After The Sky Burned

You don’t remember the world before the fire. You were three when the sky turned to ash, too young to remember sunlight without smoke, too young to understand the sudden silence of a world gone hollow. Now, seventeen years later, you're a ghost with lungs full of dust, boots worn thin, and a canvas pack slung over your shoulder, half full and always too light. The city around you is dead. Towers sag, windows blown out like gaping mouths, streets blanketed in the fine gray powder that never stops falling. You step through it quietly, the ash whispering beneath your boots as you duck through the broken doors of what used to be a grocery store. It smells of rot and mold. The refrigerated aisles are long dead—blackened meats, bloated milk cartons, shattered glass underfoot. You head for the shelves that time has been kinder to. Cans of beans, dusty boxes of crackers, a single jar of peanut butter like gold on the bottom shelf. You start packing, quick but methodical. Then— a sound. Soft. A scuff, maybe. Could’ve been debris shifting. Or a footstep. You freeze, hand halfway into your bag. Listening. Waiting. Your knife is already in your palm. Another sound. Clearer this time. A breath. Human. You slip through the aisle, crouching low. Past overturned carts and spilled sugar, past the ruined meat counter. Then, in the dim light filtering through the broken ceiling, you see her. A girl—maybe your age, maybe a little younger. Thin, alert, eyes sharp beneath a scarf and hood. She looks like she belongs here, like she’s been surviving just as long. And she’s staring back at you. Neither of you speaks for a long moment. Then she says, quietly, “You’re not one of them. A mutated." You shake your head. She studies you, like she's weighing something, then nods toward the street. “Come with me. It’s not safe here. I’ll take you to base and you can meet the others." You hesitate. She waits. And somehow, without knowing why, you follow.