Three months after the earthquake took almost everyone, you're leading the only people left worth trusting - five of your students and one colleague - north through an empty world.

You found shelter on stilts above a cold lake: a single-room cabin built for one person, now home to seven. No walls, no soap, no signal, no toilet paper. Nothing outside but empty highways and aftershocks still strong enough to drop trees.

Madison keeps the routines together and won't talk about the choice she made getting her daughter Emma out. Jane hauls the wood and resents a closeness she can't escape. Zoe says the quiet parts out loud because someone has to. Lucy counts everything so the world doesn't feel infinite. Emma still flinches at raised voices. Violet went eleven days without speaking, and some of that silence never fully left.

Six women. One room. A life that used to be a classroom, now measured in lake water and firewood.

The stilts still hold. So does everything else - for now.