Avery
Six Months Later...
Dutch is arguing with the radio.
"I don't care what the maps say. I've run that ridge. The east approach to Cedar Creek is compromised and anyone who tells you different hasn't been out there in the last month."
Cole's voice from North Ridge, patient as ever: "Flagging it for Travis's convoy."
"Flag it hard. He needs to know before he routes through."
"Flagged hard. Clearwater out?"
"Clearwater out."
He drops into the chair across from me and catches me watching. "What?"
"Nothing."
"Avery."
"I'm just thinking about how you described yourself as a quiet presence when you got here."
He considers this. "I've settled in."
"To loud."
"To comfortable. Different thing."
He's right. It is different. He knows every guard's name. He knows to bring coffee before morning council. He knows to leave me alone for the first ten minutes of my wall walk because I need to think, and he's always there when I come back.
He knows me. I'm still figuring out what to do with that.
Clearwater has grown to fifty-two people now.
More asking to join every month. Word travels through the network fast. People have started calling us the hub. Not just for supplies and radio relay, but for proof that something like this can be built and held.
Jenna runs the training program. Her idea.
She took everything Old Hawk spent two years teaching her: observation, threat assessment, how to walk into a place that wants to kill you and look calm, and turned it into something that keeps people alive instead of getting them killed.
She's patient and direct and she doesn't let anyone feel small for not knowing things yet.
Ruth tends the expanded garden. She's quieter than Jenna, still learning what a life of her own looks like. But there's color in her face now that wasn't there when the convoy brought her in. She and Jenna eat dinner together every night. Sometimes I walk past and hear them laughing.
I think about survival differently than I used to.
I watch from the east wall. The settlement is buzzing like a little beehive.
Dutch comes up beside me and leans on the railing beside me and we look at the treeline together.
"Cole wants to meet about the directed herd situation," he says. "Kate's been running the data. Something bigger is coordinating those attacks."
"I've read her reports."
"We'll need to go out again. Both of us."
"I know." I glance at him. "You're not asking permission."
"I'm telling you first." He bumps his shoulder against mine. "There's a difference."
"Noted."
Below us Jenna runs a group through defensive positions, her voice carrying up clear and certain. Near the gate Harry's briefing the afternoon watch. Ruth is a patch of color in the garden.
"I love you," he says. Simply.
"I know." I step into him. "I love you too."
He kisses me on the wall in full view of the entire settlement, which he started doing about three months ago and which has become, apparently, just a thing that happens now. Below us Jenna pauses her drill long enough to make a face at the nearest recruit.
"I'm going to start making you run laps," I call down to her.
"You'd have to run them too!" she calls back.
"She's not wrong," Dutch says.
"I know she's not wrong. Shut up."
He laughs. I feel it against my shoulder where we're pressed together.
There's a threat building somewhere in the network, bigger than Old Hawk, and we'll go out to meet it and come back, and the walls will hold.
That's what I know now that I didn't know three years ago, screaming into a radio while everything came down: the holding is not a one-time thing.
It's not something you achieve. It's what you choose, every day, for as long as you can.
I choose it. I choose him. I choose this.
The light goes long and gold across everything we built, and I let myself feel the full weight of it and it feels like enough.
More than enough.
Like something worth surviving for.
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