Aramin is the first to look toward me. As if tied to him, Jeran lifts his gaze too. Adena pauses in mid-sentence as I approach them, then breaks into a smile.

“Look at you,” she says, leaning back to take me in, then motions me to sit with them. “Should you be walking around this much? Don’t pitch over the side of the ledge, now—I don’t want to leap after you.”

I roll my eyes at her, then settle gingerly at her side and stare out at the warming horizon. It is an unfamiliar one—the curves of distant ruins from the Early Ones are nearly lost amid the towers of Cardinia and the domes of its many exhibition halls. But the sun begins to rise over it, just as it will soon be doing over Basea. Over Mara and Newage, where we once used to sit in a line on top of the Striker complex to greet the morning together.

We all fall silent now. The breeze carries with it something nostalgic. The memory of a different time. I find myself looking from the brightening horizon to my companions, soaking in the comfort of their presence. Adena still has some burn marks on her arms and cheeks from the blast at the lab complex. Jeran’s scars are healing, his arm still in a cast. Aramin’s face, ravaged with a vicious cut from the final night of battle, looks subdued.

But we are all still here.

The feeling of Red’s presence, followed by a slight sound near the steps, makes me turn my attention toward him. I see him emerge on the rooftop too, his eyes softening in relief at the sight of me. He doesn’t say a word. Instead, he walks quietly over to me, and we twine our hands together as if we were meant to do it all our lives.

Somehow, broken and unbound and rebound, we have survived. And as the first hint of sun peeks over the edge of the horizon, washing the city in a ray of gold, I lift my hands and sign.

“May there be future dawns.”

The others all answer with the same sign. Even Red does. “May there be future dawns.”

I turn my eyes up, watching the light overtake the sky.

May there be future dawns forever.

FIVE YEARS LATER

45

TALIN

Once, years ago, there was a set of double walls that encircled Newage’s Inner City. They were built in a time long before us, by the Early Ones, and they used to protect the city against the war beasts that the Karensa Federation used to defeat us. Those of us, like my mother, who lived on the outer side of the walls, saw them differently.

But they are gone now. Instead, Newage’s Inner City and Outer City look more like a gradient, a gradual shift from busy, winding streets adorned with black-and-white architecture to greener expanses of courtyards and land fenced in by rows of houses, space that extends still more into pastures and farms, then finally into open countryside.