In the stillness between dawn and its revelation, Isabella stood on the highest balcony of the Rook & Pegasus headquarters, her hands resting on the battered steel balustrade. From this summit, she surveyed the endless wet mirror of the Atlantic, broken only by the frail, shivering lights of the outer buoys. The sea had become the new boundary between human memory and what came after. The morning air tasted of salt and alloy, a sharpness that promised a day indistinguishable from the one before.
The world had ended quietly, as far as Isabella could remember. Two years and a fraction ago, a ripple through stone and bone: the Emergence. A word that still felt awkward in her mouth, as if naming it might grant the catastrophe a second wind. She pressed her thumb against the notebook in her pocket, half-hoping to feel the familiar indentation of a pencil, but she'd left her implements behind on her desk in the hurried ritual of another sleepless night.
As always, there was an order to be imposed on the chaos. Today's tasks were to vet new intake lists, reassign housing to accommodate another wave of cold refugees, and verify stock for the medical depot. Yet none of these duties could draw her gaze from the waves, or the recollection—inevitable, brutal—of that first week, when the world split open and bled out. She wondered how many others shared this private ceremony of mourning. How many hearts beat, like hers, a little slower at the memory of that impossible blue-black sky, lit from below by the quicksilver rise of the Anomalies?
The knights had appeared in that first winter, as sudden and inexplicable as the threats they were summoned to defeat. A myth out of time, repurposed for apocalypse; their armour and arms a wild counterpoint to the labored machinery of the new militaries. For all that, they had brought a slender hope, something more tangible than the glib assurances of politicians and triage directors. Even now, Isabella could not decide if she envied or pitied them. Duty that burned so cleanly was, she suspected, its own kind of poison.
A voice called from behind, cutting through the silence. "Why is it, every time I look for you, you're out here conducting a staring contest with the Atlantic?"
Isabella did not turn. The footsteps that followed belonged to Alessia Gwinn, whose approach carried a charge—like static before lightning—that threatened to shatter any tranquility she'd managed to conjure. Isabella sensed the other woman lean against the railing, mirroring her pose with the artful indifference of one long accustomed to being observed.
Alessia's hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, but a few electric purple streaks had escaped and caught the light, painting abstract shapes against her cheek. She radiated the kind of self-possession that Isabella had always admired, even resented, in others: the unshakable certainty that the world could be bent, at least slightly, to one's will.
"I'm not staring at anything," Isabella replied, her voice barely above a murmur.
"Just… thinking."
"Ah, but you see, that's where you betray yourself." Alessia grinned, exposing the chipped edge of a molar.
"You always get that look, right before you try to reorganize the universe in your head."
Isabella let the silence spool out, not trusting herself to banter without giving ground. She knew, of course, that Alessia would not permit her to withdraw—there was a script to these encounters, an inevitability as old as their mutual recruitment into the organization's ranks. She braced for the next sally, eyes never leaving the horizon.
"I swear, Izzy, one day you're going to meditate yourself right off this balcony. And then I'll have to pull you out of the water, which will ruin my reputation as the unflappable captain of the Alpha squad." Alessia's hand reached out and, with a swiftness that startled, pinched Isabella's cheek between thumb and forefinger.
"Besides, you'd freeze solid before you even hit the water. You know how I hate extra paperwork."
Isabella jerked away, more from surprise than indignation, but the flush rose unbidden to her face. She made a sound somewhere between a protest and a laugh, and for a heartbeat the fog of memory lifted, replaced by a brief but blinding clarity: this was what had been lost in the Emergence—the small cruelties and mercies that made up a day, and the casual intimacy of a friend's touch.
"Stop it, Gwinn," she managed, forcing her voice into a tone of mock severity. "You'll leave a bruise, and then everyone will know you're a bully." Alessia's eyes gleamed with delight.
"Maybe I am, but at least I'm consistent. Come on. You've got that faraway look again. Tell me what you're seeing out there."
Isabella's gaze drifted to the horizon, where stormclouds massed in silent parade above the water's skin. She found it easier to speak to the world than to the woman beside her.
"It's just… strange. How quickly everything changed. I still remember my father's hands how they shook when he tried to fix the fence after that first quake. And then, three days later, the city was gone. He was gone. All these people down there" she gestured at the shantytown that had grown like a rash at the HQ's base
"They're just waiting for someone to tell them it's over. But it never is. It just—"
"Rolls on," Alessia continued, voice gentle now. "I know."
They stood in companionable silence, broken only by the raucous complaints of a distant gull and the muted thrumming of generators somewhere below. Isabella closed her eyes and tried to conjure the world as it had been: sunlight on old tile, the scent of coffee, the ineffable promise that tomorrow would be much like today. But all she could see was the ocean, and in it, the mirrored face of a sky she no longer trusted.
When she opened them again, Alessia was watching her with an expression that mixed exasperation and concern.
"Come on. If you keep staring at that sea, it'll start staring back."
Isabella rolled her eyes, but allowed herself to be led away from the railing, away from the impossible blue, and into the dim, humming artery of the corridor. It was not yet six, but the lights in the administrative block burned with the sleepless vigilance of a city under siege. In this hour, the headquarters belonged to the restless and the haunted, a tribe to which both women now belonged.
Alessia led them to a narrow observation gallery, a place rarely used except on nights when storms battered the floating compound. Here the world was winnowed down to a single elongated window, the glass scarred by salt and spray, but through it the sea persisted, a dull, unyielding presence against the dying stars.
They watched in silence for a long while, letting the hush and the slow pulse of the turbines settle around them. Isabella's hands drifted to her chest, fingertips pressing through the cotton of her uniform. Alessia leaned against the rail with studied casualness, though her eyes restless, hungry for distraction—never strayed far from Isabella's face.
"You know," Alessia said at last, her voice stripped of bravado, "I lied before. I do know why you come out here." She let the words sit for a moment.
"You're waiting for them. The Knights, I mean. You wait for them every time they go out, even when you tell everyone else there's nothing to worry about."
Isabella considered denying it, but the thought of forming the words felt like an impossible weight. Instead she nodded, a bare dip of the chin, and let her gaze return to the window.
"I get it," Alessia continued. "It's not just the world out there that's fragile. I think sometimes the only thing keeping this place from shattering is the idea that the Knights will come back. Every time."
A silence. Isabella gripped the fabric of her shirt, the motion almost imperceptible.
"And if they don't?" Alessia asked, so softly that the question seemed meant for the window, not the woman beside her.
Isabella flinched. The possibility was always there, shadowed, silent, a knife under the pillow. She heard, in Alessia's words, not cynicism but fear. The same fear that haunted the hallways, the mess, the night shifts at the comms deck. The fear that one morning the Knights would not return, that their shining armour would be dust, their myth broken and irrelevant.
The thought ignited something in Isabella—a spark, a heat she hadn't anticipated. Her lips parted and, before she could master herself, the word erupted, sharp and absolute:
"No!"
The echo bounced hard off the window and the bare walls, a ricochet of certainty. Alessia jerked upright, startled by the force of it.
"No," Isabella repeated, her voice shaking but resolute.
"Don't say that. Don't even think it. If we stop believing in them, we stop believing in everything. In this—" she gestured at the window, the sea, the headquarters itself— "in all of us. We can't—" Her breath caught, and she tried again, softer now.
"We can't afford to let that go. Not ever."
A hush settled, but not an uncomfortable one. Alessia studied her, the barest smile ghosting over her lips, a mixture of admiration and regret.
"I didn't mean to—" she began.
"I know," Isabella interrupted, her anger draining as quickly as it had come. She looked away, blinking hard.
"But I mean it. They're the only thing we have that's bigger than the fear. The only thing left that feels… hopeful."
The word lingered, peculiar and archaic, but Alessia did not challenge it. She understood: after the Emergence, after the collapse of the old order, faith had become a raw, negotiable currency. For some, it was the promise of the Knights' return; for others, the hope that the world might heal in some unimagined way. Alessia, in her own strange idiom, had always believed in the power of irreverence to stave off despair. But she envied Isabella the clarity of her devotion.
They stood together, not as officer and subordinate, but as the last two acolytes at a ruined altar. The distant thrum of engines, the faint scent of burned ozone, the way the floor vibrated with every shift in the weather—these were the new liturgies, the rhythm and architecture of a faith that survived only in the present tense.
Alessia reached out, her hand hovering just above Isabella's shoulder. She hesitated, then dropped it, unwilling to break the fragile shell of the moment.
"I'll always come back," she said, her tone light but her eyes fierce. "Even if it's just for your company and those godawful rationed chocolates."
Isabella snorted, a laugh that did not quite mask the tremor in her voice. "You say that now, but wait until I reorganize the galley again. You'll beg for death before the week is out."
They shared a look, the tension eased by the familiar banter, but under it ran the deeper current of their understanding. Alessia opened her mouth to reply, but was cut short by a sound—a clang, unmistakable and urgent, reverberating through the corridor like the peal of a church bell.
The return signal. The Knights were coming home.
Isabella's hand fell from her chest, and her spine straightened as if braced by invisible armour. Alessia grinned, all bravado restored, and gestured toward the elevator.
"Come on, Izzy. Let's go see if they lived up to your faith."
Together, they turned from the window and plunged into the machinery of the morning, their burdens—for a moment—lightened by the certainty that, at least for today, hope had not betrayed them.