A new routine emerged over the next several days. Gu Cheng and the guardian spent most of the morning and afternoon in the back, going through intense training that left the statuesque man exhausted.

Zaria spent her time getting to know the others better now that the language barrier was down. Ito-kun caught her playing on her phone in the sitting area one day. He watched as she tried out a fantasy game that she and Gu Cheng had not gotten to yet. When frustrated about the controls and moving her new character, he shyly helped her figure things out. It turned out that Ito-kun was a secret game lover.

At school, everyone knew him as the star player on the baseball and basketball teams. He was tough and rough and loud, and he was always worried that someone would find out that secretly he was a manga and computer game fanatic. Zaria made sure not to smile when he admitted it so seriously, fervently looking around to make sure nobody else would hear. She promised not to tell anyone, and let him borrow her phone to play the new game when nobody else was around, while she sat nearby and read one of the books from the library that she was not able to understand before.

With the softening in intensity of the lead boy, the other two began to come out of their shells a little more. Yamashita-kun and Yamada-kun discovered that they both shared a passion for football, or soccer as Zaria still called it. Sometimes, the two could be found during lunch breaks arguing over favorite teams, none of which had names that Zaria recognized. At least when texting Grandpa back in City C, who was a big fan of silly romance dramas it turned out, she could speak of some of them since she had time to watch some of the shows during her down time. By the time she arrived in this world, there was no more television, no way to catch up to things that were popular or at least well known.

After dinner, when everyone went their own way, Zaria would lead the tired Gu Cheng up the stairs to their bedroom and let him lay his head on her lap while she read to him from an Italian action spy novel. He did not speak of the training, but she could tell that he was learning a lot from it.

He had become more contemplative while interacting with others. To them, she was sure that he looked as he always did. Face smooth and stern, eyes laser focused on the person he was speaking to. When he was tired or frustrated, though, she could see that he didn't tense up as much as he had been, and there was no frigid air leaking out anymore. If he wanted to talk about it, he would, she knew, so she did not pressure him to share. Instead, she smoothed his growing hair down where it stuck up in areas and told him the tale of Giacomo, the suave spy who was actually a double agent.

When a week passed, the guardian once again had the appearance of a full-grown man and was ready to leave. As a final kindness, he used his magic to sanitize their most valued possessions and coat both them and the bags they went into with magic so that the virus would not stick to them, allowing each of them to bring a few more items into their new world. Each person had to submit their bags for inspection to Gu Cheng, and if they tried to sneak anything extra with them, their entire bag would be forfeit. Nobody was very concerned about it. None of them had much of their own to begin with.

After the guardian left, the red wall of magic slowly began to fade. The pendant was still white when it went down completely. The fear for survival reared it's head once more, and they resumed their gate guarding. With no idea how long they had until it was time to leave, Gu Cheng and the gatherers began to plan a few more trips to stores they marked on their last trip out. Nobody wanted to leave Sensei in a bind, with not enough food to last him for long. On a particularly cold morning, the two boys and their stern faced guardian layered on as many tops as they could while still being able to move easily enough to defend their selves, and headed out into the city.

During the days preceding the trip, Zaria had cleared out enough of the dead in the area by taunting them toward the gate. The street was once again clear enough to offer some peace of mind while setting out. It did not offer Zaria the same peace, though. She spent the entire time they were gone worrying in a way she had not been forced to do for some time. When they came back with bags full of goods, she closed the gate carefully behind them and then threw herself into Gu Cheng's arms. By the deep sigh that he let out as his arms wrapped around her as well, she could tell that he had been concerned out there as well.

"There were fewer dead in the streets than the last time we went out," he said in a low voice as they stood near the chairs facing the gate. The other boys had gone back inside, taking his gathering bag with them already. "It could be the cold, I can't say for certain. I don't know how the weather will affect their movement."

"Mmm," Zaria mused, holding onto his arm and leaning her head against it. "If they don't feel pain or cold and have no survival instincts, it would almost seem like they would just keep going no matter how cold it got."

"That's what I was thinking. But the other option is that the tyrannosaur has expanded its territory due to lack of food. With all the other areas it could go to near it's former routes, many of which were through much more densely populated areas as I have learned from the boys, then it likely chose this direction because of us. It knows we run this way. It just doesn't know exactly where."

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Zaria swore under her breath. "Have you put up the cameras that Yamashita needed? I remember him saying yesterday that there were just a few more to complete the new circuit he wanted."

"I think that we did," he said, taking her cold fingers and rubbing them between his hands. "I tried to make sure I was careful attaching them, but something felt wrong, and I was most concerned about getting the others back safely."

"Wrong because of the dinosaur? Were there any signs that it had been through other than the decrease in walking bodies?"

"I don't know." Warm air wrapped around her fingers as he brought them to his lips and blew on them. "It's too cold. You can't stay out here like this."

Zaria chuckled quietly, pulling her hand away and sticking it into her pants pocket. "See? All better!"Her smile was genuine as she watched his eyebrow twitch, the Gu Cheng equivalent of an eye roll. "I'm used to colder than this, but I probably would have had fingerless mittens on if I was back home. Or back in the world I came from. It's not like we can get to a store to go clothes shopping for everyone. It is not worth the danger for the gatherers to go out and shop for clothes, is it?"

"Probably not. But we can keep our eyes out for things that might work in the grocery store tomorrow. Oven mitts, perhaps."

At dinner that night, they all spoke about what they could do to keep warm when it was colder outside. Nobody knew how to sew other than to fix a hole in a shirt or something simple like that. Anything covering the ears was vetoed since it would affect the hearing. Mitts made out of towels cut into a front and back shape and then glued together was shot down because they would not be able to keep a firm grip on their weapons. They went back and forth, ideas suggested, and then pulled back because of some reason or another. By the end, the best they could come up with was checking out a store next to the grocer that might have gardening gloves, with no slip grips on the fingers.

The next morning, Zaria found herself pacing back and forth across the length of the wall. She made sure to stay a full broom handle length away from the gate as she passed each time, but the urge would not go away to step out and look around. Gu Cheng's concerns about something not being right had infected her brain. Going out and looking around wouldn't fix anything or even give her information that would be worth it. That didn't stop her body from itching to do something, anything, that would help out more than just standing in a walled off yard. At one point, she drug a chair across to a section of wall far from the gate and stood up on it on her tippy toes, peeking over the top of the smooth stone.

Across the street and three buildings down, she could see a clump of the dead weaving below the brightly colored awning of a little restaurant. There was nothing left inside that building. It was one of the first cleared out by the people of the house after they started scavenging farther out. A cold wind pushed into Zaria's ear, and she clamped her hand over it to stop the ache. From the awning, the sound of fluttering vinyl drove the zombies into a frenzy. It might have been happening all day, or every day, for that matter. The proximity to the wall could have been blocking the sound.

The wind lessened, and the sound stopped. The four bodies below the awning calmed, standing still on the pavement until another sound would draw their attention. With no reason not to, since none of the zombies were taller than the wall and able to bite her over it, she stayed that way for a while. Eventually her feet grew tired of balancing on the cushion, unsteady enough on the soft surface but more so because the feet of the chair were pressed into the grass and dirt of the front yard and not a solid surface like the walkway.

Zaria hopped down, leaving the chair there just in case she decided to look again. She was just returning to the remaining chair to have a seat when a sound she had never heard before echoed through the streets. Even though she had not heard it before, she was still able to guess what it was. Enough movies and television shows had featured dinosaurs that she could safely hypothesize that she was hearing the roar of the huge creature she saw that first day in this world. Her heart stopped for just a second. There was no way to tell how far away it was, or even from what direction it was coming. The empty streets and stone buildings bounced the sound around too much. Another sound came just a few minutes later, a sound she did know. Footsteps, several pairs, running up the street.

Zaria hovered close enough to get to the gate but not close enough for anyone to reach her through it. When Gu Cheng's face appeared at the bars, she darted forward, unlocking the gate and swinging it open. As soon as the last of them passed through, she slammed it shut before the first of the dead arrived. She did not ask them why they were making so much noise and attracting the corpses that milled along the street.

A low vibration could be felt through the soles of her new sneakers, inherited from Adashi-chan after her passing. They were offered to her, and she accepted, acknowledging that it would be better to have something of sounder quality than the maid's shoes. She was lucky they had been near the same shoe size. Now she looked down at the ground and the white sneakers with a navy blue stripe running diagonally up the sides.

The three males raced past her, and Gu Cheng grabbed her arm to pull her up the walkway. Another vibration came stronger than the last, and Zaria turned and ran. By the time she burst through the door, leaving the chairs behind and pointing her sharp wooden stick to the ground, the earth was shaking below her. The door was shut, and they all stood in the front hall, looking at each other with wide open, terrified eyes. Zaria was the first to move, not speaking as she pushed past the others and walked into the front sitting room, where Yamashita was already kneeling on a couch and looking out the front window. She climbed up next to him and stuck her eyes up to a gap in the wooden blinds.

Outside, down the front walkway that was once bordered by what she could only image had been beautiful and well tended flowers, and through the black iron barred gate leading out to the sidewalk and the street beyond, stood a living, breathing dinosaur. Its densely muscled neck was lowered, small arms scraping along the top of the cold grey stone wall. It's head was turned toward them, and Zaria wondered if it was listening for them. She did not wonder for long. A powerful leg stepped over the wall, followed by another, foot crushing the chair still sitting in the middle of the walkway. With exorbitant patience, it walked toward the house.