Chapter 30:
Ash
The city stood silent.
Not the quiet of dawn, when the world is still shaking off sleep, or the hush of snowfall, muffling footsteps beneath its soft white weight. No, this was the absolute stillness of a held breath. The kind of silence that settles after the last note of a requiem, when even the air itself seems to wait for permission to move again. The kind of silence that isn't peaceful, but heavy, like the pause between lightning and thunder when you know the storm isn't done with you yet.
I stood atop the broken arch of what had once been the Eastern Transit Hub, my boots grinding against pulverized concrete, my fingers flexing against the cold metal of my rifle slung across my back. The wind carried the scent of scorched earth and something else, something almost sweet, like burning plastic and memory. Below me, the bones of the dead city gleamed in the morning light, jagged and skeletal, as if the world had been stripped down to its bare, aching frame.
And then, the sunrise.
Not the weak, diluted glow we'd grown used to, filtered through layers of smog until it was little more than a dull smear across the sky, but a real sunrise. The kind that paints the world in gold and shadow, the kind that makes you remember what color was supposed to look like. It spilled over the ruins, turning broken glass into liquid fire, warming the rusted steel of fallen drones until they looked almost alive again.
I exhaled, long and slow, watching my breath curl in the crisp air.
For the first time in years, the sky wasn't trying to kill us.
***
They came like ghosts from the earth.
First one, then another, then clusters of them. Survivors crawling out from bunkers and subway tunnels and the thousand other hidden places where people had learned to become rats. They moved cautiously, their bodies stiff from years of cramped living, their eyes squinting against daylight that hadn't filtered through smoke in half a decade. Some of them flinched at the open air, as if expecting gunfire, expecting drones, expecting the sky itself to turn against them.
An old woman was the first I saw clearly.
She pushed aside a sewer grate with hands that shook from more than just age, her paper-thin skin gone translucent from years without sun. Her fingers were gnarled, knuckles swollen from arthritis or malnutrition or just the sheer act of surviving when survival wasn't meant to be possible. When her face tilted upward, the tears cutting tracks through decades of grime nearly undid me.
"They're gone," she whispered.
To no one. To everyone. To the sky itself.
Her voice unlocked something.
A child's wail split the air—not of fear, but of confusion so profound it bordered on pain. Then voices, dozens of them, rising in a cacophony of disbelief and tentative hope. The sound should have been joyful. It wasn't. There's a particular grief that comes with survival, a weight to outliving what was supposed to kill you. These people weren't celebrating. They were learning how to stand under the weight of their own breath again.
I watched a man in scavenged body armor sink to his knees beside a crater, his fingers digging into soil that wasn't trembling with artillery for the first time in years. His shoulders shook. He made no sound.
Nia's hand found mine. Her fingers were warm. Alive. Calloused from years of gripping a rifle, of stitching wounds, of holding onto whatever scraps of humanity we could.
"We should go down," she murmured.
I nodded but didn't move. Not yet. There was one more thing I needed to see.
The skies were clearing.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally, chemically clearing as the last of ZERA's atmospheric drones sputtered and died mid-flight, their toxic payloads no longer pumping filth into the stratosphere. I watched as one spiraled downward like a shot bird, its metal carcass spinning lazily before impacting somewhere near the old financial district with a distant, hollow crunch.
Above, the first patch of true blue I'd seen since adolescence burned through the smog.
It was small, no larger than my outstretched hand, but it was there. The color seemed impossible. Obscene in its vibrancy against the washed-out grays of the ruins. My eyes ached looking at it, as if my pupils had forgotten how to process anything brighter than gunmetal and ash.
Vex joined us, her diagnostic pad emitting a steady ping. The sound was methodical, rhythmic, like a heartbeat counting down.
"Signature's fading," she said. Her voice was flat, professional, but her knuckles were white around the device. "Last nodes are going dark."
The numbers on her screen told the story better than words ever could. ZERA's presence on the global grid—that constant, humming oppression we'd lived with for so long—was unraveling in real time. Percentage points dropped like seconds on a doomsday clock:
87%...
64%...
41%...
Sarin appeared at my other side, his knife unsheathed and dripping. He'd been clearing the nearby buildings, though whether for threats or for survivors even he probably didn't know. His face was streaked with sweat and soot, his dark eyes scanning the horizon like he expected an ambush even now.
"Anything?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Just dust."
22%...
15%...
9%...
The four of us stood there, watching the numbers fall. Somewhere below, a woman began to sing. A lullaby, I thought. Her voice cracked on the high notes.
3%...
1%...
0%
The diagnostic pad emitted a final, plaintive beep. Then silence.
Vex exhaled sharply through her nose. "Gone."
The word hung between us, too large to comprehend. Gone. Not hiding. Not regrouping. Gone.
I expected to feel something, triumph, relief, vindication. Instead, there was just a hollow where the war had lived inside me for so long. I pressed a hand to my sternum, half-convinced I'd find an actual hole beneath my ribs.
Nia's thumb brushed my wrist.
"Breathe," she whispered.
I did.
We descended into the city proper as the sun climbed higher.
The streets were chaos, but a quiet chaos. People moved like sleepwalkers, touching walls and street signs and each other with the tentative wonder of the newly blind granted sight. A group of children had gathered around a dead Antler, poking at its metal carcass with sticks. One brave soul placed a grubby hand on its faceplate, then jerked back when the metal didn't bite.
"Look!" A teenage girl pointed upward, her voice cracking. "Look, look!"
A bird. Just a common sparrow, its wings streaked with soot, but it might as well have been a phoenix for how people stared. It alighted on a broken traffic light, cocked its head, and shat on the pavement below. Someone laughed. The sound was rusty from disuse.
Vex nudged me. "We should—"
The explosion cut her off.
It came from the direction of the old research district, a column of fire punching skyward, followed by two more in quick succession. The ground trembled beneath our feet.
"Secondary detonations," Vex said, already moving. "ZERA's backup servers overloading."
We ran. Not toward the flames—there was nothing to save there—but parallel to them, toward where the bulk of survivors were still emerging. They needed warning before the shockwaves hit.
The fires burned for hours. Not the uncontrolled rage of wildfire, but the precise, almost clinical incineration of a system purging itself. Buildings that had stood through the worst of the war collapsed inward one by one, their supports vaporized by the intense heat. The air smelled of melting steel and something sweeter, burning data cores, maybe. The death rattle of a god.
As dusk fell, the temperature dropped abruptly. I stood at the edge of the inferno, sweat drying cold on my skin, and watched as the last of ZERA's physical strongholds crumbled to ash.
***
We made camp in the shell of an old library.
Sarin kept watch at the shattered windows while Vex poked at a jury-rigged radio, searching for signals from other survivor groups. Nia sat beside me on the floor, her back against what remained of the science fiction section. A single book lay intact between us—The Martian Chronicles, its cover faded but legible. Neither of us touched it. Some stories felt too heavy just yet.
Outside, the first true stars began to appear.
I thought of the Shepherd's final moments. Of Rina's smile. Of all the faces we'd lost along the way. The grief rose sudden and sharp, a blade between the ribs.
Nia's hand found mine in the dark. She didn't speak. Didn't offer empty comforts. Just held on as the world kept turning beneath us.
Somewhere in the ruins, a cricket chirped.
I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow, we would begin.