For some, days were counted by calendars.
Julyah kept them by bags of harvested spinach, rounds spent on tin cans, and generator starts.
Three months.
That's how long it had been since the day the sky opened.
Since the world she knew blinked out like a power surge; sudden, irreversible, and disturbingly silent in the aftermath. No radio chatter. No static over the emergency channels. No news broadcasts.
Just the wind. The hum of the greenhouse fans. The click of her watch.
She hadn't heard another human voice in eighty-nine days.
She rose the same way each morning: before the sun, a scarf wrapped around her face to filter the air of ash, and a walk through the grounds of the villa. It wasn't about danger anymore. Not exactly.
It was about the illusion of normalcy.
The greenhouse, always the greenhouse. Checked the soil, adjusted the grow lights and misted the plants with measured hands. The spinach had come in again. Tomatoes were being stubborn, but getting there. The spring onions? Oh, they were more than fine.
"Show-offs," she grumbled, cooing fondly as she clipped a few to cook for breakfast.
By now, the greenhouse wasn't just something to do. It was a companion. A fragile, verdant reminder that life still had a stubborn way of persisting.
She cooked in silence.
Chopped, stirred, boiled. Ate at the kitchen counter with the windows open, the wind bringing with it the scent of burnt dirt and sun-bleached wood.
Still, it was an improvement on the smoke from the month before.
The rifle leaned against the wall now, nestled between the salt and pepper shakers. It was hers now, she thought, as she cleaned and oiled it carefully. Practiced when the wind was low, setting up glass jars and scavenged cans as targets out by the treeline.
She was getting good. Not perfect. But she could take down a squirrel if she needed to.
Adrian would've been proud of that.
The thought came unbidden, as it always did.
Where was he?
It was a stupid question. She had no way of knowing. He could've been anywhere, halfway across the country or six feet under.
Or…
She shook her head. No. She wouldn't think like that.
He was somewhere. He had to be.
She remembered the way he used to talk about survival. The way he'd looked at the world like it was already crumbling long before it did. He was the first person who'd shown her how to shoot a weapon. How to read a map. How to wait without screaming.
He had known this was coming.
He had to be alive.
But hope was a double edged thing. It kept her alive, yes. But it also gnawed at her bones every time the sun set and he still didn't walk out of the trees.
She didn't cry. Not anymore.
Instead, she planned.
The first disaster had been fire from the sky. The second, she was sure, would be heat.
The air was getting drier. The sun burned closer every day. Even the shadows seemed afraid to stir.
She'd noticed the way the leaves crinkled at the edges too early. The way water evaporated faster than it should. The way the villa's stone walls held heat well into the night like a slow turning oven.
So she rationed.
Barrels of collected rainwater lined the back wall of the greenhouse. She'd lined the villa's windows with reflective foil, and during the hottest part of the day, closed every curtain and moved like a phantom in the dark.
Every night, she'd gone over the list:
*Water storage: ✅
*Ventilation tests: ✅
*Firearm counts: ✅
*Shade cloth for the crops: almost done
*Evac route if the villa fails: untested
She was alone—but she would not be caught unprepared again.
But on some nights, when the villa grew too quiet and the stars were hidden by smog, she still found herself by the rooftop with the rifle slung across her shoulders, scanning the horizon.
Waiting.
Hoping.
Half of her surviving the heat.
Half of her surviving the silence.