There is no electricity now, not after the firebombing that came at the very end, and the only water is from the rain collectors, but we have to ration that carefully, as Happy tried to poison the rain with its last few moments of battery life. In doing so, it affected the weather permanently. Now we get mostly scorching-hot days, and five-minute bursts of heavy rain once every three or four days.

As I half fill a bottle with water, I look out over the city. It’s a wreck. Some areas are still smoking and smoldering, some buildings still crumbling. The burning-hot sun and lack of rain has turned the river into a wide path of cracked mud that snakes through the burned-out city.

I change into a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. I pull on a pair of boots and leave the apartment as quietly as I can.

As usual, by the time I’m halfway down the 176 flights of stairs, I tell myself that Kina and I are moving into a house on the ground floor today! But I know that once we start looking around, I’ll feel nervous again. Not just nervous but anxious, as if the act of leaving my old home would somehow be sullying the memory of my deceased mother, father, and sister.

I shake off the thought and continue down and down until, finally, I reach the front doors of the building and push my way out into the heat and the blinding light.

I move carefully through the rubble, through the charred streets and hunks of melted metal that might have once been vehicles, until finally I come to a warehouse near the factory district.

I have to be careful now; I’m not the only scavenger around. There are many survivors of Happy’s war—some Alts still bent on carrying out their artificial leader’s orders, some Regulars who survived because they were on the drug Ebb at the time, even the occasional Smiler, humans driven crazy by the bioweapon that was delivered through the Earth’s rain supply. Most Smilers are dead now, though. Those of us who only want to survive have not yet found a way to communicate, and we avoid one another, scared that each living soul is a threat.

I enter the warehouse through a hole that was blown into the outer wall at some point during the final moments of the war. The entire place has been picked over and ransacked, leaving the shelves almost empty, but there are still some vacuum-sealed packs of fruit and sacks of rice.

Once I have gathered some basic supplies and secured them in my backpack, I move down to the last part of the river that still had enough water in it to sustain life, and check my traps for fish: nothing.