28. Gabriella
TWENTY-EIGHT
GAbrIELLA
The Appalachians, usually a verdant sprawl of ancient, gentle giants, were weeping.
A relentless rain system, Hurricane Peggy’s monstrous afterbirth, had stalled over the Blue Ridge for days, turning every stream into a raging torrent, every hillside into a cascading river of mud.
Gabriella had seen devastation, but this was different.
In Mexico, the earth had fractured, violent and immediate, leaving a stark, broken landscape.
Here, in the hollows and mountain passes of North Carolina, the earth was dissolving.
Houses slid off foundations, roads vanished into the churning brown water, and the cold, damp seeped into everything, a bone-deep chill that no amount of emergency blankets could chase away.
She was deployed to Asheville, but her work had taken her deep into the surrounding counties, to isolated communities now cut off by mudslides and washed-out bridges.
One day blurred into the next. She’d spent the last twenty-four hours mapping evacuation routes for a pocket of residents trapped up a particularly unstable ridge, her feet squelching in ankle-deep mud, her breath fogging in the frigid air.
The sheer scale of the logistical nightmare eclipsed Mexico in its insidious spread.
There, it was the immediacy of the threat.
Here, it was the creeping, relentless despair of watching an entire way of life slowly, irrevocably swallowed by the land itself.
By night, the closest thing she had to a bed was a cot in the corner of a high school gymnasium, repurposed into a central command and relief center.
The air hung thick with the smell of wet wool, damp humanity, and institutional cleaner.
The hum of generators was a constant, irritating drone, punctuated by the static of radios, the cries of infants, and the hushed, weary conversations of volunteers.
Privacy was a luxury she hadn’t known in months.
She was running on fumes, her body a raw and aching vessel.
The fire that usually fueled her, the unshakeable conviction that she could bridge the gap between chaos and order, was sputtering and fading.
She found herself missing the focused intensity of Mexico, even the cartels.
At least then the enemy was clear and defined.
Here, the enemy was nature itself, cold and indifferent and unstoppable.
The endless, aching vulnerability of people trapped by its force weighed heavily on her heart, wearing down her resolve with every passing moment.
The memory of Picasso, that solid, unyielding presence, felt like a distant dream.
Each near-miss, each terse text, had chipped away at the fragile connection they’d forged.
She pictured him in his structured world, his routines, his predictable rhythm.
It was a universe away from her own, a chaotic, improvised dance on the edge of the next disaster.
One night, curled on her cot, listening to the relentless drumming of rain on the gym roof, the silence finally broke her. She needed to hear a voice that wasn’t asking for supplies or reporting a new mudslide. She needed his voice.
She pulled out her phone, the screen a pale ghost in the gloom. With a trembling finger, she found his contact and dialed. The call connected, but it was just a faint buzz, a watery whisper of a signal that kept cutting in and out.
“Picasso?” she whispered, her voice raw with exhaustion and a desperate longing she hadn’t realized she still possessed. “Are you there?”
A crackle. A burst of static. Then, a fragment, almost lost to the noise. “…Gabriella?”
“Yeah,” she managed, tears pricking her eyes. “It’s me. I… I just…” She swallowed, fighting the tremor in her voice. “I don’t think this is working, Picasso,” she admitted, the words tumbling out, heavy with defeat. “This… this life. Our lives. We live on different planets.”
The connection frayed. A final, desperate crackle. She heard him try to respond, a low rumble of his voice, but the sound was swallowed by the storm.
Then, just silence.
The call dropped. The screen went dark.
She stared at the dead phone, the words hanging in the frigid air of the gym.
Different planets. The finality of it chilled her more than the damp mountain air.
She squeezed her eyes shut, a single tear escaping to trace a cold path down her mud-smudged cheek.
The universe had spoken. And it had cut them off.