You began walking nondescriptly, but without proper orientation of where you were. The sky was cloudy, like so many other days, and it was almost impossible see the orientation of the sun. Either way, it was impossible to check which direction you were going by the sun, as it was nearly dead overhead by any crude estimation that you had. You thought you could smell the faint waft of sea air to your left, but you were unsure which direction that actually meant. Damn living on an island—the passage of space and time got so distorted after the Fallout. Besides, even that may have been imagined. The rubble had such a permeating, nauseating stench of death that your nose would often catch onto any other smell just for relief.

You slinked past the rusty car, carefully, though bravely, moving into the road to get a better view of where you were. The streets still offered you the best vantage point for where you wanted to go, but the reality was that they were rarely safe. Even though the fog and upturned concrete meant that the line of sight along the roads was interrupted every few hundred feet, they were still the most vulnerable open spots on the horizon. Who knew what lurked just beyond your sight, ready to pounce on you when you were least expecting it.

You missed your teammates—your family—the most during this time. Zephyriah would probably have known what to do. She always seemed to know what to do—the girl, as far as you knew, was next to unflappable, she seemed to have all the answers. Felix would probably have interjected with some wisecrack: an offensive one, but one that managed to make you smile. Adrian probably would have already taken charge of the situation, reassuring everyone that it would all work out. Even Ella and Lily would have managed to keep everything in perspective, to remind you that there were still things in this world that were worth trying to protect.

But none of them was here now. You were completely alone.

The sense of panic grew as you realized that you were lost. The rubble around you looked quaint, different from before, but still hardly anything that you could orientate. You edged away from the center of the road. Probably a wise decision. Still, you could not afford to creep too far from the streets, as that was a great way to get lost, or to find that the rubble and ruin formed an impossible roadblock. You knew this; from all the years that you spent growing up in Central Park, from all the experiences you had with the friends that you had come to cling to with all your heart, you knew what to do when you needed to navigate the Manhattan ruins—

Point yourself in a direction and walk until you found a landmark. The strategy felt so juvenile; so silly, now that you had to use it. But you knew that it was the only viable option. You simply couldn’t stand there and hope someone found you, especially if most of the things that could find you were not things you wanted to encounter.

After you scaled the rotting log, you continued down the street, on what you felt was the remains of a sidewalk, though this particular area of the road was too grungy, too obliterated for you to tell for sure. You came across what looked to be your first big obstacle. In the middle of the street, a burst pipe must have caused a crater that spanned the entire intersection. The rubble on the sides of this crater made it nearly impossible to climb over. You either had to backtrack or traverse through the basin. Neither option felt particularly safe, but both felt better than remaining where you stood.