“How?” Catcher stands facing me. He looks as helpless as I feel.

“I don’t know.” I start jogging across the roof, dodging around old barren gardens thick with dead weeds. I vault a low wall onto the next building and thread my way toward the bridge at the end of the block.

“Where are you going?” Catcher shouts, following me across the spindly bridge, the boards under my feet almost rotten.

“Home,” I call over my shoulder as I race south. This corner of the City was practically abandoned even before the horde hit, and most everyone who tried to scrape out an existence here already left after the Rebellion, when it became pointless to pay such high rents to live in a city that no longer promised safety and order.

We cross past a few panicked families, their backs loaded with bags of supplies as they rush from roof to roof toward the docks to the southeast, the only hope of an escape. “What do we do?” they ask, their eyes wide and terrified, but I don’t know what to tell them and so I just keep running.

All they have to do is look around them to see how hopeless the situation is.

The building with my flat is an old high-rise. It used to occupy an entire block until half of it crumbled a few years ago, leaving me the only occupant after everyone else moved away. Trees already struggle up through the rubble pile, winter-burned vines twisting through rooms now exposed to the elements.

I race across the roof, skirting the edges of my garden as if it matters whether I trample the fragile buds. Once at the fire escape I make my way down to the fifth floor, not even pausing before I step through the window.

My mistake is in thinking that things would be the same as I left them only a few days ago. My mistake is in not checking to see if the flat is empty. In barging in without a weapon drawn.

For assuming that the panic of the horde would mean that people were consumed with tasks more important than breaking into places that are not their own.

I see the figure standing by the bed at the back of the long narrow room and my heart skips. I pause, and the sudden change in my momentum causes me to stumble, my balance thrown off.

His body is wrapped in shadows, the meager winter light from the window not penetrating deep enough to illuminate his features. He stands with all his weight on one leg, and his once-black shirt is now frayed and gray, the cuffs at his hands ragged. His fingers clutch into fists.

“Annah?” White clouds slip through the frozen air as he exhales my name.

I close my eyes. I will my heart to stop beating and my blood to stop pumping so that nothing can distract me from the full measure of the sound of him calling my name, his voice soft as his lips form around the sounds and syllables.