Vienna, European federation, January 2035

Catherine Andrews offers to buy the next round. Her South Carolina drawl stands out against the local backdrop, as does the Corona beer she orders.

“It wasn’t the kids who gave us the biggest headaches,” she says, her voice cutting through the bar’s chatter. “Honestly, it was the parents—Germans, Poles, people from all over—showing up desperate to find their children. They came knocking on our doors, and that’s what caused us the most trouble. Hell, they even had to station an Austrian platoon next to us, just to keep order. Those guys acted like bouncers while they were supposed to be resting before their next fight. They were the reserves, fresh off a month straight of combat.”

“Who decided to put your orphanage there?” I ask, the taste of the corona lingering on my tongue.

“Child shelter,” she corrects me. “We didn’t use the word orphanage. They put us in a warehouse. Locals donated mattresses, the army gave us camp beds. Actually, not the military itself—just the Austrian grunts. They had this tradition: if one of their own died, they’d donate their camp beds. Along with the standard UNICEF supplies, we had piles of donated clothes and toys.”

"What about food?" I ask.

"For a while? Nothing. The logistics chain was backed up all the way to Cairo. Food shipments came sporadically—when they came at all. We relied on the military to share their rations. The roads were a nightmare—millions of troops inching north, refugees flooding south. You couldn’t send a Christmas card in November and expect it to arrive before Easter.

It got so bad that we sent volunteers door to door, asking for anything people could spare. But we weren’t the only ones struggling. Millions were displaced. Industry and agriculture were at a standstill. Even areas untouched by the war saw people fleeing, afraid of how far it would spread. Families sat around their kitchen tables whispering, ‘Let’s leave before everyone else does, get a head start.’

Every rare phone call I had with my parents, they begged me to come home."

"How did you get there?" I ask.

"I had applied to volunteer with UNICEF a few months before it all started. I was studying international relations at Berkeley. When the war escalated, I was pushed into service. They needed everyone. I was on a plane to Munich before I had time to process it.

We barely made it into Austria before the surge arrived. The nukes had stopped them in the north, but the ones in the south? They were desperate—trying to make it somewhere warm before winter set in. They landed in October, and by December, 150 million were displaced. That’s not even counting the 20 million civilians who died. The fallout alone killed hundreds of thousands.

People downplayed it, but there’s a reason nuclear strikes weren’t used as freely later on. At the start of the war, they dropped them by the hundreds. That stopped when they realized the cost."

She exhales, the weight of it still heavy even now.

"But there I was, caring for twenty kids on my own. We all were. Ten of us, each responsible for twenty children. It broke my heart when desperate parents came looking, hoping to see their child’s name on our lists. When they didn’t, some lost control. I understood why."

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"How did you reunite kids with their parents?"

"Every legitimate group had a database. We recorded names, physical descriptions, any family details we could find. It was called Family Tracing & Reunification—FTR. Some organizations had facial recognition and biometric systems, but we barely had stable electricity, so everything was manual.

Refugee processing sites helped. If we registered a child in Vienna, someone in Frankfurt or Zagreb could check the records and find them. But for the youngest ones, the ones who couldn’t even count to five? All we had were guesses—an estimated age, a rough idea of where they came from. It was a miracle any of them were ever found."

I pause, then ask what we both know is a tense subject.

"What about the incident in Romania?"

She sighs, rubbing her temple.

"The gypsies?" she says. "When hundreds of thousands of children went missing, some people fell back on old superstitions. The stories about Romani stealing kids—those ugly myths our grandmothers used to whisper. And people believed them.

Two hundred dead across the plateau. Entire camps burned to the ground by mobs desperate for someone to blame.

But desperate isn’t the right word. You don’t wake up one morning, desperate, and decide to burn someone’s home down. That takes hate. Fear. And an excuse."

A long silence follows.

"What did you do to entertain the kids?" I ask, shifting the conversation.

"School continued. Basic algebra, spelling—anything to create a sense of normalcy. But we were in a temporary shelter, constantly waiting for trucks, waiting for orders to move south. Kids were reunited. More arrived. It never stopped.

We couldn’t wait to leave. Vienna was split in half. The big canal, the Danube—it divided the city. The mountains to the north kept us safe, but across the river, the fighting never stopped. Even on the quiet days, they lost hundreds.

We heard it all. Every artillery strike. Every air raid. The kids would cry. They had lost everything—their homes, their families. Now, they were surrounded by strangers, sleeping in cold basements on makeshift beds.

No amount of apple compote, second-hand teddy bears, or singalongs could fix that."

One evening, after putting all the kids to bed, I sat outside drinking with the others. We drank a lot. Especially with the soldiers. Some of my colleagues got too friendly with the infantry guys—more often than I’d like to admit. But I guess we all felt like we were living through the last days.

The soldiers were being sent to the meat grinder—the farm country between Vienna and Bratislava. And we? We were overworked, too exhausted to sleep, too numb to care.

A sergeant, half a bottle deep, asked me if I wanted to see something cool.

We climbed to the roof, setting up two camping chairs. The whole time, he kept checking his watch and a folded-up map, barely speaking. Then, at just the right moment, he signaled for me to look.

There was a hill in the distance—just a dirt mound, maybe 200 meters tall. We stared at it for what felt like forever.

Then, I heard it.

Something flew over us, too low to be a regular bomber. A second later, a cloud appeared above the hill—sudden, unnatural. It must have been 300 meters wide. And in an instant, the entire thing lit up.

The hill vanished.

The shockwave hit us seconds later. The sergeant just nodded, eyes fixed on the fireball swallowing the night sky.

"Vacuum bomb," he muttered.

“Then, as the explosion faded, the guys below—and what felt like everyone in the city—erupted into song. The sergeant told me it was their national anthem. It wasn’t “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but still, it was strange to hear, especially as the entire frontline and the areas behind it were erupting in explosions.

Particularly the crab refueling sites. Those crabs—strange, terrifying machines—had somehow bypassed millions of years of natural processes to turn trees and biomass into combustible fuel.

And when those things went up, the light was blinding. You'd feel it in your eyes, like staring at a lightbulb for too long. And as you watched that hellfire, you couldn’t help but wonder—how the hell were we losing that war?

We talked for a while, the sergeant and I, about our lives before all of this. He had a lot of questions about my state, about how I was holding up. Then he told me they were leaving tomorrow, making a push to recapture the northern part of Vienna. Something about his commanders wanting breathing room, a safe place for reinforcements to cross north of the Danube in case a counterattack was launched.

"They left?" I ask.

"Yeah," she says. "They were replaced by another unit. They’d just come back from the front, and by the way they looked, it didn’t exactly stir up any patriotic fervor in the guys who were about to head out. But they climbed into their vehicles and made the short journey north. I saw the sergeant from a distance. The kids had drawn pictures for them to take with them. Of course, they smiled and tucked the drawings away. But there was something else in their eyes—something a four-year-old's crayon scribbles couldn't ignite. They looked like they were heading straight into hell. And they knew it."

She pauses, her eyes lost in the memory for a moment.

"They must have some stories to tell." I say, trying to shift the conversation.

"Why don’t you ask him?" She replies, her voice casual but knowing.

"Who?" I ask.

"The sergeant. Marius. He’s been playing pool since you arrived. We’ve been together for years now."