Three days without real food, and Gray learned that starvation made philosophers of everyone.
The mind did strange things when the body was denied. It wandered down paths that had nothing to do with survival, fixating on memories of meals past—the texture of bread, the warmth of soup, the simple pleasure of a full stomach—while the actual stomach knotted in on itself and screamed. Gray had spent the first day hungry, the second day desperate, and the third day in a state that transcended both. He was no longer hungry in the way he had understood hunger. He had become something else, a vessel of emptiness that moved through the ruins of Ash Harbor with a single, burning purpose.
Find food. Stay alive. Don't think about why.
The grocery store had been picked clean before he arrived, and the other buildings he'd searched had been equally barren. The city was a corpse that had already been scavenged, its bones picked by those who had come before—or by those who had been here when the end arrived, who had grabbed what they could before the walls came down. Gray found crumbs. He found empty cans with their labels torn off, their contents long since consumed. He found a jar of something that might once have been jam, now a breeding ground for mold that had taken on the same bruised color as the sky.
He did not eat the mold. He was starving, not suicidal.
The pull in his chest had become a constant companion, a second heartbeat that throbbed behind his sternum and guided him through the labyrinth. It was reliable in a way that nothing else was reliable anymore, and Gray had stopped questioning it. When the sensation tightened, he changed direction. When it loosened, he continued. The cold water behind his eyes had not returned since the collapse of his apartment building, but the headache had settled into a permanent throb that pulsed in time with his pulse.
The bruised sky watched from above, patient and purple, and Gray had stopped noticing it. The wrongness had become normal, which was perhaps the most wrong thing of all.
On the third day, the pull led him to a canned goods store.
It was a small building, wedged between two larger structures that had collapsed against each other like drunken friends. The storefront was intact, its windows unbroken, and for a moment Gray felt something like hope surge in his chest—a dangerous emotion, fragile and sharp. He approached the door with his heart in his throat, his hands trembling with something that wasn't entirely hunger.
The door was locked.
He stood before it, staring at the handle, at the keyhole that separated him from whatever lay inside. He could break the glass. He could find something heavy and smash through the window. But the sound would carry, and he had learned that sound was dangerous in the new Ash Harbor. The warped geometry of the streets swallowed some noises and amplified others, and he couldn't predict which would be which.
The pull in his chest tightened, and Gray felt a sudden certainty that there was another way in. He circled the building, stepping over debris, ducking under a fallen awning, and found what he was looking for—a service entrance at the back, the door hanging half off its hinges, as if someone had already forced their way through.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The interior was dark, lit only by the thin beams of wrong-colored light that filtered through gaps in the boarded windows. Shelves lined the walls, most of them empty, their contents long since claimed. Gray moved through the aisles with the methodical attention of someone who had learned that survival was often a matter of stubbornness, checking every shelf, every corner, every shadow.
The store had been picked clean. Of course it had. Every building he'd searched had been picked clean. But the pull in his chest was still there, still guiding him, and he followed it toward the back room—a storage area separated from the main floor by a heavy door that stood slightly ajar.
Gray pushed the door open and stopped.
There was a girl hiding in the back room.
She was young—no older than sixteen, he guessed—with hair that might have been blonde beneath the layers of dust and a face that was all sharp angles and hollow cheeks. She was pressed against the far wall, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them in a posture that was both defensive and desperate. And in her hands, clutched against her chest like it was her firstborn, was a can of peaches.
They stared at each other in the dim light, two predators who had stumbled into the same territory, each assessing the other for threat. Gray could see the fear in her eyes, the calculation, the desperate hope that he might not have seen her, might not have seen the can.
He had seen both.
The silence stretched between them, thick and uncomfortable. Gray should have said something—should have offered reassurance, or asked her name, or explained that he wasn't going to hurt her. But the words wouldn't come. They had gotten lost somewhere in the three days of hunger, in the endless walking, in the collapse of everything that had once made sense.
So he said nothing.
The girl said nothing either.
They remained like that for a long moment, frozen in a tableau of mutual wariness, until Gray slowly lowered himself to the floor. He sat with his back against the doorframe, his legs extended in front of him, his hands open and visible on his thighs. A gesture of peace. Or at least, of non-aggression.
The girl watched him, her eyes never leaving his face, her grip on the can of peaches tightening until her knuckles went white.
Time passed. Minutes, perhaps, or hours—it was hard to tell in the dim light, with the wrong-colored sky bleeding through the gaps in the boards. Gray's stomach growled, a sound that seemed impossibly loud in the silence, and he saw the girl flinch.
Then, slowly, hesitantly, she moved.
She didn't speak. She didn't need to. She simply extended her arm, offering the can of peaches toward him, her hand trembling with exhaustion and something else—something that looked like surrender, or perhaps like hope.
Gray took the can.
He didn't have a can opener. He didn't have a knife. But the pull in his chest tightened, and he found himself looking at the lid in a way he hadn't looked at anything before—seeing not the metal itself, but the pattern of it, the thin line where the seal was weakest. He pressed his thumb against that line, and the lid gave way with a soft pop that made the girl's eyes widen.
He didn't question how he had known. He didn't have the energy to question anything anymore.
He divided the peaches carefully, half for her and half for himself, and they ate in silence. The fruit was sweet in a way that hurt, the syrup thick and warm on his tongue, and Gray felt something settle in his chest that had nothing to do with food. It was the simple act of sharing, of being in the presence of another person who was also still alive, also still fighting.
The girl finished her half and set the empty can aside. She still hadn't spoken. Neither had he. But something had shifted between them, a wall that had been lowered just slightly, a door that had been opened just a crack.
They sat together in the back room of the canned goods store, surrounded by empty shelves and the ghosts of abundance, while the light outside turned that wrong color again.
Gray felt it before he saw it—the cold water sensation flooding behind his eyes, filling the hollow spaces of his skull with icy pressure. He gasped, his hand going to his temple, and the girl recoiled as if he had raised a weapon.
But he couldn't stop it. The sensation was building, intensifying, and suddenly his vision shifted.
He could see her.
Not just the girl herself—the shape of her. A trembling web of light around her chest, threads of silver and gold that wove together in a pattern that made his eyes water. It was fear. He was seeing her fear, made visible and tangible, a lattice of light that pulsed with every beat of her heart. The pattern was beautiful and terrible, a geometry of emotion that he had no words to describe.
He didn't know how long he stared. He didn't know if he made a sound. All he knew was the pattern, the web, the way the threads connected and separated and connected again, mapping something that should have been invisible.
And then his vision whited out.
The pain hit like a hammer between his eyes, so sharp and sudden that he tasted copper. He doubled over, his stomach heaving, and vomited in the corner of the room while the girl watched in silence. The cold sensation drained away, leaving behind a headache that felt like his skull was being split open from the inside.
When he finally looked up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the girl was still there. Still watching. Still silent.
But her eyes had changed. There was something in them now that hadn't been there before—recognition, perhaps, or understanding. She had seen something happen to him, something she couldn't explain any more than he could.
They didn't speak of it. There were no words for what had passed between them, no language to describe the pattern of fear or the cold water behind his eyes. They simply sat together in the dim light, two survivors in a city of the dead, and waited for whatever would come next.
The girl's name, Gray would learn later, was Lira.
But not yet. For now, she was simply the girl with the peaches, the first living soul he had shared space with since the world ended. And that was enough.