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She casts me a doleful smile. “At least we have our library,” she says. “There’s hope for us yet.”

A diaphanous-shawled, rhinestone-bespectacled university librarian in the old days, Agnes is installing a library on the empty second floor of our building—a heavy-lifting labor of love. We’ve been collecting books for over a year now—though most were burned that first winter when people grabbed the easiest thing.

Doc checks for unwanted books on rounds, and the ragtag police sniff them out while patrolling abandoned houses and buildings. I scavenge when I’m raiding old gardens and making rounds for the clinic. Regardless of genre or providence, we take whatever we find and try to shield them until the future is more certain. Each day Agnes floats down to the second floor, a court of cats behind her, to catalogue and organize what we bring.

“I found a big haul today over on Eighteenth,” I say, acquiescing to her subject change. “I’ll take a grocery cart to go get them in the morning.”

“That many?”

“In good shape. Doesn’t look like the room’s been disturbed much. Some foreign-language stuff, too.”

“How wonderful,” she says, lifting her plate out of reach of a fat tabby.

I do my best German accent. “Ve go get ze buchen.”

“Bücher
,
”
she corrects.

“Yup. That’s what I said.” I wink at her. “College, schmollege.”

“You know, you
should
be in school. It’s a real shame.” She tuts to herself, to the cat.

I reassure her about this a lot, and have since she agreed to let me live on my own after my mom died, as long as I check in with her three times a day. Maybe we have the same conversation over and over again because of her memory. But maybe we have it because she wants to keep having it. “I was never going to school anyway. I mean, maybe after I stopped dancing. They had a program where you could take some classes, see if you were good at anything else.”

“Well, of course you would be,” Agnes says, offended. “You could do anything you set your mind to.”

“What I mean is, I’m not sure what we were preparing for in the first place. If this is what life really boils down to? Survival?”

“Human beings have been in the business of
survival
since the beginning, Syd. You’ve read enough history to know that. Your generation won’t have your wants, your needs handed to you, but that onus has always been on the individual. Even in easier times.”

“Are you telling me to stop whining and do something about it?”

She pats my arm as she passes, momentarily dimming the low light. “Do be a dear and blow out the candles on your way out, won’t you?”

I once started each morning at the barre. Now, I start my mornings at the bar—or the space that used to be one in the lobby of our building. After the panic of finding things to eat and drink and repairing wounds quieted down, the few hundred of us who survived in the city limits agreed to some rules of decency—what to burn, how to signal one another, where and how to take a dump. Extra chairs and tables were delivered to a community firewood pile, and so what’s left in the lobby is a smooth wood floor and a slightly higher than standard brass rail.

My soft slippers are mostly duct-taped together these days, but they serve their purpose. I’m sure I’m cultivating a zillion bad habits working without instructors, but the hour I spend emptying my head of everything but alignment and balance and center and weight over the second metatarsal is about as spiritual as it gets for me these days.

This morning my work is engrossing—the music in my head swelling—and I find myself humming as I stretch, counting and correcting myself aloud. When I finish, I take the stairs by twos, pausing at each landing to wipe the sweat out of my eyes.

I open the door and find Doc in my kitchen, standing on one leg like a lanky, overgrown pelican. He holds a hand up, caught red-handed drinking a cup of my precious instant coffee.

“Hey! That’s for emergencies,” I say, swiping the mug for a sip. “I should call the police.”

Mina’s eyes widen.

“Don’t worry, honey,” I say. “He’s friends with all the police. Just be careful with your coffee around him.”

“It
is
an emergency,” Doc says. “We were up all night wrangling that cast, weren’t we?”

Mina, her leg swathed in gauze and glue and elevated on my coffee table, nods from the couch. Buster sits next to her, pressed into her side.

“How are you feeling, honey?” I ask, but she pulls the end of her ponytail over her face.

“I need to ask you a favor,” Doc says, not waiting for her answer.

I suppress a groan. Maybe Mina can sit with Agnes while I explain to Doc why no one in their right mind would leave a houseplant, let alone a child, in my care. I yank a sweatshirt off the chair and pull it over my workout clothes. “Hey, Mina, would you like to go next door to meet my friend Ms. Agnes and her cats?”

“No,” she says, matter-of-factly. “Doctor Remington says I have to stay with somebody. I don’t know anyone but you.”

All eyes are on me, including Buster’s. “But you don’t know me, Mina. We just met.”

“I’ve known you the longest.” Buster lowers his head in her lap, as if to console her.

I both do and don’t want to ask what awfulness left her so alone so early in her journey in life, but I’ll have to do it when four poignant brown eyes aren’t surveying my every reaction.

“She’s only twelve, Syd. Even you weren’t alone yet at that age. I need her to be on these antibiotics for a couple of weeks. The break will be fine, but the gashes she tore into herself getting her leg out are deep, and I want to make absolutely sure they aren’t infected. She’s not sick enough to need a bed at the clinic, but . . . will you?”

“I’m not sure I’m qualified.” I look around my apartment at the shabby disarray.

Doc is laughing. “You’ll be fine.”

“I mean, I guess? If she wants.” Mina’s face remains unchanged—neither thrilled at the prospect nor repulsed by it. “How bad could I screw it up?”

“I can just see your mother’s face right now,” Doc said, taking a slurp of coffee.

I shake my head. My mother would be appalled that I’m using my living room floor as a holding pen for muddy boots, and eating out of cans. I can’t even begin to fathom her thoughts on my taking a child on. Sometimes, I think it’s better she doesn’t have to see how messed up things are versus the future she had imagined for us. She gave up her entire life in New Charity—our home, my dad—for my dream and everything that was supposed to follow. My ballet career, a partner, children, a family, hobbies—the fulfillment of a life she herself never completed.

In all of this, I have failed and continue to fail. I’m not ready for the responsibilities of womanhood. I should be flirting with the leader of the police force—the most eligible bachelor in the City. I should be working on having little ex-ballerina policeman babies, keeping house, and serving family dinners at five. Things that are probably important to the effort of rebuilding, repopulating, restoring things to the way they were. But I don’t even know what that sort of normal family life looks like—it never happened in my childhood, with my dad working in the barn and me training at the studio—let alone how to implement it. It’s not that I know for sure that I don’t want those things, but I’m scared to want them for myself.

“Let’s step outside for a second,” I say. Doc unfolds himself, draining his coffee mug, and follows me into the hallway.

“Are you sure I’m the right choice for this?” I ask.

He lets out a caw of laughter. “Syd, you’re overthinking this. Just relax.”

Agnes pokes her head out of the door. “Hello, dears,” she says. “Everything okay?”

“Yes, sorry for the noise,” I say.

“It’s not so much the noise,” she says. “It’s that there’s a visitor at the door downstairs.”

I listen to the steady knock coming from the boarded-up lobby door. “Expecting someone?” Doc asks.

“I haven’t expected anyone today. And yet, here you all are.” I shoulder around him and down the stairs. I pause midstair. “Keep your mitts off my coffee while I’m gone.”

At the bottom of the stairs, I unlock the dead bolt and throw the door open.

“Welcome to the City Library,” I say, stepping into the blinding sunlight. “Do you have a moment to learn about our Lord and Savior, Strunk N. White?”

“Cressyda Turner?” the visitor asks.

“Who’s ask . . .” My eyes adjust and I find myself addressing a horse’s chest. I stumble backwards, the ornate door handle jamming into the small of my back. I bite back the screed of profanity in my mouth.

“I have a message for Cressyda Turner.” As I look up, the clouds cover the sun for a moment, but the rider is just a dark form. “Is that you?”

I nod. The rider dismounts, takes off his hat, and hands me a large cream envelope with my name typed on the front.

“Do you want me to wait?” he asks.

“For what?”

“A reply. Maybe you’ll want to send something in return,” he says, looking at his hat. “I’m heading back to New Charity tonight.”

A sour mix of dread and panic rises in my throat. Once people realized that New Charitans were immune from the plague—not the acquired resistance of Survivors, but instead completely unaffected by the virus’s rampage—it became a distasteful identity to admit to. After New Charity built the reservoir that dried up our river downstream, revealing New Charitan heritage became downright dangerous—no matter that the Sanctuary there claimed they were protecting us from the plague in the water.

Whatever is in the envelope is from what remains of my family. People I haven’t claimed as mine since my mother died.

I wonder how much this courier knows about me. He has to know by my name that I belong to the Turner Ranch of the famed Turner equine bloodlines. Though if he does, he doesn’t have the guts to say anything.

I think about asking him to tell my dad that I hope he and his darling manure-spewing hay compactors are happy together, but I decide against it.

He hesitates, as if waiting for something. I pat my pockets. “Sorry, am I supposed to . . . I don’t have, like, a tip or anything.” I’ve never received a couriered message before. We used to tip the pizza delivery people, but this is different.

“Not necessary. But I’d appreciate some water for me and my mount, if it’s not too much trouble.”

It takes me a while to parse why this guy seems so out of place, besides the cowboy hat. He’s polite and quiet. Well fed and smooth skinned, sun browned, not thin and pale and scarred from scavenging.

“This way,” I say, holding the door open and tamping down my burgeoning hostility. “There’s a water jug on the back counter.” I return my attention to the envelope and follow him into the lobby, promptly running into his back; he’s staring at the ornate glass chandelier above the entryway.

“Bet that’s real pretty all lit up,” he says.

“Get the assholes at the Sanctuary to open the reservoir’s floodgate, and we’ll turn the power on and show you.”

The courier stares at me. I guess it’s not his fault. But it’s not
not
his fault either. New Charity’s reservoir holds hostage the lifeblood of our hydroelectric power. And in all this time, not a single resident has been willing to admit their wrongdoing. We’ve sent diplomats to negotiate; crusaders have camped outside New Charity’s gates for years. It’s made no difference.

After the messenger has his drink, I point him toward a clean tank so he can fill a bucket of water for the horse, and I step back outside to look at her. She doesn’t have my dad’s brand on her, but she’s undoubtedly New Charity stock. She’s a good-sized mare, about sixteen hands, though she’s favoring her left front. “It’s okay, girl,” I say, running my thumb and forefinger down the tendon on the back of her leg. The horse lifts her hoof for me, revealing a big chunk of loose asphalt wedged in her frog. I use my keys to gently nudge it out.

I hear footsteps, but I don’t want to drop the horse’s foot too suddenly onto the concrete. “Thank you kindly, ma’am,” the messenger says, though his eyes stay on the bucket and don’t stray to me. “I was about to do the same thing myself. Roads around here aren’t quite like they used to be, I’d imagine.”