My sister. Alive. Safe. Here.
“Lily?” I asked.
“Asleep already,” Lock said. “Didn’t make it past the bed. She curled up and dropped off in about thirty seconds. The kid’s resilient, but today took it out of her.”
Good.
They had made it. They were here. The boat, the crossing, all of it—they had done their part, and now they rested behind locked doors on solid ground, surrounded by people with guns.
That mattered.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, my eyes already drifting toward the hallway. “About everything. The mainland, the route, what I saw out there. All of it. But right now I just—”
“Libby’s in your room,” he said immediately, cutting me off before I had to finish the sentence. The way he said it—no hesitation, no questions—told me he already understood more than I’d told anyone.
My chest constricted.
“She hasn’t really slept,” he added, his voice dropping lower. “She tried. Callan’s girl sat with her for a while. I brought her food she didn’t touch, but she… couldn’t settle. Kept getting up. Kept going to the window. Kept staring at the water like she thought if she watched long enough—”
He stopped himself, pressing his lips together.
“She finally crashed, maybe an hour ago,” he said. “Exhaustion took her.”
Of course, she hadn’t slept. Of course she’d fought it. Of course she’d sat in my room and stared at the dark water and waited for something that she’d already been told would never come back.
I nodded once, not trusting my voice.
“Alright.”
Lock grabbed my shoulder before I could take a step, his grip firm, his eyes holding mine one more time.
“Glad you’re here, Finn,” he said. The simple words carried more weight than any long speech could have.
“Me too,” I replied, meaning it more profoundly than anything I’d ever said before.
Then I moved.
Down the hallway, past closed doors and quiet rooms, my muddy boots left prints on the wooden floor. I’d clean them tomorrow, or never; it didn’t matter. Every step drew me closer to her.
The door stood ajar.
I pushed it open slowly, letting the hinges creak.
Quiet.
The room was dim and still, lit only by the small bedside lamp someone—Lock, probably—had left burning on its lowest setting. The bed occupied its usual spot: the same worn wooden frame I’d built with my own hands the first year I bought this place, the same blankets I’d slept under hundreds of nights before the world ended and everything I’d taken for granted became precious.
And her.
Curled in the center of the mattress, knees drawn up, one hand tucked beneath her chin, the other resting on the pillow beside her face—my pillow. She had pulled the blankets tight around herself, wrapped in them as if she needed something to hold on to and the blankets were all she had.
Small.
So still.
Even in sleep, the tension hadn’t left her. I saw it in the faint crease between her brows, the slight curl of her fingers against the pillow, as if she’d fallen asleep mid-grip. Her hair spread across the white cotton in dark waves, still faintly stiff with salt from the crossing, and her face—
Her face bore the swollen, creased look of someone who had cried herself into unconsciousness—puffy eyelids, faintly blotched cheeks, mouth slightly open the way it gets when sleep arrives as collapse rather than rest.
