The world ended twenty-three years ago.
At least, that's what the history books say, on the rare occasion you find one that isn't being used for kindling. They call it the Great Collapse, like naming a massacre makes it easier to swallow. Some lab somewhere thought it could build the perfect soldier. Instead, it built something that shouldn't exist. Something that laughed at bullets.
The first generation of Abominations shredded their cages and spread like a stain. Cities went dark. Governments stopped answering phones. Countries turned into dead zones you don't mark on maps—you just memorize where they are, and you don't go there.
Humanity fought back for years. And supposedly, it won.
Supposedly.
When the last of the first-generation beasts were destroyed, the leftover governments did something they'd failed at during the actual apocalypse: they worked together. Created an organization. Called it Rainbow. Cute, right? A rainbow after the storm. They promised the nightmare was over. Promised the Abomination Project was dead and buried. Promised to protect whoever was still breathing.
They built shelters across the ruins. Places with food. Medicine. Walls thick enough that kids could sleep without waking up to the sound of claws on concrete.
For someone like me, Rainbow was the closest thing to hope.
I just didn't know hope could have teeth.
I'd been walking for three days when I finally saw it.
The highway beneath my boots wasn't really a highway anymore—just a scar of asphalt and rust winding through land that had forgotten what roads were for. My coat dragged against my legs, heavy with dust and dried mud. My hat, wide-brimmed and black, kept my face in shadow. I was tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. My shoulders ached from the weight of nothing. My jaw was sharp enough to cut paper, and I'd shaved that morning with a knife that needed sharpening, because looking like a wild animal gets you shot before you get to explain yourself.
But people don't notice my jaw. They notice my eyes.
They look at them, then they look away. Not dead, my eyes. Just finished. Like I've spent years watching things the mind wasn't meant to hold, until the watching wore grooves into something I can't get back.
I stopped when I saw the flag.
White. Clinical. A rainbow arched across the center, each band too bright, too clean, too deliberately cheerful against the gray wilderness. Behind it, walls. Steel walls, thirty feet high, stretching into the murk on either side. Floodlights swept across the deadlands in slow arcs, carving white cones through the twilight.
Above the gate, a sign:
RAINBOW SHELTER — HUMANITY'S NEW BEGINNING
My stomach twisted. Not with hope. With a Pavlovian ache. I couldn't remember my last real meal. Couldn't remember the taste of bread, or meat, or what it felt like to eat without calculating how many bullets the food was worth.
I approached the gate.
Two soldiers emerged, rifles already up. Their movements were synchronized, mechanical.
"Stop."
I stopped. Kept my hands loose at my sides, visible.
"Name."
"Kael Veyron."
"Age?"
"Twenty-eight."
"Affiliation?"
"None."
The soldier on the left stepped forward with a handheld scanner, no bigger than a deck of cards. He ran it over me. It pulsed, then flashed green.
"Any Beast contact?"
"No."
"Any symptoms?"
I paused. Just a fraction of a second too long.
I felt the rifles shift. Not much. Just enough.
"No," I said.
The soldier studied me. Young eyes, flat and evaluating. The kind of eyes that had already shot people for lesser hesitations. Several seconds passed. Somewhere in the dead trees beyond the fence, a crow screamed.
Then he lowered his weapon.
"You're welcome" he said. Didn't sound like a compliment. Sounded like he was inventorying livestock.
The gate groaned open—hydraulics hissing, steel grinding—and I walked through.
I expected barracks. Barbed wire. The grim architecture of survival.
Instead, I found a city.
Not large. Maybe a few square miles inside the steel walls. But alive . People moved between buildings, carrying laundry, tools, baskets of vegetables. Kids darted through the streets, shrieking, their cheeks full, their clothes clean. Food stalls lined the main road, steam rising from pots of stew. Medical centers stood beside dormitories, windows glowing with warm light. Someone was playing a guitar somewhere. Actual music. Unhurried. Unafraid.
The sound of it hit me like a physical blow.
I stood in the middle of the street, motionless, while the current of humanity flowed around me.
A woman appeared at my elbow. Middle-aged, hair in a practical knot, apron stained with broth. She pressed a ceramic bowl into my hands. Steam curled up.
"Eat," she said.
I looked down. Chunks of something pale floated in thin, greasy broth. It smelled like heaven and chemicals.
"Free?" My voice came out rough, barely used.
She smiled. It reached her eyes, which was somehow more unnerving than a blade.
"Everything is free here," she said.
I lowered my head. I ate.
I didn't care that people were watching—the curious, the pitying, the calculating. Didn't care the soup was barely warm, or that the bowl had a chip in the rim. I finished it all and scraped the bottom with a spoon that had been sterilized so many times its edges had gone smooth.
For the first time in months, I wasn't hungry.
That night, they gave me a room.
Small. Four meters by four, barely enough to pace. But the mattress didn't smell of mold. The blanket didn't have bullet holes. The walls didn't shudder when the wind blew.
I removed my hat and set it on the floor beside the bed, brim-down, like putting a weapon to rest. Then I lay down, fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling.
I expected nightmares. I always expect nightmares.
Instead, I slept.
I'd woken before dawn, my body still tuned to the rhythms of evasion. I wandered into the central courtyard—a patch of packed earth and concrete where a single dead tree stood, its branches bleached white by sun and radiation. An old man was already there, sitting on a wooden bench beneath the skeletal canopy, like he'd been waiting for years and wasn't in any hurry.
White hair, cropped close. A face like a map of bad decisions. And a scar—a long, pale ridge running from his left temple to his jaw, like someone had tried to unzip his face.
I sat on the opposite end of the bench. Close enough to be sociable. Far enough to draw my knife if I needed to.
"You look like someone who doesn't trust easily," he said. Didn't look over.
I glanced at him. "You look like someone who talks too much."
He laughed—a dry, rattling sound, like gravel in a tin can. "Fair enough."
He extended a hand. Swollen knuckles. Skin mapped with burns and age.
"Elias."
I shook it. Firmer than I expected. "Kael."
"I know." He withdrew his hand, folded it back into his lap. "New people don't stay new for long around here. Gossip travels faster than the rats."
I studied him. Took me a moment to place what was strange about him. It wasn't hostility. Wasn't the feral, predatory alertness I'd grown used to in the wasteland. It was something subtler.
Tiredness.
The same exhausted weight behind the eyes that I saw in my own reflection, on the rare occasions I bothered to look.
"How long have you been here?" I asked.
He gazed up at the dead tree. "Long enough."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
I almost smiled. My face twitched, uncertain of the choreography after so long without practice.
Almost.
I didn't know then that it would be the last normal conversation I'd ever have.