It wasn’t good; it wasn’t safe, but it was all we had.
Finn and I would go.
The plan had come together earlier over cold coffee and a map spread across the kitchen table. I’d told him about the tunnels—a network carved out more than a hundred years ago, running beneath the city in long-forgotten corridors that most people had simply stopped thinking about. Finn had leaned forward, arms crossed, and asked how I knew. My father, an archaeologist, used to take me down into them on weekends when I was young. We’d trace old brickwork for hours, following passages that branched and opened into chambers no map had ever recorded. I still knew them the way you know a place you loved as a child—not by thinking but by moving, your hands and feet remembering what your mind has long since let go. I remembered which routes flooded, which walls had collapsed, and which passages remained open. I thought that if we could reach the eastern access point, a few hundred feet from thehouse through the alley, we could move beneath the city without ever surfacing into whatever was waiting above.
Fiona and Lily would stay.
There wasn’t much argument. Lily opened her mouth once, and I looked at her until she closed it again. The world outside had changed overnight into a hellscape I didn’t have a name for yet, and I wasn’t going to let her walk out into it.
Finn hadn’t even entertained the idea of Fiona coming.
“No,” he’d said, his tone flat and final. “Not happening.”
Fiona started to push back, of course.
“I’m not just sitting here while—”
“You are.” He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t need to. He merely looked at her—a look he must have used in the field, one that meant the decision had already been made, and the only thing left was whether she was going to make this harder. He looked away from her for a moment, somewhere past her shoulder. “I need to know you’re somewhere secure.” A beat. “That’s how this works.”
“This isn’t the military, Finn.”
“No,” he held her gaze. “It’s worse.”
That stopped her.
Now we stood in the dim study. I picked up Finn’s backpack from the desk and held it out to him without a word. I pulled on my own, working the left strap twice before it sat right, my fingers clumsy with anxiety.
Finn checked his weapon one final time and looked at Fiona.
“Hey.”
She looked up, her eyes already glassy, the light catching the thin film of tears she hadn’t let fall yet.
He stepped closer, lowering his voice enough that Lily wouldn’t catch everything. I should have moved to the other side of the room, but I stayed where I was, a few feet away with myback half-turned, fingers working at the strap of my pack, not adjusting anything.
“If we don’t come back—”
“Don’t.” She shook her head, a barely-there whisper, her hand lifting as if to physically push the words away.
“Fiona.” His voice was firmer now, yet quieter, making it harder to process. “You need to hear this.”
Tears spilled before she could stop them, tracing fast, silent paths down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them, only nodded, her lips a thin line, her eyes locked on his.
Finn took a breath, and I watched his jaw clench.
“You wait as long as you can, as long as it stays safe. You ration the food. Keep the house quiet.”
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, a quick, almost angry gesture, a muscle jumping along her jaw. Her eyes remained on his, fixed as if releasing his gaze would finalize something that wasn’t final yet.
“And then?” Her voice cracked on the second word.
“You take Lily and you leave.”
Nobody moved. Lily had gone still beside me, and I became aware of my own breathing, too loud, too present. Somewhere in the walls, a pipe knocked once, then fell silent.
“Find a car,” he continued, his voice low and steady, each instruction given with the weight of what he rehearsed a dozen times in his mind before he’d spoken it aloud. “Any car. Don’t worry about the keys. You remember how Dad taught us to hotwire?”
Fiona let out a shaky breath. Trepidation flickered across her face—there and gone. She nodded.
