Author's Preface
The heavy, rhythmic clack-clack of plastic blocks from the corner of the tent had long since stopped. As the morning crawled by, the initial shock of the evacuation center began to give way to a different kind of movement. The tent flaps whipped open and shut in a relentless cycle, letting in drafts of the biting, ash-choked air. It was a day of frantic, emotional noise. Families who had been separated in the rush at the pier were finding each other across the crowded hub, their loud, tearful reunions echoing off the canvas. Some were already being loaded onto outgoing transports bound for the north and west, while others simply sat on their cots, staring blankly at the paperwork in their hands.
For Sarah, the day was a suffocating mountain of logistics. Her fingers were stained black from carbon copy receipts, her eyes burning from the harsh neon glare as she logged names, matched separated minors with distant relatives, and signed off on rations. In the sheer, overwhelming volume of human misery passing through her station, she had almost forgotten about the two quiet figures sat in the far corner.
Amber and Claire had been extraordinarily still. They didn't fight over the colored pencils. They didn't run around like the other children. They just sat side by side on a low plastic crate, their oversized grey tracksuits making them look even smaller than they were, systematically filling a scrap pad of paper with jagged, dark shapes.
That was until the phone on Sarah's desk rang, and the sterile voice of a surgical nurse on the other end of the line brought the world crashing down. Jennifer Macfarlen had died on the operating table. The internal damage had simply been too extensive; her heart had stopped before they could even finish clamping the ruptured vessels. Sarah hung up the receiver, the plastic clicking into place with a sound that felt entirely too quiet for the gravity of what it meant. She sat frozen for a moment, her breath hitching in her throat as she looked across the crowded, bustling tent toward the corner. The weight of the promise she had made to a bleeding woman on a gurney pressed down on her chest like lead.
She stood up, her knees shaking slightly under her high-vis tabard, and walked over to the girls.
As her shadow fell across their drawing pad, Claire looked up. Her eyes were wide, glassy, and impossibly perceptive. She clutched her sling tightly against her ribs, her voice a tiny, fragile thread that cut straight through the surrounding noise of the camp.
"Where's Mummy?"
***
The silence that followed the girls' breakdown was heavier than the noise of the entire camp. They had cried until their voices were nothing but dry, clicking rasps, their small fingers bunching the fabric of Sarah's high-vis tabard as if it were a life raft in a rising sea. Sarah hadn't moved. She had sat on the edge of the narrow metal cot for most of the bleeding afternoon, rocking them, murmuring empty, rhythmic comforts that she knew couldn't fix a broken world.
She didn't know why she cared so much for these particular orphans. God knew the camp was full of them dozens of nameless, ghost-eyed children sitting on thin mattresses, waiting for families that had been swallowed by the Thames Estuary. But as she watched Claire's chest hitch in her sleep, her small arm still locked in that clean medical sling, Sarah felt a fierce, terrifying protectiveness bloom in her chest. Maybe it was the mother's blood still dried on the girls' wrists. Maybe it was the memory of Jennifer's final, frantic demand to look at me. Whatever it was, the paperwork on her desk could rot. For the first time in seventy-two hours, Sarah wasn't a cog in the military machine; she was just a woman keeping a promise.
The next morning, they trekked to Addenbrooke's hospital to collect their daily food rations. For Sarah and the girls, it was a death march. They moved through the biting, ash-choked air, passing crowds of people lined up along the hospital's concrete walkways. Everywhere they looked, they were met with the same thousand-yard stares hollow, unblinking eyes that served as a silent, crushing reminder of everything that had been lost to the water.
The hospital cafeteria, once a bright and bustling sanctuary for doctors and visiting families, had been stripped of its warmth. Colorful posters promoting public health still clung to the walls, looking like ancient relics beneath the harsh, flickering utility lights. The dining tables had been shoved aside to make room for metal crowd-control barriers, creating a narrow, winding chute that led to the serving counters.
The room was a pressure cooker of noise the clatter of heavy combat boots on the linoleum, the low, desperate murmurings of hundreds of displaced people, and the sharp, authoritative commands of the soldiers guarding the food vats. Sarah kept her arms wrapped firmly around the twins' shoulders, using her own body as a shield as the crowd jostled and shoved in the queue. Claire walked with her head down, her good hand gripping the hem of Sarah's fleece so tightly her knuckles were white, while Amber stared blankly ahead, her feet moving entirely on autopilot.
When they finally reached the counter, a kitchen worker in a grease-stained apron slapped three generic grey ration tins and two bottles of murky, purified water onto a plastic tray. The metal tins clattered against the plastic, a cold, institutional sound. Sarah looked down at the unappealing meal, then at the girls' pale, hollow cheeks. Steeling her jaw, she caught the eye of a catering supervisor she had coordinated with during the intake chaos the previous night. Sliding her staff ID across the stainless steel counter, she leaned in, her voice low but fierce.
"Please," Sarah whispered, cutting through the ambient roar of the cafeteria. "Just something for the kids. Anything."
The supervisor glanced past Sarah at the two small girls drowning in their oversized grey tracksuits, then back at Sarah's exhausted, pleading eyes. Without a word, he reached beneath the counter and slid a slightly crumpled box of shortbread biscuits and a small, red carton of apple juice onto the corner of the tray.
It was a pathetic, microscopic victory against the apocalypse, but as Sarah steered the girls toward a vacant corner of the room, holding the tray high above the crowding shoulders, she felt a sharp, protective spark ignite in her chest. She hadn't just collected rations; she was keeping them alive. They managed to find a small, formica-topped table near the emergency exit, away from the main thoroughfare of the queue. Sarah set the tray down and gently guided Claire into a plastic chair, mindful of her splinted shoulder, while Amber slid into the seat next to her sister without a sound.
"Here," Sarah said softly, popping the straw into the juice carton and sliding it between them.
"Drink some of this first, girls."
Neither of them reached for it. They just sat side-by-side, staring at the grey tins. The noise of the cafeteria swirled around them like a storm, but at their table, the silence was absolute. Sarah felt a lump form in her throat as she cracked open the box of shortbread, the sweet, buttery scent hitting the air and feeling entirely out of place in a room that smelled of sweat, damp wool, and falling ash.
"So do you two know your nana's name?" Sarah asked, her voice deliberately soft, trying to sound like she was just making casual breakfast conversation.
"Nana Eve lives in London," Claire said, finally reaching out to take a small sip of the apple juice through the plastic straw.
Shit, Sarah thought, a cold jolt of panic striking the back of her neck. London. If Nana Eve had been in the capital when the Thames Estuary buckled, there was no Nana Eve anymore. The reports coming out of the south sector were entirely non-existent; London was a black hole on the military maps.
Sarah swallowed the lump in her throat, keeping her face perfectly still so the girls wouldn't see the terror in her eyes. "Any others?"
"There's Nanny Elaine," Amber chimed in, speaking up for the first time all morning, though her voice was barely a whisper. "But she lives in Blackpool."
Sarah felt the breath rush back into her lungs, a sudden, blinding spike of hope cutting through the gloom of the cafeteria. *Blackpool.* Blackpool was in the northwest, completely clear of the eastern tsunamis and miles away from the initial impact zone. If Nanny Elaine was still there, the girls had a lifeline. She pulled the thick clipboard onto her lap beneath the table, shielding it from the twins' view, and quickly flipped past the intake forms until she found a blank page.
"Nanny Elaine," Sarah repeated, forcing a warm, encouraging smile onto her face. "That's a lovely name. Do either of you know her last name, or maybe what her house looks like?"
"No, Mummy just called her Mum," Amber answered, picking at the crust of a shortbread biscuit.
"Yeah, and she always came to us at our house," Claire added, her good hand resting on the table.
"Yeah, Daddy said she was something called a drinker," Amber said innocently, looking up with wide, glassy eyes. "Whatever that means."
The word hung in the air between them, heavy, ugly, and entirely misunderstood by the eight-year-old who had just spoken it. Sarah's smile froze. Her pen stopped mid-stroke above the paper. Across the table, the girls were completely oblivious to the massive, complicated red flag they had just raised. To a child, it was just a word Daddy used. To Sarah, a seasoned social worker, it was a code word for a completely different kind of disaster.
An alcoholic.
The fleeting surge of hope that Blackpool had given her instantly evaporated, replaced by a cold, familiar dread. Jennifer's desperate, dying words on the gurney echoed through her head: My mum lives in Blackpool, so they'll be safe with her. Had Jennifer been telling the truth, or had she just been a dying mother grasping at the only living relative she had left, regardless of how broken that relative was?
"A drinker," Sarah repeated softly, keeping her voice carefully neutral. She didn't want to scare them. "Did... did Nanny Elaine drink a lot of special grown-up drinks when she came to visit?"
"Daddy said she did," Claire nodded, leaning her uninjured shoulder back against the chair.
"He said that's why she fell asleep on the sofa before tea time. Mummy got cross with him for saying it."
"Yeah, Mummy said Nanny was just tired because she had to take the big train all the way from the seaside,"
Amber added, finally taking a small bite of the biscuit.
Sarah's chest tightened. It was a classic domestic blueprint. A mother trying to shield her children from her own parent's addiction; a father frustrated by the reality of it. If Nanny Elaine was an active alcoholic living alone on the other side of a broken country, sending two deeply traumatized orphans to her doorstep via a chaotic military transport system was a recipe for another tragedy but as Sarah looked at the blank space on her intake form under Next of Kin, she knew she didn't have the luxury of picking the perfect guardian. The military authorities were already talking about clearing out Sector Four by the end of the week. If she didn't find Nanny Elaine, these girls would be absorbed into the state system nameless casualties of the asteroid. She had to find her first. Then she would figure out if she was safe.
"Right," Sarah said, forcing her voice to sound bright and reassuring as she scribbled Elaine, Maternal Grandmother, Blackpool, onto her pad.
"The big train from the seaside. That's a very good clue, girls. You're being so helpful. Do you know what her last name was? Was it the same as yours, or did she have a different name?"
"Different," Claire said instantly, her brow furrowing as she tried to remember. "Mummy's old name. I saw it on a book once. It was... erm... Mac-something? No. It was like a boy's name."
"Anstruther," Amber said suddenly, the unusual word popping out of her mouth with surprising clarity.
"Mummy said it was a Scottish name."
Sarah's eyes widened. Elaine Anstruther. In a world where millions of people were currently missing, a unique surname like Anstruther was better than gold.
"Amber, you are a superstar," Sarah breathed, quickly writing it down before she could confuse the spelling. "Elaine Anstruther in Blackpool. That is exactly what I needed."
Before she could ask another question, the loud, mechanical chime of the cafeteria's public address system rang out, cutting through the low roar of the crowd.The mechanical chime of the public address system didn't just cut through the noise this time-it shattered it. The voice that came over the speakers wasn't the calm, bureaucratic flatline from before. It was breathless, tight, and sharp with panic.
"Attention all sector staff. Emergency. Emergency. All military personnel report to the gates immediately. All non-urgent personnel take refuge in the hospital building. Repeat, all non-urgent personnel take refuge inside the hospital."
The cafeteria froze for a fraction of a second, the collective breath of hundreds of people catching in their throats. Then, the murmuring began-a low, terrifying swell of voices that turned into a sudden, chaotic rush.
The double doors of the cafeteria burst open, and a wave of medical staff nurses, junior doctors, ward clerks-began filing in from the external tents, their faces pale under the flickering fluorescent lights. They were retreating from the compound, flooding into the concrete safety of the main building. The empty spaces between the formica tables filled up fast, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with terrified people. Sarah instinctively stepped in front of Amber and Claire, pushing them back against the emergency exit door, using her arms to keep the swarming crowd from crushing them.
"What's going on?" Sarah heard someone shout from the middle of the room, their voice cracking with anxiety.
"I don't know!" a nurse replied, her hands trembling as she pulled off her latex gloves.
Right next to Sarah, two young ward clerks shoved their way into the corner, their breathing ragged as they tried to look out the narrow glass window of the emergency door.
"I heard from a lieutenant that there's been an attack of sorts in the west refugee camps," one of them whispered frantically, her eyes wide as she gripped her colleague's arm.
The other clerk turned on her, her face a mask of disbelief and exhaustion. "Yeah, right, Tina. How did you?... you slut, did you sleep with him?"
Tina flushed, though her eyes remained glued to the window, watching the silhouettes of armed guards sprinting toward the outer perimeter. "What? He was cute. And he was terrified, okay? He said the perimeter in the west just went completely dark."
Sarah's stomach dropped. An attack? In the chaos of a broken country, with resources dwindling and the grid failing, the threat wasn't just the ash or the water anymore. It was people. And right now, she was trapped in a cafeteria with two orphans, completely cut off from the computer terminals that held their only ticket out of here.
Comments