The morning arrived with no mercy for sleep. Lucien woke to the dull, animal hum of the camp: low voices, someone sobbing quietly, the slap of a plastic bowl against a tarp. He blinked the last of the night from his eyes and sat up, shoulder blades protesting. The bed—his bed—had been nothing more than a mattress on the floor, but it had been big. That was Max's doing, probably. Max always stole the lightest complaint and turned it into a grin.
He swung his feet to the floor and stretched, the lazy ritual of a man who still owned the habit of keeping himself whole. First thing he did—because some part of him could still be annoyingly practical—was check his phone. No service. No messages. Just a cracked screen and stubborn silence.
Outside, the camp moved like a messy organism. Tents in a hasty ring, tarps lashed together with rope, fires smoking in reclaimed barrels. The aroma of boiled cabbage and something overcooked made it feel like some hideous, communal dinner. People were louder than last night—conversation replacing the stunned quiet. Argument replaced the stunned quiet.
Lucien wandered through the cluster, passing hands filled with canned food and newspapers used as plates. He offered a nod, a curt "take it" to an older woman who didn't have the energy to smile back. Small help was his currency: do the necessary, not the heroic.
A kid no more than seven shuffled past him, eyes too old for his face, clutching a tin cup. Lucien watched the kid's scabbed knees, the way he shuffled like a little man. He should have felt anger at how the world had put grown things on small frames. Instead he felt an odd, hard curiosity—an itch he couldn't scratch. The kids had survived. Too many of them had.
"Oi, idol of questionable morals," Max called, collapsing beside him with two bowls. He'd already got soup and was slurping like the whole apocalypse wouldn't get to him.
Lucien let out the sound that passed for a laugh. "You call that soup? This tastes like budget history."
Max grinned, the same easy shape he'd been the night before. "Thanks. I try to keep it authentic."
They moved together through the camp, passing groups clustered around smoldering kettles. Arguments flared up and died. Near the edge, Lucien saw the three men who had kept apart last night—the ex-soldiers—leaning over a burnt crate. They spoke in low tones that looked like they weighed more than the words themselves.
"People are expecting the army," one said, and Lucien caught the word like a thrown stone. "They think lines of trucks will roll in. They keep that hope like a talisman."
"And when the army comes," the other replied, "it'll be for control. It's not rescue people dream about. It's triage, order—and law."
They didn't say more. They never said more. They didn't want to break the camp's fragile belief. Lucien watched them look away from a child clutching his mother's sleeve. He remembered how hope could keep people upright more surely than a spine.
Machines continued to disappoint. An elderly man fussed with an old walkie-talkie until an ex-soldier rapped his knuckles and took it away. Newer radios sat dead on a tarp like inert animals. Cars coughed and refused to start unless you coaxed them with old, temperamental mechanics. A truck's horn sounded once and then nothing. Someone with a lighter touch and a scrappy kit would get a generator groaning back to life for an hour—just long enough to keep a light on and then die.
"Weird," Max observed, watching a kid try to coax a battered radio into life. "Like half the tech remembered to work and half of it just—gave up."
"Old stuff works because it was built to be stubborn," Lucien said. "New stuff quits in stylish ways."
"Government stuff?" Max tossed his head. "Weapon tests? Aliens? I vote aliens."
Lucien actually let himself consider it. The kids alive. The old collapsing the night after. The radios dying like wounded animals. The idea that the world had shifted—subtly—pressed at the back of his mind. He felt something else, a small shudder: distances felt longer now, the sky a touch farther. Maybe he had slept wrong. Maybe he hadn't. He tucked the thought away. Not everything had to be an omen.
Then one of the tent fights escalated.
"Shut it up!" an older man barked at Max as he made a face at the younger kids. "This isn't a circus. You think everything's a joke? People are dying!"
The words came like a knife through smoke. Max's grin vanished, replaced by a small, stung look—not because he'd been insulted but because the man had yelled at the children. Max always hated it when kids got treated as afterthoughts.
Lucien felt something light up in his chest that was not rational: a flare of hot, white anger that had the shape of a fist. He didn't like the man. He didn't know the man. But the man had reached for Max, and more importantly, he'd reached for the kids' dignity.
He moved before he thought.
The punch landed hard, the old man's cheek folding under the snap. The camp went flat, like someone had muted the world for a second. The man staggered back, hand to his face, surprise and fury mixing.
"You hit me?" he spat.
Lucien smelled sweat and fear and realized his knuckles were burning. His blood spoke before his brain could.
"Don't put your hands on kids," Lucien said, voice low enough to fracture something.
Another man lunged—older, heavier—angry for the spectacle. Lucien pivoted, ready. Max's hand closed around his wrist with a force that hid a dozen years of practice in restraint.
"Lucien, stop," Max breathed. They held each other's gaze: one of restrained animal and one of preternatural stillness. The world around them thrummed in a dozen different rhythms, but Max's grip anchored Lucien like a rope to a dock.
He let go with a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. The tough control reassembled around him like armor. People resumed talking, the hush breaking like overcooked dough. Murmurs, accusations, defenses. The ex-soldiers watched, unreadable.
Afterward, Lucien stepped away. He wasn't proud. He didn't apologize. He had no patience for performative humanity, but he also had no tolerance for cruelty against people he cared for—Max included. His anger didn't make him noble. It made him human in a small, dangerous way.
He found Max near the water barrel, face grey with smoke. The little boy—same as earlier—sat nearby, noodle-thin, watching as if the world had been reduced to waiting between heartbeats.
"Why did the kids survive?" Max asked suddenly, voice thin. He looked up at Lucien like he expected an answer.
Lucien leaned on the barrel and watched the boy. He had been turning over the question in his mind since yesterday night, moving it like a coin between finger and thumb.
"They shouldn't have," Lucien said finally. "If you measure by brute strength, by bone and lung, kids should have been gone first. It doesn't add up."
Max chewed his lip. "I swear I saw something last night. When the force hit—there was this white light. Around the kid next to me. It barely blinked, like a shield. I thought my eyes were playing tricks."
Lucien let that settle. He remembered the glow too, not as a shield but as an absence of pressure, like someone had cleared a hollow around small bodies. He wanted to dismiss it. He wanted to reduce it to lucky positions and random physics. But the sight of the kids—so many of them—alive while the old lay still in the streets, didn't feel random.
"Or it was luck," he said. "Or God had a change of heart. Or we're in a sci-fi novel and this is the part where the plot gets interesting." He tried to make it a joke and failed; the edges didn't fit.
Max stared at him. "If it's not luck, then someone—something—protected them. Or chose them."
"Or it's chaos with a taste for irony," Lucien replied. He looked up. The sky was changing slowly now, clouds crawling like slow tides. Night was comins but not suddenly. It eased in, but its approach felt too deliberate, like a hand making room on a table.
Lucien's chest tightened. The three men from the edge of camp—ex-soldiers—were speaking again, just loud enough now for him to hear.
"If the army comes, they don't come to comfort," one said. "They'll set order—checkpoints, curfews, control. People think uniforms mean safety. Sometimes uniforms mean rules you can't bargain with."
A small coldness slid into Lucien's chest. The thought had been in the back of everyone's head, a whisper: government, rescue. The ex-soldier's words turned whisper into an image: rows of trucks, strict faces, stamped papers, and the word that tasted like vinegar—martial law.
Lucien thought of the children—their survival, their soft, fragile faces—and suddenly the future felt smaller and cruelly literal. If uniforms arrived with clipboards and order, who decided which children were sent to which shelters? Who decided what was necessary and what could be left?
He sat a while longer by the fire, listening to people barter hope. The world had become larger in ways they couldn't explain, and smaller in the choices it presented. He reached for his anger and found it steadier now, sharpened into a decision.
If the army came, it might save some. If saved, some would be handed over to rules that weren't mercy. He could picture it—lines, IDs, officials with pens.
Lucien bared his teeth in a half-smile that wasn't for humor.
Then he thought, very clearly: if the army comes, it won't simply be to help. It will be to take control. And if it takes control, the people who had survived this long might lose the one thing they still owned—choice.
He let the panic slip into a new place: not a blind fear, but a planning kind of dread. The kind that made a man stop pretending the world was where he could be selfish forever.
Night folded over the camp like a slow hand closing a book. Lucien watched the first stars prick through the cloth of dark, too many and too sharp, like someone had woven more into the sky. He thought of the kids again, of Max's small white light, and of men in uniform with lists. He sat there until the first murmurs turned into plans and the camp readied itself for the day after tomorrow.
Martial law was a word with teeth. He tasted it, and he didn't like the flavor.
*Author note*
do to some irl stuff i will not be able to write as must as before, so from now on i will post only 1 chapter a day.