Chapter 14 Nicoles POV
888 Words
Rowan doesn’t leave when the plates start to empty.
Most people drift after dinner—check posts, rotate watch, grab sleep while they can. Lanterns burn lower, shadows stretching long across the warehouse floor.
I’m stacking my tin plate when he asks it.
“How old were you when it all started?”
I don’t look at him right away.
“Twelve,” I say.
He stills.
Not pity.
Just recalibration.
“Twelve,” he repeats quietly.
“Yes.”
That lands differently than seventeen.
Twelve isn’t almost grown.
Twelve is still supposed to be worried about homework and scraped knees.
“I was nineteen,” he says after a moment. “College sophomore. Complaining about exams.”
I almost smile. “Must’ve been nice.”
“It was loud,” he says. “Crowded. Complicated.”
“I barely remember loud,” I reply.
That’s the truth.
I remember school hallways. Lockers slamming. My dad picking me up early the first day rumors started spreading. I remember the first emergency broadcast cutting into cartoons.
I remember thinking adults would fix it.
They always fixed things.
At twelve, you still believe that.
“My dad didn’t sugarcoat it,” I say quietly. “First week, he put a pistol in my hands and said, ‘You hesitate, you die.’”
Rowan’s jaw tightens slightly.
“You were twelve,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Did you?”
“Hesitate?”
He nods.
“Once.”
Mrs. Kline from across the street. She used to give me peppermint candy when I walked past her porch. She was standing in our driveway, jaw hanging wrong, skin gray.
I froze.
I was still twelve.
Dad wasn’t.
Afterward, he made me practice until my hands stopped shaking.
“I didn’t hesitate again,” I finish.
Rowan doesn’t rush to fill the silence.
“You grew up fast,” he says.
“I stopped being a kid,” I correct.
There’s a difference.
Across the warehouse, one of the younger kids laughs when someone flicks water at him. He can’t be more than eight.
I look away first.
“You remember before clearly?” Rowan asks.
“Some of it.”
“What do you remember most?”
I think about it.
“Noise,” I say finally. “Music in the car. My dad arguing with GPS. Birthday candles. Dumb stuff.”
He nods slowly.
“Sometimes I think remembering makes it harder,” he admits. “Knowing what it was.”
“I’m glad I remember,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because then I know what we’re fighting for.”
That earns a different look from him.
Not assessment.
Respect.
“You were alone after your dad died?” he asks carefully.
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“Fifthteen.”
He exhales quietly.
“So you were on your own as long as you had him.”
“Yes.”
Seven years total.
Three with him.
Four drifting without.
No—five and change alone.
Time blurs.
“You ever get angry?” he asks.
“All the time.”
“At him?”
“No.”
At the world. At the randomness. At the fact I had to grow up with a weapon instead of a future.
But I don’t say all that.
“I got efficient,” I say instead.
He studies my face.
“Twelve,” he repeats softly, almost to himself. “That’s a lot.”
“It doesn’t matter how old you are when it ends,” I reply. “It ends.”
He doesn’t argue.
“Do you ever think about who you would’ve been?” he asks.
Before.
I shake my head.
“That girl doesn’t exist.”
He leans back against the beam.
“I don’t think that’s true.”
I glance at him.
“You still watch the kids,” he says. “You always position yourself between them and the exits. That’s not death. That’s protection.”
I don’t respond.
Because he’s not entirely wrong.
Twelve-year-old me would’ve been scared of the dark.
Now I move through it without sound.
“You don’t have to keep carrying it alone,” he says quietly.
There it is again.
Not pressure.
Just steady presence.
I look at him fully.
He’s twenty-six.
Built for leadership because he had to be, not because he wanted to be.
He grew into adulthood during collapse.
I was thrown into it before I even understood what adulthood was.
Outside, another distant howl rises.
Layered.
Closer.
Preparing.
I rest my hand on the hilt of my katana.
“Twelve,” he says again, softer this time. “You deserved better.”
Maybe.
But deserved doesn’t mean anything anymore.
“Let’s survive tomorrow,” I tell him. “Then we can talk about what I deserved.”
His gaze holds steady.
“Deal.”
Across the room, the singing starts again—low, defiant.
I listen to it differently now.
Twelve when it started.
Nineteen now.
More years shaped by the end of the world than by the one before it.
Tomorrow we hunt something evolving in the dark.
And if I live through it—
Maybe I’ll decide whether that twelve-year-old girl is really gone.
Or just buried under everything I had to become.
- Writer
