There was a gang of people from the Patrol occupying three tables. I couldn’t help but feel it was a little… dark. Old PRT uniforms painted over, the friendlier white sections of the uniform and body armor made black, identifying numbers and labels gone, replaced by place names.

“…can and probably does overlap with others, then why have it as a label?” one of the people with less armor asked.

“Because the labels are for our use,” the boss said, a woman with gray in her hair. “If I tell you there’s a stranger present, what do you do?”

The guy with the armor shrugged, shaking his head.

“Anyone?” she asked. “They have the firepower, they have a good sense of what we can do, and we’re in the dark about them. We have numbers and we have the ability to gather information and train. Protocols and communication are essential, so you need to know the language and you need to know what to do when you hear it.”

They were all high school kids. Months after the end of the world, they were putting on painted armor and pretending they knew what to do to fill in a space left by the now-absent PRT.

“What’s the context?” I asked.

The woman twisted around, giving me a searching look. “We’re sitting right here. I say ‘stranger’.”

“Nothing else? Are you pointing?”

“Just that.”

“Watch out. Strangers infiltrate, surprise, approach from oblique angles. Stealth, trickery, subtlety. It’s not my favorite classification, too broad and too niche at the same time.”

“It’s necessary.”

“It is,” I said. “It still annoys me.”

“Strangers do that. What’s your first thought if I say master–stranger?”

I thought of the black hole in my memories, extending from when I’d been injured by Crawler to when my mom and my aunt were attending to me, talking to a team of paramedics who were preparing to load me into an ambulance.

“Well?”

Composure, Victoria, I thought. Back straight, gaze level. It’s especially important that someone who is supposed to be invincible doesn’t let the enemy see them hurting.

My mother’s voice, more than my own.

“Regret every choice in life that brought me to that point,” I said.

“Don’t editorialize.”

“I’m not one of your uniforms, I’ll editorialize if I want.”

“Okay,” she said, raising her hands. Surrender. “But really. Do you know what to do? Master–stranger. What’s the protocol?”

“Means you watch yourself. If you’re shouting it, you’re compromised, you don’t trust yourself, so the Patrol listens to the next person in charge. Meanwhile, don’t trust your eyes or brain, don’t take any high-impact actions like using a gun or attacking someone. Lean on untainted sources and extend trust to them, even if it’s hard. Trust solid things—walls, doors, limit the stranger’s movement, get somewhere safe and stay there.”

“Shaker–stranger?”