had looked like that every day since the Dimming in March, when the radio blamed a volcano somewhere in the far north that no one ever managed to find. Even the snow came down grey, and a fine film of the dust had already settled over the tracks I made walking out to the north fence an hour earlier.Behind Cesare, the depot was lit from end to end. I could see the long tables I had dragged in from the old canteen in August, the queue lines I had painted on the concrete in yellow road p

Ruby POV“Ruby? Babe, did you hear me?”Cesare was smiling down at me with fireworks still cracking over the harbour behind the curtains. I had not heard a word he said.The window was still there, hanging in the air between his face and mine. The white letters sat perfectly still while the coloured light from outside slid across his cheek and over the wall behind him.I blinked, and the window stayed exactly where it was.I turned my head toward the ceiling, and it moved with me, floating in front of my eyes at the same height and the same distance.I lifted my hand and reached for it. My fingertips went straight through the word Goal and touched nothing at all.Cesare laughed and caught my wrist. “What are you doing?”“Eyelash,” I said, and rubbed the corner of my eye with my knuckle. “It’s gone now.”He kissed my fingers before letting my hand go, then rolled onto his back with one arm folded behind his head. His eyes passed right through the window while he looked up at the ceilin