“Hold on for Truff’s sake,” Finch said to Feral as the cat ran to the kitchen through the living room.

Feral had wide round eyes. They gave his owlish face a perpetual look of surprise. Finch had rescued him as a kitten from a fungus that had wound tendrils around the animal while he slept. Still had purple patches on his flanks, sometimes growing, sometimes not.

No sign of Sidle, his windowsill lizard. Never really knew if it was the same lizard anyway. Felt compelled to pretend for some reason.

After feeding Feral, Finch put the two memory bulbs on the kitchen counter. Poured himself a glass of Trillian’s Premium Whiskey, aged eighteen years. An F&L brand trading off a famous name. Something no self-respecting H&S man would’ve drunk before the Rising. He had six bottles left in the closet. Next to the boxes of cigars. These had been his father’s habits, his legacy. Nothing better had replaced them. The smell of cigar smoke made him feel like his father was right there, beside him.

Cigars. Whiskey. Both working as a kind of peculiar clock or timer. When they ran out, would his life as Finch run out, too?

Heretic’s touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.

Dinnertime, but he wasn’t hungry.

A long, shuddering sigh as he sat in the old leather chair next to the couch in the living room. Under the light of an old glass lamp shaped like an umbrella that he’d taken from the lobby. Watched the dusk dissolve into night.

On the far wall hung three of the hotel’s original tourist scenes of Albumuth Boulevard. A far better view than the one from the small balcony abutting the kitchen. All the balcony could show him was more of the night sky, a sliver of the two towers, and the alley below. A view saved for emergencies. A second view could be had from the bathroom by opening the small latched window and standing on the toilet. Finch could look down into the courtyard whenever he wanted. Between the two sight lines, he had as much forewarning as he could expect. If what came after him was human.

Not a bad place. At least he had a separate office next to the kitchen and extra bookcases, overflowing, on the wall closest to the door. He’d made them from planks torn up from the rotting eleventh floor.

Even before the Rising, Finch had enjoyed reading. So many nights at the old house in the valley he and his father had sat reading in silence, separate yet together. To block out the night. The wars. Now the gray caps’ camps lay so close that a crushed foundation under a heap of garbage was all that remained of the house. Nothing left but the books and other things he’d rescued.