Harry looks at her directly. His voice drops. "She gave her name as Ruth. She's okay."
Jenna makes a sound I've never heard from her. It's not words. It's not anything that needs to be.
Then she's running.
We watch her cross the compound at a dead sprint, every bit of composure she's built over the past ten days gone, just a seventeen-year-old girl who needs to see her mother. She hits the medical building door and disappears inside.
Avery doesn't say anything. I look at her and her eyes are bright.
"Give them a minute," she says. Not quite steady.
"Yeah."
We give them more than a minute. A daughter and mother being reunited need more than a minute. It’s a small miracle in this hellish world, and I don’t take it for granted.
Avery
Six Months Later...
Dutchisarguingwiththe radio.
"I don't care what the maps say. I've run that ridge. The east approach to Cedar Creek is compromised and anyone who tells you different hasn't been out there in the last month."
Cole's voice from North Ridge, patient as ever: "Flagging it for Travis's convoy."
"Flag it hard. He needs to know before he routes through."
"Flagged hard. Clearwater out?"
"Clearwater out."
He drops into the chair across from me and catches me watching. "What?"
"Nothing."
"Avery."
"I'm just thinking about how you described yourself as a quiet presence when you got here."
He considers this. "I've settled in."
"To loud."
"To comfortable. Different thing."
He's right. It is different. He knows every guard's name. He knows to bring coffee before morning council. He knows to leave me alone for the first ten minutes of my wall walk because I need to think, and he's always there when I come back.
He knows me. I'm still figuring out what to do with that.
Clearwater has grown to fifty-two people now.
More asking to join every month. Word travels through the network fast. People have started calling us the hub. Not just for supplies and radio relay, but for proof that something like this can be built and held.
Jenna runs the training program. Her idea. She took everything Old Hawk spent two years teaching her: observation, threat assessment, how to walk into a place that wants to kill you and look calm, and turned it into something that keeps people alive instead of getting them killed. She's patient and direct and she doesn't let anyone feel small for not knowing things yet.
Ruth tends the expanded garden. She's quieter than Jenna, still learning what a life of her own looks like. But there's color in her face now that wasn't there when the convoy brought her in. She and Jenna eat dinner together every night. Sometimes I walk past and hear them laughing.
I think about survival differently than I used to.
