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She is seventeen and the world is ending.
In the beginning, there were six of them. Herself, her eldest brother's husband, her other brother, the woman he would have married, the boy they took in, and the child. A family of blood and ties and choice. They were safe, they were waiting for answers and reunion. They were happy, once.
They stay as long as they are able. All around them are reports of disaster, disease, collapse. Her oldest brother is out there, at first to investigate and then to help. And then to vanish into the static of broken comm relays and unknowing.
They stay as long as they are able, but eventually they have to leave without him. He's a soldier, she tells herself. He is doing important things, he is saving lives, he will make it home and then he will find them and it will all be okay. A much smaller, crueller voice tells her that her nephew will grow up remembering only one of his dads.
Her brother in law is calm, capable. He sets a course, he keeps watch, he finds them weapons and protection. He teaches her to shoot, just in case, because the world is empty of safe places.
He dies to keep them alive, fighting monstrous creatures like she's never seen, even in nightmares.
Her nephew will grow up barely remembering either of his parents. But she will tell him they were brave. She will tell him that they loved him. She will tell him that they died to protect them all. She will tell him the same story so many children will grow up hearing, one of loss and death hollow reassurance.
She is eighteen.
Her sister—there was no marriage but still she must be her sister, the end of the world a vow stronger than marriage—has heard of a place they might find ships. The off world colonies are lost, but to be mobile is to survive. They all discuss the risk extensively. Finally they decide to go.
She watches it happen, looking back over her shoulder as she races to get her nephew to the safety of the jump ship. Her brother and sister fall back to hold the attackers off. They fall. She is half praying the ship won't start and the rest of her is screaming at it to fly. If it fails she won't have to leave them. If she doesn't leave them, they're all dead. She doesn't know if the roar of the engine is loud enough to drown her cry, but as it fades the numbness takes hold. It's easier to be empty.
It is just her and the child and the boy. Family or nearly family before, forged into something smaller, something closer by the melting down of all else around them.
Her chosen brother didn't talk much before, he says even less now. He sits and stares out the window, back the way they came.
“Where do we go now?” he finally asks.
She doesn't know how to answer. They could go anywhere, but everywhere is dangerous.
“Wherever it's quiet,” she answers.
Quiet takes a long time to find. She is twenty when they stow the ship, finding it too much of a liability. Too loud, too visible, too sought after. She is twenty-two, laying awake and doing the terrible arithmetic of the lives her own has cost, the ones given and the ones taken, wondering what gives her the right to keep on going. She is twenty-seven and every day is just about reaching the next, making sure the two people she has left in the world make it with her.
Her nephew grows up. Unlike them, he is not a child of the peace times. She teaches him to shoot as soon as he can understand the dangers of the weapon, how to handle it. Danger, though, is an understanding that lives in his soul. He looks so much like his father. It startles her sometimes, to turn around and see him. It makes her heart leap, just for a second, to think one of the lost has come back to them.
The lost are coming back; she hears whispers of rumours when they see other people. Contact is always wary, hands on weapons, fingers curling around triggers, a readiness to defend at the first sign of hostility. In these tense moments of alliance, the ghost stories begin. Death undeniable—heads gone, bodies gone, life slipping away despite desperate efforts—undone. Lost ones rising, empty of memory, full of a great and unknowable power.
“She looked right through me like there was nothing in her eyes,” a man says of his sister. “And then she scorched the earth.”
The image haunts her dreams for weeks. Her brothers rising, walking, killing as if there is nothing left of them at all. Their eyes empty but for raging fire. She stops wishing for them to return to her.
She is thirty-two when they find it. Other wanderers have told them of a camp beneath the Traveler, where there is safety in numbers, but they don't make it all the way there. In the middle of the Rockies is a broken-down outpost. Too small to be remembered, too distant to be worth holding. It's been looted and scavenged but the structures stand. They stay a night, two, three. Time stretches and slowly, slowly she realizes that she has no plan to move on. Hidden can be safer than numbers.
A year later and her last brother is restless. There is a world out there still on fire, still in need of help. He doesn't know how to sit still. He doesn't know how to deal with not knowing, not for certain. One day he finally tells her he needs to leave. She isn't able to stop him; he doesn't come back.
She is fifty-three and she can feel every day of it like a decade in her bones. Back when there was still a world, she would hardly have been old, but God does she feel ancient. Her nephew is fully grown, a man, she watches him talk closely with one of the women in their little settlement. His eyes follow her when she leaves; he starts to spend his nights in her shelter. She wonders if they'll have children, if anyone will want to to bring a new generation into the apocalypse.
But if there is ever to be an end to the death, there must be new life. She's already raised one child, she'll not have any of her own. Though her nephew never calls her mother, when people ask she says she is. Who else has been there?
She is fifty-four and she is a grandmother or a great aunt. The child is a wonder. The most delicate thing she can remember seeing. She is fifty-four and older than any of her brothers lived to be. Still she dreams of them returning, of everyone she ever lost returning, but their eyes are soulless and they lead armies of the risen dead.
She is fifty-six. The Warlords come riding to their gate. She is the first to meet them because she has to know—to make certain she doesn't know them—and even if she did, her aim would be true. Hers is one life against unnumbered, and their aim is just as true.
Before the darkness fully takes her, there is a light. She doesn't go to it; it consumes her. In the stories they tell of that day, the Warlords died to a searing fury that no one understood, not even the one who unleashed it.
She has heard the stories, so often it is hard to know what she remembers truthfully and what is a tale, solidified into something that feels like her missing past. There is a man whose eyes cause her sadness; he calls her by a name no one else seems to know. He tells her more stories, over and over, ones he says she told him when he was young. Of family and loss and laughter. He repeats them until they, too, feel real. And she remains, because the world is large and empty, except for this tiny place that holds all of her past and all of the future.
She remains, even after the storyteller has found his rest. She guards his children, their children. She remains, until she is a myth herself, a rogue whisper in the wind about a place high in the hills where there is safety, and a woman who guards it with her hundred lifetimes. One is named Haven or they both are.