“One more year, Mom,” I whispered as I pulled her door shut softly. “I just need one more year from you.”

In the room I shared with Melanie, our radio alarm had already gone off, and as usual, my little sister hadn’t noticed. I swear, a demon horde could march right through our house and she’d sleep through the whole thing.

“…and I, for one, am looking forward to a little sun!” the DJ said as I dropped my oversized coat on the floor. It thumped against the carpet, which is when I remembered the pilfered cans of stew I’d meant to leave in the kitchen. “In other news, Church officials in New Temperance are expected to announce their choice for headmaster of the New Temperance Day School today, a job vacated just last month when Brother Phillip Reynolds accepted a position in Solace….”

I listened for a couple of minutes, waiting to see if they’d announce a degenerate attack in New Temperance and the mysterious boy and girl spotted in the alley. When that didn’t happen, I poked the alarm button, relieved that I hadn’t yet made the news, and the DJ’s voice faded into blessed silence.

That alarm radio was the only thing on my scratched, scuffed nightstand. It was the last thing I saw before I fell asleep and the first thing I saw every morning. The clock divided my days into strict segments devoted to sleep, school, homework, housework, and real work. I had little time for anything else.

My sister’s nightstand was covered in books. Not textbooks or the Church-approved histories and biographies available in the school library. Mellie had old, thick hardcover volumes, some with nothing but black-and-white print stories, others with brightly colored strip illustrations of people with ridiculous powers, speaking in dialogue bubbles over the characters’ heads. She borrowed them from Adam Yung’s dad, who had a secret collection of prewar stuff in his basement.

The Church hadn’t officially outlawed secular fiction, but they had a way of making things like that unavailable to the general public. Right after the war against the Unclean, they’d recycled entire public library collections to reuse the materials. And after they’d brought down all cellular transmission towers—to keep demons from communicating with one another en masse—people had no use for their portable phones and communication devices, so there were recycling drives for those too.

Collections like Mr. Yung’s were rare. When we were kids, I’d read his stories with Melanie, curled up in our bed, dreaming of eras and technologies that were long past by the time we were born.

Then I grew up and realized that was all those stories ever were. Dreams. I lived in the real world, where Mellie was only a part-time citizen.

“Time to get up, Mel.” Standing, I gave my sister’s shoulder a shove. She groaned, and I grabbed the towel hanging over the footboard of the bed, then trudged into the hall.

My shower was cold—the pilot light on the hot water heater had gone out again—and we were out of soap, so I had to use shampoo all over. The suds burned the fresh scrapes on my lower back, a vivid reminder of my near death in the alley, and when I got back to the bedroom, shivering in my towel, my sister was still sound asleep in the full-size bed we shared.