The morning came in pale gold, the kind of light that felt too gentle for everything they’d survived.Arin woke first, the way he always did now suddenly, completely, as if some part of him still expected an alarm that would never sound again. Maris was curled against his side, one arm thrown across his chest like she was afraid the night might steal him back. He stayed still and listened to her breathe, counting heartbeats the way he once counted threats.Outside, the city sounded different. Not louder, just fuller. Real voices, real footsteps, the clank of metal on metal that wasn’t a weapon being loaded. Someone was singing badly, off-key, but singing all the same. The sound drifted up through the cracked window and settled on the sheets like dust made of hope.He slipped out of bed without waking her. The floor was cold against his bare feet. He pulled on yesterday’s trousers and the frayed jacket, then stood at the window for a long time, watching the square come alive.A girl ma

They had suppressed the news eleven days.Eleven days of regular miracles: the very first rain that was not ash, a school was opened in an old drone hangar, Kade was teaching a group of teenage boys how to swear in binary. Eleven days of Arin rising early in the morning to stare at the ceiling and ask himself what sort of a man leaves a ghost wearing the face of his monster.On the twelfth morning the conscience decided on their behalf.As he was assisting Maris to bring crates of seedlings to the rooftop gardens, Arin saw his wrist comm light up. The message was rude, street, not to be suppressed:I will not be able to remain underground as the city becomes able to trust. I shall address you to-night at the fountain. Come and stand with me, should you desire. Come if you wish to end me. I will accept either.The square was silent when the words sprang up on all the screens, on all the drones, on all the broken bits of glass remaining in the windows. Then the questions began.

Chapter One — Ten Years of Bread and StaticThe city had grown loud in the way only healed things can: messy, opinionated, alive.Arin woke to the sound of arguing over whose turn it was to fix the communal oven. Someone had left it on all night again, and the smell of slightly charred bread drifted up through the floorboards like a familiar ghost. He lay still for a moment, listening to Maris breathe beside him, her leg hooked over his, hair across his arm like spilled ink.Ten years.He still counted them sometimes, the way people touch scars to make sure they’re real.Downstairs, Lila (sixteen now, all sharp elbows and sharper opinions) was losing the argument with Kade, who had apparently been the one to fall asleep mid-bread. Their voices rose and tangled and dissolved into laughter. The oven door slammed. Someone cheered.Arin smiled into the pillow. The world had kept its promise: it stayed soft only when people refused to let it harden.Maris stirred. “If you get up now,” she

They buried the silence of Ash Hollow under three days of festival.People had declared a week of noise: drums on every corner, children painting the streets with washable dyes, Kade and Lila rigging the fountain to shoot colored water thirty feet high while old men bet on whose turn it was to get soaked. No one spoke of the hollow settlement again. They didn’t need to. The absence had been felt, measured, and gently folded into the city’s long memory.On the fourth morning, a girl walked into the square carrying a map made of starlight.She was seventeen, barefoot, hair the color of burnt copper, wearing a coat three sizes too large and stitched with constellations that moved when you looked at them too long. A single drone followed her at a respectful distance, light blinking the pale gold the system used when it was nervous.She stopped in front of the fountain, unfolded the map across the stones, and waited.By the time Arin and Maris arrived (pulled by rumors and the drone’s incr

They did not come down the Sky Ladder the same people who had climbed it.No one spoke of it directly, but everyone felt the change: a quiet, permanent widening behind the ribs, the way a house feels different after a child is born in it.They reached the city at noon the next day. The elevator cage rattled open and the square was waiting.Not a festival crowd this time. Just people. Thousands of them, standing in the ordinary sunlight, holding ordinary things: loaves of bread, paper lanterns, children on shoulders, dogs wearing flower crowns. No speeches had been announced. No one had sent word ahead. They had simply known.When Arin stepped out first, the silence was so complete he could hear the fountain breathing.Then a small boy near the front (couldn’t have been more than six) walked up and placed a slightly squashed tomato at Arin’s feet like an offering. Another child followed with a handful of daisies. Then another with a cook