The End Has Come

MARGIN OF SURVIVAL Elizabeth Bear

In darkness, Yana waited. To her left, the sea was the smell of spent oil and a blackness broken by the slow hiss of phosphorescent breakers. If she squinted at the horizon, she could just make it out — a line as level as if it had been planed, pimpled with the tops of aquaculture rigs. To her right, the beach stretched rocky, rusty, and bleak up to an undercut bluff that she knew was there only because of suggestion and memory. It was a narrow margin of survival between the proverbial devil, and the equally proverbial sea.

The aquaculture domes were within sight, trailing rich constructed biomes of mussels and kelp through the richly nutritious, bitterly cold water. She could swim out to them and spare herself the risks. If she were a stronger swimmer; if she were not already weak with hunger; if it weren’t for the waves and the rip current; if she had a drysuit; if she had some way to keep the mussels from spoiling before she got them home to Yulianna; if she could guarantee there weren’t snipers or booby traps or guards.

Yana counted under her breath until the light came again.

Thirty-five, thirty-six. And there it was once more, a beam like a stroking finger. It crossed the black water, lanced over her head, bathed the bluff in brilliance, and moved on. On the horizon, she watched the shine of the Svet nezhyti, the Zombie Light, dim as it swept away again. The thing loomed out there in the night, unmanned, forgotten, possibly leaking reactor coolant — but automated. Still doing the job it had been set to do, decades or maybe a century ago. And it had illuminated enough of the stretch of beach before her that, crouched, she could scurry to the next rock without breaking her ankle.

Her stomach clenched, but Yana had become a connoisseur of clenching stomachs. This wasn’t early hunger, which could endanger one with plunging blood sugar, unexpected weakness, and dizzy spells. Nor was this true starvation, when the stored resources were exhausted and the will began to revolve around food and only food, when the body grew frail and riddled with sores.

This was, rather, the comfortable middle ground of hunger — where the body had adapted to privation, where it was working hard to utilize stored resources, rather than grabbing and cannibalizing anything at hand. What a falconer called “sharp set,” where the bird is ready and eager to hunt, lean — but also physically capable.

Another kind of margin. Another narrow edge to balance on.

Yulianna had been worse off, which was why Yana was here alone. Because when their supplies started to get low, Yulianna had set her jaw and refused food, refused water — starving herself so that Yana would have more. That was when Yana had realized that she would have to go out and seek supplies. They would need to go south, go inland. For that, they needed portable rations — and gear. Boots. Warm clothing.

Yana wanted to worry, but she wouldn’t let herself. Her sister would be fine. She’d left Yulianna most of the remaining food. And the gun.

If she pulled this off, neither she nor Yulianna would have to be any kind of hungry — or cold, or badly dressed — for a good long time.

But first she had to survive the rest of the night.

Yana reached over her shoulder and patted the neck of the crowbar tucked into the loop of her large frame pack. She waited for the light, waited for the darkness, and darted to the next shelter. She wasn’t worried about being spotted by anyone in the Zombie Light; there was no one in the Zombie Light. It had been empty for the devil knew how long, mindlessly spinning away on its reactors.

The people — and cameras, and infrared sensors — she wished to avoid were those in the bunker at the top of the bluff, overlooking the sea.

Unfortunately, they were also the people who had the food.

A basic conflict in desires, as her economics tutor would have said. Before he starved, or was torn apart by feral dogs, or went cannibal and was put down, or whatever the hell had killed him.

She might have made an effort to find out — she’d liked him — if there had been any chance of the news being good, and if there’d been any chance of her finding out some kind of definitive answer. But she’d learned a long time ago that the news was never good, and that it was generally best not to ask too many questions.

You never liked the answers once you got them.

He, too, might have had a couple of trenchant comments to make about margins. Margins of survival. Margins of safety. Margins of profit. The world was right up against the edge of all of them now.

Maybe it was teetering back, Yana told herself. Maybe things were starting to get better.

She was finally close to the bluff. One disadvantage of the bunker’s position, from the point of view of the bunker’s inhabitants: It held a commanding view of sea, strand, genetically-engineered kelp-tangle aquaculture clusters, and distant undead lighthouse, but the edge of the bluff cut off their line of sight to the beach immediately below. There had been motion detectors down here once, not too long ago . . . but after the Eschaton, the end of the world — here in the future — entropy took its toll and things which had once been cheap and disposable could not be replaced. Manufactured objects that had been designed to be thrown away were not simple to repair.

It was Yana’s advantage, and a delightful little scrap of irony.

She bounced on her toes like a runner warming up before a race. When the light swept past again, she scrambled up the steep, overhung-in-places bluff. Her fingers scraped at crumbling stone; roots gave when she grabbed at them. Though she was strong and fit and practiced and not too hungry, her forearms ached with a deep muscular soreness by the time she dragged herself over the edge.

There was no time to lie there panting and collecting herself. She wriggled to her feet and crouched, balanced on her toes and fingertips, waiting to discover if she’d been seen.

The blind eye of the robot lighthouse swept past once, twice, while Yana held as still as a toad that hopes not to be noticed. She thought, over and over like a short penitent prayer: I am stone. The illumination within the bunker never flickered. No hue, no cry. No sign of life.

They were probably in there enjoying a pleasant supper of hot soup and bread, she thought bitterly — a mistake. Her stomach growled, and she felt faint. She waited for one more pass of the light, gathered herself, and when the welcome darkness embraced her again, sprinted toward the back of the bunker, running not by sight but by the remembered outlines of the land.

She made it. Pressed against the base of the bunker, she paused and listened intently for alarms and excursions. Nothing. Had the infrared sensors given out long ago, along with everything else? Had she been skulking for no reason?

Or was it simply that no one was watching them, and all the artificial systems had long since degraded, ground down, and failed?

She knew the bunker wasn’t deserted. She’d seen shapes moving around it as recently as her last scouting visit, a mere few days ago. But they went inside at night, sealed themselves up. And that was why night was the safest time for her to strike.

She didn’t expect to break in. The bunker was pre-Eschaton tech, and she might have about as much luck prying a clam open with her torn and ragged fingernails. It’d be safer to try to swim out to those aquaculture rigs, and that was nearly certain death. But her careful spying had revealed that while the bunker was probably impregnable by any means within Yana’s reach, the people who lived there didn’t store everything within its walls.

There were outbuildings. Low, dug-in, camouflaged with rocks so they looked like part of the outcropping the bunker was built into; they huddled behind it like so many slanting boulders. There, by those storage sheds — there, Yana thought she could probably break in. And there was food there. She’d seen men rolling the barrels of mussels from the aquaculture rigs along the beach, hoisting them up the bluff with pulleys and cables. She’d seen them hauling up baskets of seaweed, too. And more mysterious large, soft-looking sacks of things, all carried from small boats moored far out to sea — too far to swim.

She imagined flour, bacon. Oatmeal. Sugar.

Her stomach growled again. She swallowed the bitter bilious flavor of her hunger and propped her hands on her knees.

There was a little more light here. It filtered down from the floodlights above, and the dark sky was brightening. Not with dawn, not yet. With rich drapes and swirls of electric green and arctic blue aurora.

Sprinting — and potentially falling — wasn’t worth it, here. By the glow of the Northern Lights, Yana picked her way along the edge of the path that led from the bunker’s great steel door around to its rear. She didn’t walk on the path because it was scattered thickly with bivalve shells — clam, oyster, mussel — and she knew they would crackle and crunch under her feet.

She moved crouched over, as much to get her eyes closer to the ground as to disguise her silhouette. It was a good thing, too, because it kept her from tripping into the trench beside the entrance to the sheds. There were three of them, side by side, two-thirds buried underground and then more earth and stones heaped on the roofs.

She drew up sharply, found the stone steps leading down, and paused. If she, herself, were going to set a booby trap, this is where she would do it.

Someone moaned in the darkness below.

Yana froze. She felt like a damned startled rabbit. For an instant, she thought bitterly of what it had been like to walk tall, mostly fearless. To have a full belly and time to think, read, plan. Then she acknowledged the thought, let it pass through, and refocused her attention on the actual, critical, possibly life-threatening matter at hand.

There was a person in the darkness below.

And that person was hurt.

Well, most likely. She could construct all sorts of conspiracy theories and worries about decoys and traps, but Occam’s razor suggested that somebody else had been attracted by the presence of food, and had either triggered a trap or just — in the dark — stumbled into the gaping hole in the ground.

Yana risked bending down, dropping her hand below the line of the ground, and squeezing her fingers tightly, briefly, on the activator of her minilume. It glowed with a pleasant cool light, illuminating a bare pit or trench paved in flagstones and featuring a fieldstone retaining wall to keep it from collapsing in on itself. On the far side were the doorways to the three sheds or root cellars. They were all closed.

Yana heard the moan again.

This time, she had been listening. Waiting. She thought the sound emanated from the leftmost of the sheds, which was the one closest to the sea. Another quick squeeze on her lume, and she saw that each shed had a small casement window about four feet off the ground. The three windows were not identical. They had obviously been constructed from whatever materials were available, then hinged to a custom-built window frame when the time came to install them in the sheds.

The one on that leftmost shed was propped open at the bottom.

As if in response to her light, Yana heard a brief intake of breath. The moaning stopped.

Silence.

She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a trap in her brief glimpses. Now, though, she palmed the lume and waited for her eyes to adapt. She moved her head from side to side, scanning — looking with her peripheral vision, which was sometimes better in the dark.

There. A faint silvery runnel reflected the glow of the night sky. Elongated, razor-thin, like when sunlight splayed along a length of spider-line: a tripwire strung across the bottom riser of the stairs.

All right, Yana thought. So if you saw that and wanted to avoid it, what would you do next? You’d drop down, right, over the edge on the opposite side?

Yana waited for the lighthouse beam and matched it with a quick flicker of her lume, peering down into that pit. The big flagstone at the far end of the pit had a funny, plasticky shine to it. And it was suspiciously clean, without the scraps of dead grass and litter of sand that marked the other flagstones. Plenty of birdshit, but some of the shit had a sort of funny, elongated splatter pattern.

The flagstone was on hinges. It was designed to drop whoever jumped down onto it into an oubliette. Or possibly into a pit of hungry tiger sharks and rotating knives, which would probably be more efficient in the long run, and probably just about as much fun. No need to haul any prisoners — or bodies — out of a hole in the ground that way. You’d save on rigging pulleys.

She checked again, but those were the only two traps she saw. The moaning had stopped completely, as if the moaner were biding their time, or simply playing dead.

Yana shrugged, checked her pack straps, made sure the lume’s loop was fast around her middle finger, and walked slowly down the stairs, pausing to step over the tripwire as gingerly as a cat walking through deep snow before testing the pit-bottom with one toe. It held. She shifted her weight onto it.

It held, still.

All right then, she thought, and lifted her trailing foot high over the wire.

She’d need something noisier than her crowbar to get through any of these doors quickly. Though she could probably shatter the frames. But that one down on the end, with the open window . . .

The window wouldn’t have been wide enough for her to wriggle through before the Eschaton. Hell, she wouldn’t have had the strength to boost herself up to it. She’d been a comfortable, wide-hipped graduate student then, and not the lean predator she was now. Yulianna had always been the skinny one — the hot one — back in the day, and Yana had been the smart one. Because most people were too blind to notice that her sister was just as smart as Yana was.

She missed that margin of safety. Hell — insulation, stored food — it was probably the reason she’d survived this long.

She flashed her lume again and inspected the window ledge for imbedded glass and razor blades and the like. She craned her neck to see upward, to check for any sign of, oh, something like a guillotine suspended on the other side of it. She poked the crowbar in, just to be sure.

Nothing.

“Lazy,” she said.

In fairness, she supposed, the bunker folks came in and out of this place every few minutes during the day. Even in the post-apocalyptic world, you wouldn’t want your toddlers playing around guillotines.

She hooked the window open with the crowbar and waited.

Nothing. Nothing but the sound of the sea.

“Hey,” she called softly through the window, with a preparatory glance toward the stair. If somebody in there were inclined to raise the alarm, she could hoof it out of here pretty quickly. She’d just have to remember to hurdle that tripwire. She could shine the light in and take a peek, but to see in she’d have to silhouette herself against the sky. And the light was a bullet-magnet, if the person inside were armed and inclined to open fire.

Talking was safer. It didn’t require line of sight.

“Hey,” she stage-whispered again, having the peculiar sensation that the darkness was listening. “Is there somebody hurt in there?”

A pause, and then a cautious voice. “Not badly hurt,” a woman replied. “I’m tied up, though. What’s your name?”

“Yana,” Yana said. “Yours?”

“Yulianna.”

Yana stopped dead, brought up sharp. It was her sister’s name.

This was not her sister’s voice or phrasing, though, and she forced herself to take a breath and continue on. “Are there any traps? If I come through the window?”

“No,” Yulianna said. “It’s safe. They propped it open so I could breathe, but it’s cold in here. Are you here to steal food?”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Sort of,” the woman said. “Here, let me get out from under the window.”

There was a scraping sound and a couple of thumps. “Ow,” the woman said.

“I’m coming in,” Yana warned. She jumped up, got her belly on the window frame, and slithered through. The hard part was not falling on her face on the floor, but she managed a sort of controlled slide and caught herself with her hands. Her feet hooked the window frame. Carefully, she unhooked them one at a time and brought them down to the floor, then stood.

“I’m going to make a light,” she said, and squeezed her lume.

She’d turned the ring around so the bright part was inside the curve of her hand, so the lume mostly shone through her flesh, producing a macabre effect. Even that was enough light that the woman on the floor winced and turned her face away, which told Yana how long she’d been sitting in the dark. The stranger didn’t shield her eyes with her hands because she couldn’t; her wrists were zipped to her ankles with plastic ties.

The woman couldn’t have been as hungry as Yana and her sister were. She still had some flesh on her bones, not just sinew and ropy muscle. Her hair was red, and shoulder-length, though it seemed patchy and staring as if she’d been ill. Or perhaps it was just matted from sleeping on the dirt floor, or from lack of general care.

“What did you steal?”

“Mussels,” the woman said. “From the frames. The aquaculture. I dove for them.” She looked defensive. “They were from before the Eschaton, and just sort of got left there. A little engineered ecosystem of kelp and shellfish.”

“Huh,” Yana said. She gave her lume two quick short squeezes so it would stay on without her attention. Impressed despite herself, she said, “Did you have a drysuit?”

“Just a lot of practice,” the woman said.

Yana tried to think of her as Yulianna. But the dry hair, the shadows under bruised skin . . . she couldn’t look at them, and think that name. It was a common name. But every time Yana tried to wrap that name around this stranger, her mind sheered off.

So she said instead, “Is that really . . . stealing?”

“They thought so,” the woman said, jerking her chin at the door. “You know, this is a great conversation, but maybe you could . . . untie me?”

“Right,” Yana said. “Do you solemnly swear not to decapitate me or something?”

“I do so swear,” the woman said, with mock gravitas.

Yana knelt beside her, pulled her clam knife from the sheath in her boot, and jerked the short razor-sharp blade through the plastic straps.

“Ahh,” the woman said. She flopped her hands against her chest as if they were wet feather-dusters. “Devil take it,” she said. “Nothing. Feels like a couple of hot squid on the ends of my arms. I hope I don’t get gangrene.”

Then she moaned sharply, bit her lip to stem the noise, and curled up around the arms, rocking back and forth with her face distorted by pain. “Ow, that hurts. Ow, ow, pancakes! Ow.”

Yana watched, thinking there was nothing she could do for her except bear witness. It made her uncomfortable to watch the other woman’s pain, so she turned her back. She played her lume over the barrels and crates and shelves, spotting food, gear —

“Is any of this booby-trapped, do you know?”

“Ah, ah. Don’t touch the two-way radios, owww!”

But the ows were getting softer. Finally, Yu . . . the woman made a sound that was probably a sigh expressed through gritted teeth and rolled forward onto her hands and knees.

“Anoxic pain,” she said. “Wow, that was not fun.”

“You’re a doctor?” Yana asked, interested. That was useful.

“Biologist,” the woman said. “Marine.”

Well, that explained the swimming.

“Right,” Yana said, examining the shelves. She needed valuable things, trade goods. Travel equipment. And food. There was a metal box labeled “wind-dried fish” that reeked promisingly. She grabbed that and opened it. Stuffing papery pieces of whitefish into her mouth, she started chewing, then filled up one of the side compartments in her pack while the pungent flavor flooded her mouth with saliva. The texture was a bizarre combination of leathery, spongy, and crisp. This was just protein, though, and you’d starve to death on only that. She handed the box over to the woman — since her hands seemed to be working now — and found a bag of dried apples next to it. She appropriated the whole thing. They were old, stiff and brown. Probably not pre-Eschaton, though. Dried fruit wouldn’t last that long.

Trade goods.

“Fat,” Yana said.

The other woman was now chewing on her own slice of fish. She rubbed her hands through her hair, where her fingers stuck in the mats. She wriggled them free, then rolled a cat’s cradle of shed strands down her fingers, wadded it up and tossed it away. There was sea salt still crusted on her skin and along the hems of her clothing, and it seemed to be causing purple sores around her hairline.

Yulianna, Yana thought, and turned away.

“There’s salted blubber up there,” the woman said. “And some pemmican.”

Yana was grateful for something plausible to do with her hands. “You inventoried the place in the dark?” Yana found the clothing, packed neatly in old crates along the back wall. She rummaged through it, finding warm wool trousers that would fit Yulianna — her Yulianna, who was thinner than this one, thinner still even than Yana was — base layers, technical fleece. She took what was warm and light.

Yana found sugar and flour, too, and took a five pound bag of each. She layered clothing on; she’d put her pack back on after she dealt with the window. Rooting around in the clothes, she located a second rucksack — army issue, old, the canvas worn through in small fraying squares — and began to pack a load for the other woman, too.

“I’ve been here two days,” the woman said. “Some light gets in in the daytime.” She had made it up to kneeling and was working one of her feet flat in front of her. Grabbing the ledge of a shelf, she stood.

Yana was ready to catch her, and she did stagger. But once she was up, she seemed pretty stable. She looked around. “It’s hard to see in here.”

“Sorry,” Yana said. “I’ve just got the one lume. Here.”

She handed the woman the bag. “Can you manage that?”

The woman hefted it, winced, and started to struggle into the straps before glancing at the window and deciding that she would wait until they were outside, as well. “I’d better. We’re taking a lot to travel light.”

“I have to bring food back,” Yana said. “For my sister.”

The woman raised her eyebrows, then gave Yana a nod after she’d thought about it for a while. “Good girl. What else are you looking for?”

“Trade goods,” Yana said. “Something valuable.” She was starting to feel the pressure of time. Surely somebody would come to check on the prisoner soon. Or worse, notice the lights moving around in here. But they couldn’t forage in the dark.

“Well.” The woman stepped aside with a magician’s flourish.

Yana stared. Behind where the woman had been standing was a shelf holding dozens of jars of clear liquid. Yana snatched one up — they were all mismatched, old jam jars and who knew what; the one in her hand had once held marmite, by the shape of it — and unscrewed the top. She didn’t get it all the way off when the smell hit her.

“Alcohol.”

The woman nodded, smiling tight.

“Grab as much as you carry,” Yana said.

Loaded up, the woman with her sister’s name stepped toward the door while Yana killed the lume. The woman was still limping slightly but didn’t complain, and seemed to be loosening up somewhat. She reached the door and tested the handle.

The door swung open with an oiled click.

Yana shrugged the pack up her arms. “Good. Just as glad not to do the window again.”

She stepped forward, but the woman stopped Yana five steps from the bottom of the stairs. “Careful,” she said. “There’s a monofilament a couple of centimeters over the wire you can see.”

A horrible shock of realization settled in Yana’s stomach. The expression must have registered even in the semi-dark. “Missed it on the way in?”

“I think I might be sick.”

“Don’t do that,” the woman said. “You look like you need that fish on the inside. How do you still have your feet?”

“I stepped really high.”

“Well then,” the wrong Yulianna said. “You know how high to step on the way out, don’t you?”

They were very careful climbing up the stairs. When they came to the top, Yana shifted her pack. It was heavy with wrapped glass jars, and she could already tell that the weight would be a problem. But she was fed now. She was strong. All she had to do was get it back to Yulianna.

Her Yulianna.

She looked over her shoulder at the woman.

“I’m going west along the coast,” she said.

“I have nowhere else to go,” the woman answered. “May I come with you?”

Yana paused. The woman was strong, capable. Despite getting caught, if she’d been diving for mussels as far out as the aquaculture cages, she really must be a powerful swimmer. Yana still didn’t think she could have done it herself without drowning. Or dying of hypothermia.

“We’ll decide that later,” Yana said, after only a brief hesitation. “For now, let’s put as many kilometers between this place and ourselves as our legs can manage.”

The woman threw a hateful glance over at the bunker, though all they could see from here was the back slope of it, like a rubble-strewn hill. The Zombie Light swept across them again.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

They couldn’t run in the dark with the heavy packs. And they certainly couldn’t down-climb the bluff. So they crept inland, staying low, though Yana’s body complained about the belly full of food she’d stuffed into it before leaving the shed, or cellar, or whatever it was. A palpable mist rolled in from the ocean as dawn approached. They blundered through it, picking their way, following the sound of the sea to stay oriented. They had to be wary of terrain, walking so nearly blind.

Yana’s body finally managed to assimilate the food. The lack of fat was a blessing now; she thought if she had eaten anything richer, she would have vomited. And it was good that she was recovering some of her brains along with the calories — she hadn’t realized how much the hunger had affected her — because about an hour into the walk she decided that she should probably ask the woman a few questions before she brought her down on her unsuspecting sister.

The end of the world, at least, provided for a plethora of conversational openings. “So,” she asked the woman. “What have you been doing since the apocalypse?”

“Stealing,” the woman said. She patted her hip; it wasn’t exactly ample, but she wasn’t the next thing to skin and bones, the way Yana was. “Or the army dogs would call it that, anyway, but you saw how much food they had just piled up there. And what gives them the right to claim that aquaculture farm as if somebody didn’t build and maintain it beforehand?”

Yana contemplated her accent. “You’re not from near here.”

“I’ve been camped near the lighthouse for about three months.”

Which was a non-answer.

“I was a graduate student before,” Yana said. “Economics.”

The woman smiled. “An academic.”

Yana nodded.

“I was a biologist. Wait, I told you that already. So. You say apocalypse,” the woman continued, doubling back in the conversation. “I say opportunity.”

“The world,” Yana said harshly, “has ended.”

The woman shrugged. “It’s not the first time.” She smiled. “The Black Death, for example. That was an apocalypse. Or the smallpox epidemics in the Americas. Some evidence suggests that at one point our species died back to around two thousand individuals. Two thousand individuals. There were fewer of us than there are whooping cranes. Well, were whooping cranes. After they bounced back, I mean. Who knows if there are any left now?”

They were clambering down to the beach at last, to walk in the mist that glowed pink with incipient sunrise. The woman paused and studied Yana’s face in the strawberry glow. “What I’m saying is, give it time. It’s hard now, I know. Still hard. The margins are slim, incredibly tight. But we’ve survived worse. And in another ten, twenty, ten thousand years . . . it will turn out to have been good for all of us. Except the ones who died. Infinite possibilities for everyone now. Like the Black Death.”

“I don’t understand,” Yana said.

The woman coughed, then turned to spit the result on the beach. It gleamed blackly in the night-sky glow.

“Empty ecological niches are an opportunity for evolution,” she said. “As surely in human society as in the natural world. We’ll have an opportunity as a species to become so much more than we are now. To improve. Evolve, as we haven’t evolved in millennia. And that’s what matters in the long run. Species survival. Species development. Who knows — maybe we’ll finally take that next step, become something transhuman.”

“What about . . .” Yana pointed to herself, the other woman. The sweep of abandoned rocks on the strand. “ . . . the casualties?”

You’re creepy, she didn’t say.

“Awful, isn’t it?” The woman coughed. “And yet, life finds a way. This is hardly even an extinction event, compared to some of them.” She cast her hands out wide, staggered, caught herself before she stumbled into the sea. She put her hand to head as if it ached. “And you and I have already outcompeted our rivals simply by surviving. When we start to push back from this crisis, there will be a world of opportunities.”

“You’re pretty cocky for somebody who was hogtied in a root cellar fifteen minutes ago.”

“There weren’t any roots in that cellar,” the woman said. She turned to walk backwards, smiling at Yana while the sun rose and filtered through the mist over Yana’s shoulder, lighting the woman’s hair up in shades of incredible flame.

“We can stick together,” Yana said, suddenly, feverishly hopeful. “The three of us. We’ll be safer. We can go someplace. You’re right, of course you’re right. We’re young, we can work. Somewhere there’s got to be a community, doesn’t there?”

“Maybe we should walk south to Africa,” the woman said with a smile. “That’s always been where the waves of human evolution come from.”

The stranger’s face seemed more bruised under the salt. In the morning light, as the mist burned off, Yana could see the purple stains spreading under translucent skin. Her steps began to drag, but when Yana said they should rest, she shook her head. “It’s not much farther, right? I’ll rest when we get there.”

She hitched her pack straps away from the bones of her shoulder as if they hurt.

They walked another two kilometers, but the woman was soon staggering. She hemorrhaged before they reached the broken highway that marked the place where Yana must turn landward.

The blood gushed from her — nose, mouth, down the insides of her trouser legs — as she doubled over and clapped her hands across her face as if she could somehow stuff it back inside, keep her life from running out.

Yana went to her, lifted off her pack, held her head, and tried to calm her when she begged through blood. At last she lay still, and Yana laid her down, composed her hands, smoothed her shedding hair back, and laid pebbles on her lids to close her wild, wild, white-ringed eyes.

She wanted to stay and pile the beach rocks over her in a cairn. But somewhere, her own Yulianna needed her. And there were untold riches in her bag.

She picked up the woman’s pack too, and strapped it across her chest despite the blood. She was bloody herself, from her attempts to help, though she washed as much as possible off in the sea. It might have been a hemorrhagic fever, some mutant disease. But Yana wasn’t too worried about that.

She remembered what the woman — Yulianna, call her Yulianna — had said, about camping among the rocks near the zombie lighthouse.

The reactors must be leaking after all, then.

Yana looked back once, while she still thought she should be able to see the stranger’s body. It wasn’t there, though, and Yana wondered if the tide could have so quickly rolled up the margin between sea and shore and reclaimed it.

She and her Yulianna would have to move on. Once Yulianna was strong enough. Once the food did its magic. They had two packs, trade goods now. Clothes for hiking in.

It was only a few kilometers more. Yana followed the highway on its long curve away from the beach, not leaning as far forward as she might have to make the climb because of the unbalanced weight of the packs. She saw just the stones and the sky.

There had been fewer people every year, since the Eschaton. Now Yana wondered if there were any at all, except her and Yulianna, and the army men holed up in the bunker. Maybe they were all that was left in the whole world.

Probably not.

But maybe.

They would do what the biologist had suggested, Yana decided. They would walk south. To Africa. They would be part of the future of humanity. The next step in evolution. If they were tough enough to survive.

If they could prove their fitness. It could still turn out to be a good thing for everyone.

Yana wondered how many thousands of kilometers it was, to get to Africa. Once, it would have been easy to look that up.

She turned off the road at the moss-covered boulder that was shaped roughly like a giant tortoise, and picked her way around to the tumbledown old fishing shack that looked like it was about to melt into the landscape. If you even happened to notice it, weathered gray as it was and wedged between two great, wind-break stones, you’d never think it anything but a ruin.

She paused, assessing, as the shack came into view. It seemed undisturbed. It was considerably more sound than it appeared — they had made all their structural improvements on the inside. They had spent the first summer after the Eschaton reinforcing, insulating, and weatherproofing it — but leaving the exterior treacherous and abandoned-looking.

It had mattered more at first. When there had been more people.

Yana’s feet hurt. Her shoulders burned. She hurried down the little dip to the shack, wishing she could call out for Yulianna but too careful to give their position away that easily. Besides, she wasn’t worried. Yulianna would be fine. She’d left Yulianna the gun.

The quiet and the closed door were good signs. Peaceful signs.

She broke into a trot, careful of the gravel underfoot. If she shattered her ankle, it would not get a chance to heal. She paused by the boulder, listened. Everything quiet, everything good.

She stepped up to the shack’s little crooked door, which was better hinged than it seemed to be, and tapped lightly. The latch string was out, but she still called, “Sweetheart? It’s me, don’t shoot,” softly before she opened the door.

It glided on the hinges she had oiled, and she stepped inside.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She used that time to shrug out of both packs and set them down by the table made of planks resting on salvaged plastic crates. Jars wrapped in cloth knocked against one another, muffled. She straightened up with relief and turned.

Yulianna was on the plank bed, curled on her side as she always slept, the blanket pulled up to warm her. The rifle leaned against the wall beside the bed, in exactly the position where Yana had left it. That was good, very good; Yulianna hadn’t even needed to move it.

Yulianna watched Yana with her gray eyes as Yana came in. Yana picked up the bag of dried apples and a canteen of water and went to sit beside her.

“Hey, sweetie,” Yana said. She rested her hand on Yulianna’s shoulder and stroked her faded, straw-stiff ginger hair back from her cool, firm brow. “I got food. Will you eat some?”

She placed a piece of apple in her own mouth and chewed, then carefully scooped the moist pap into the corner of Yulianna’s lips. She gave her a little water, but it ran out between her teeth.

“Sweetie,” Yana said, “You have to swallow. There’s fish too, beef jerky. Some pemmican. So much food, we’ll get fat. And I have trade goods. We can find a town.”

Yulianna didn’t answer. She stared ahead unblinking.

Yana wiped the corner of her sister’s eye, and the skin crumbled. She pulled her hand back and resolutely reached for another bite of apple.

“You have to get strong,” she said, stroking her sister’s hair again. The stiffness was bad today, she thought. “You have to eat. You have to get strong. So we can travel. So we can be the ones who make it.”

She leaned down and kissed her sister’s cheek, rubbing soft lips against hard, papery skin.

Yulianna made no answer.