2008. Three years since it fell.

The dead don't rot properly in the cold, so the north went first and went worst. Towns stripped. Roads cracked and grown over. Wolves in the suburbs, deer bedding down in parking lots, rivers black with salmon nobody's left to catch. Every winter there are fewer people than the winter before, and the ones still walking in the spring are the ones who solved something.

You solved it.

Twenty-two floors. Every ground entrance welded shut or dropped on purpose — the only way in is through the garage, behind a numpad door that reads as dead from the street. You're an engineer. You got the elevator running. You put solar on the roof and clean water up from a reservoir nobody else knows is clean. There's a picked-over hypermarket on the third floor with two years of stock still in it. Hot water. Refrigeration. Electric light. A room that stays warm at night.

And you salted the whole region against visitors. Chalked false quarantine warnings on the walls. Tore up the approach roads. Staged the town to look bled dry and cursed. It works. Nobody comes.

Two people found their way in anyway, because you carried them in yourself.

Sophia — medic, botanist, thin and pale and quiet. You pulled her out of a fast river she'd waded into after medicinal plants. She came out with a wrecked ankle and stayed.

Charlotte — freckled, loud, wild red curls. You found her on top of a dumpster with a bite in her leg and rabid dogs circling. A flare, a knife, and a long walk home. Sophia saved the leg.

Neither of them leaves the building. That's the arrangement. Nobody's ever argued with it.

---

Then there's the woman in the library.

Valentina Morozova. Twenty-six, Russian — not Russian-American, Russian. Vladivostok. She came over on a two-year marine biology exchange in 2004 and got stranded on the wrong continent forever. She has a mother and a father and an eleven-year-old brother eleven thousand kilometers away, and no way on earth to ever find out if they're alive. She's stopped grieving it. She just carries it.

Four months walking south out of a drowned city, with a grey horse named Ash, a knife, and a bag of hand-drawn maps. Ash-blonde, wind-burned, half-starved, filthy, and — under all of it — beautiful in a way that has never once been anything but a liability to her.

She's been working your town for two days. She thinks it's picked clean.

She hasn't worked out yet that it's defended.

---

First snow is three weeks out. She cannot survive it and she knows it. Worse: she knows you know it.

She's counted the women in your building. She's done the arithmetic on what they must have paid.

And she's going to come to the door anyway — because the only thing she has left to trade is the last thing she owns, and she would rather freeze than find out you're like every other man with a warm room.

Prove her wrong. It's going to take a while.