It was the first time Aisha Lexington experienced unbearable pain. Raw. So overwhelming that tears streamed down her cheeks, and she’d do anything to stop the agony, even risk that which she loved most. The young woman had waited loyally for a brother who would not return, a fraternal promise that would not be fulfilled. For a father who pretended everything was all right, that nothing had changed since the day the pandemic struck, since her brother vanished out of hatred for his own blood, out of sheer rebelliousness and a desire to cause mayhem. For a mother she could only talk to atop the Heavens.

But she would wait no longer.

Aisha Lexington didn’t know why sorrow had slashed her soul when she did not see her brother return, but not when her mother gave her last breath. She didn’t know why grief had seared her heart when she heard her father crying in secret once he realized his son would not return, when she overheard her father and her brother arguing to the point of fist fights, but not when she was told she only had a month to live and would soon join her mother.

She didn’t know when her home had turned into a three-story gothic mausoleum cocooned by the hills and mountains of North America’s Pacific Coast, where Renaissance and Enlightenment paintings hanging from ivory marble walls gave way to achroite hallways, oak staircases, and a multitude of rooms from which no more laughter sprung forth. No more joy or warmth. Only the cold sound of whispering chandeliers and people exchanging pleasantries at dinner. A museum of acquaintances instead of a home with a family.

She didn’t know when her manor’s fruitful gardens had begun to wilt, to serve solely as a reminder of an age that would soon end. Or depending on the perspective of those who believed in the Chairman’s vision of progress, an age that was just beginning, reborn from the ashes of the past. But to the young woman, the withering meadows that sheltered her were nothing but the stench of all the rotten things in the world she thought was perfect, in the world she thought would never hurt her, of the brother she thought would never make her suffer.

All the young woman knew was that her father and brother had been lying to her, trying to protect her, to take care of her, to be her rock, to be strong for her, and that she’d have to break her father’s heart to mend her own. That was what made her waver. That was what made her hesitate.

The young woman had tried talking to her father, assisting him as she did in the family business, where her keen business acumen had increased the company’s profit margin by fifteen percent. She had managed to increase the money earmarked for social responsibility—to help those less fortunate than them—but all she got was a reply that she shouldn’t worry. That he’d take care of everything.

But that only meant yelling at the Lezavres, saying that they were Lexingtons, and that this type of thing shouldn’t happen to them. It only meant more sleepless nights of tears, where the soft Pacific breeze wafting against her home’s clerestory windows was the sole respite of peace in a mire of agony and distress.

But the young woman wouldn’t let her father needlessly suffer. She would not let herself needlessly suffer. She knew her plan was outrageous, folly even, and perfectly understood why her father didn’t think it would succeed. She doubted at times, but all other avenues had failed. All conventional plans had failed. All interventions had. So now, only foolishness remained.

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Perhaps to find her brother, she’d have to stop acting like her father and act more like her brother. Reckless. Emotional. Without a care for her own safety. Without the slightest sense of how things were supposed to be done. She had always found that sort of thing endearing in her brother, and sometimes she thought of molding her personality to be more like him, but now that he had hurt her, failed to keep his promise of returning after a week in VirtuaNet, she wasn’t so sure if his way was the right one.

A part of her wanted to believe her brother had not done that to her. A part of her wanted to believe that something had happened to him. That he was hurt somewhere. Kidnapped. Dead. And she didn’t know which was worse. That the brother who understood her fully and could decipher what she’d do before she even made a sound had hurt her. Or that the only person who treated her as herself, instead of just the daughter of Lexington Bank & Trust’s founder and CEO, was lying somewhere as vermin food, forgotten by all but his father and sister. It was a fate that clawed at her soul, because the same thing had happened to an acquaintance of hers due to a drug overdose.

The young woman knew what she had to do, even if it meant sneaking away without her father knowing. Even if it was the first time she’d disobey him. But he had taught her well. He had taught her to stand up for herself, to fight for what she believed in, even if it gashed her heart into myriad pieces. She was not a little girl anymore, but a young woman. Capable. Strong. An Achroite, the best of humanity, at least according to the government’s propaganda, but she didn’t think herself better than others.

So, leaving a tear-soaked note in her father’s studio, telling him where she was going and what she was planning to do, the young woman skulked away, past the servants in a house whose every nook and cranny she had memorized. Once at the heliport, she ordered the pilot to take her to Wessex, the capital of the United States of the North, or USN, the newly formed nation east of her own. She lived in the Jointly Administered Territories of the Pacific, where the laws were more flexible than in the USN, where the USN’s ideology had not fully taken hold yet, but where it’d soon be adopted. Soon everyone would believe the same things, behave in the same way.

An ideological cleansing of our own making. Because we were too distracted to notice.

The young woman didn’t know if that was for the better or worse, though, as she had never ventured abroad. For the first time, she would dare to go into the lands she’d only known through holographic screens and books. For the first time, she’d brave the heavily shelled cities of the Eastern seaboard, go to the capital by the Atlantic, to the Capital of Rebirth, where the Chairman of the nation had declared a new world arisen, a future that was now.

When the pilot started the plane, she hesitated for a second and almost told him to stop, that she wanted to get out. What her father had told her pounded through her mind. That for all its importance and haughty title, for all the appeal the government tried to bestow upon it, the capital city Wessex was nothing but a repository of crime-prone refugees from the Unification. People who, no matter what, the Chairman would not have been able to civilize. People of a nascent terrorist movement who would kidnap her for ransom and soon cause a civil war in the political powder keg that was the capital. That no one in their right mind would visit that wretched city unless they absolutely had to.

As the jet took off, the young woman gazed upon the ash that Yellowstone had brought upon the land. The radiated rivers that made up the free lands of the Rim and the poisonous smoke rising from the country’s many Eugenex generators. She took a deep breath and projected a hologram through her smartwatch. She looked one last time at the hologram of the young man who she thought … who she knew would help her find her brother. At the bridger who was her last hope. Her family’s last hope.

The world’s last hope.

Cael Cavanaugh.