The decision was taken, the volunteers—a couple of steady guards and a feral, talented scavenger named Eli—were chosen. The foray into the black zone warehouse was a countdown in the back of each mind, a certain appointment with death that lent the remaining hours a strange, fever-dream-like intensity.To Ken, those hours were a checklist of grim preparation: studying the brittle, yellowed warehouse blueprints, testing the aging, suspect radiation gear, having hushed, final words with Lena and Markus. He moved with an intent intensity, a man who had already compartmentalized his own fear and potential death.It was at one of these times, while going to the armory to watch over the guns they'd washed and re-wash for the tenth time, that he saw her. Sophia was alone in a crate in a dimly lit side corridor, her sketchbook open on her lap. But she wasn't drawing. She was simply staring into the middle distance, her young face pale and pinched. The passionate, idealistic flame that once bu

The emergency lights cast a dismal, functional gloom over the largest of the science labs. It was to be the meeting place, the point at which the non-essential personnel—the thinkers, the researchers, the archivists—had been told to report and wait. The air, once charged with the ferment of question and answer, was heavy with despair and with the stale smell of unwashed bodies and fear.They had spent hours there, listening to the sanctuary wither away from them. The complaint of the dying generator had devolved into a low, ominous hum, a stone rattle of death. The lights had never flickered back to full power. They were trapped in a perpetual, gloomy twilight, their reality shrunk to the dim circle of a battery lantern or the poor beam of a hand torch.The dead generator had done more than to kill the lights and the experiments; it had killed the final vestiges of collective consciousness. The hunger turned into a second-order fear. The initial fear was suffocation, a crawling, whisp

Silence within Ken's room was a living thing. It was the silence of a tomb for its occupant. He sat on the edge of his cot, methodically, obsessively, oiling his rifle for the third time. The separated parts lay across a pristine rag on the desk, each of them glinting dimly under the light of one oil lamp. The actions were reflexive, reflective, a way of filling his hands so his head would not scream.The rehearsal for the mission was done. The schematics memorized. The gear, as there was any, stacked by the door. The three volunteers briefed. There was nothing to do but wait for the designated time and meet the certain death that awaited the black zone.His mind was a whirlwind of grim mathematics and cold recollections. The vacant eyes of the men in the bread line. The scientists' decision to disintegrate, a secret he'd been harboring like a lump of lead in his breast. The crumbly ash-taste bread dissolves to paste in his mouth. The whine of the generator's dying rattle. He was taki

Ken's broken, soft sobbing was the most awful thing Elara had ever listened to. It was a noise that did not exist, the sound of the mountain weeping itself. She had seen him hurt, spent, pushed to the limits of exhaustion, but she had never seen him break. The Ken she knew was a force of will, a cliff face against a stormy sea.To hear the cliff face shatter was a vibration in her soul.She did not move for a very long time, mesmerized by the door at the back of which she had left him. Her want was to rush to him, to take him in her arms, to tell him it would be all right. But she knew better than to lie like that, and he would instantly know the falsehood. He would be humiliated. So she remained, her heart pounding against her breastbone, letting him have this one lonely moment of utter despair.As the harsh noises faded into a hollow, quivering quiet, she roused. She went to the cot and sat beside him, not touching him yet. She looked at bits of the rifle littering the floor, at hi

The march back to the sanctuary was trudged in silence so profound it was its own language. Every scuff of their shoes over gravel, every rustle of their clothes, seemed to yell the words they were not saying. The world outside had become a threat again, a world of darkness and potential drones, building an efficacious space between them. But the space between their bodies was thick with the memory of the bridge, with the weight of his hands and the shared, breathless fear.They descended the groaning, rusting ladder to the mountain's belly, the transition from the deadly, open air to the damp, confined darkness more a drop back into a cage than a homecoming. The hatch slammed shut over them with a final, muted thump that excluded not just the world outside, but the choice it had briefly offered.The dark comfort of the sanctuary felt altered. It was once a slow death. Now, it was a confessional. Their faces were hidden by the darkness, but the darkness appeared to intensify the unsai