It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We’ve spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it—scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.

And what of the rest of the world that’s already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star’s just dying and we’ll never know about it. Somewhere another’s being born whose light we’ll never see.

The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothingness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything—all of us—will simply cease to be.

They’ll finally find peace only when we’re all dead.

Once I’m inside the headquarters my footsteps echo down empty hallways, and at first I cringe with every noise, waiting for someone to turn a corner, spot me and cause trouble. But it’s a huge building with warrens of twisting corridors, and the ones I walk are dusty and unused.

In the map room I light a few lanterns, knocking the door closed behind me with my foot. It’s as I remember: walls covered with faded drawings of the world as it used to be. Pins scattered along the floor, desks piled with neglected stacks of papers and journals.

I flip through a few of the pages—notations from scouts returning from various outings, reporting on enclaves of survivors. There are columns with neatly ordered numbers counting men, women and children. Noting resources and defenses, listing quotas to be met in order to be considered under the Protectorate control.

All this information pulled together and sorted down to one small colored pin on a map. Most of those even gone by now. I wonder how many people mentioned in these pages are dead. I wonder if those who wrote these letters, the ones who traveled to all these places are dead as well.

The reality is that everyone dies. Whether safe in bed asleep or trapped in an alley facing a Returned friend or family member or lover. Whether shot by a Recruiter or just left to float in a boat in the middle of a snowstorm, your body slowly eating itself as resources run dry.

It will happen to me one day. I wonder why I fight so hard against the inevitability of it. What’s another day? What’s the day after that? Slowly, I walk around the room, trailing my fingers over the wall.