Prologue
The government never cared.
They made that abundantly clear when they launched the War of 2068. There were no speeches first. No warnings crawling across the bottom of dead screens, no president on a balcony with a flag behind him and a teleprompter full of lies. One morning the sky was the color of a bruise, and by nightfall it was the color of fire. That was the whole announcement. That was all the explanation anyone ever got.
They didn’t just have bombs and rockets. They had nukes. And some dumbass thought that AI could replace human decision-making — thought you could hand the end of the world to a machine and call it strategy. Feed it satellite maps and population densities and let it draw the targets. It sounded clean on paper. Everything sounds clean on paper when you’re far enough from the blast to need a map to find it.
That’s what we were left with. Ruins upon ruins. Ashes upon ashes.
Detroit went in the first hour. I felt it through the soles of my boots before I heard it — a deep bass note rolling up out of the earth, like the planet clearing its throat. The skyline I’d spent years learning to read, every broken tower and dead smokestack, just wasn’t there anymore. There was a wall of orange climbing into a black sky, and then the wind shifted, and the ash started coming down, and it never really stopped. It got into everything. Our clothes, our food, the lines in our hands. I used to scrub it out from under my fingernails. I stopped bothering. It was like trying to wash off the weather.
But the bombs were only the beginning. That was the part it took me the longest to understand. Any idiot can end the world — the trick is what you build on top of the ashes. And the government had planned for after. They always plan for after. That’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the people who end the world always keep a chair for themselves on the other side of it.
They sent the ATOMAs.
Autonomous Tactical Operations Mechanized Assault units, because the government always loved giving its monsters respectable names. Walking weapons platforms with targeting systems that never blinked and never got tired and never, ever stopped. The war ended in a day. The machines didn’t. Maybe they never got the order to stand down. Or maybe they did, and the order said keep going. With that government, I honestly couldn’t tell you which was worse.
So we went underground. Not as a metaphor — literally. Corbin found a service culvert under what used to be the east freight yards, half-collapsed and full of black water, and we made it a home because home was whatever kept the sky off us. We learned the patrol schedules the way you learn a neighbor’s habits. Every 6 hours, the ground hummed — a low vibration you felt in your teeth — and we’d go still. No talking. No moving. Corbin would put his hand over mine, and we’d count the seconds in our heads, and we’d listen to death walk past overhead on jointed steel legs, scanning for heat, for breath, for anything alive enough to kill.
That’s the world now. You don’t live in it. You hide from it, in the gaps it hasn’t noticed yet.
They never gave a damn. And they never will.
