Chapter 1: Just Another Day

The first rays of sunlight gently touch my face as they filter through the gaps in the tarp that functions as the roof of my tent. I push the worn blanket off of me, letting out an enormous yawn as I do so. My hand instinctively reaches for the corner of the makeshift bed, where my mother’s shawl lies folded. Even though the fabric is tattered and discolored, it is one of her few remaining possessions, making it invaluable to me. As I pick it up, my heart tightens at the sight of the old blood spots, dull but unmistakable.

Tears sting my eyes as I whisper to myself, “Why did you and Pop leave me? No, that’s a lie. Your deaths are on me and my damned mouth that never knew when to shut up... You didn’t deserve to be shot over a few cans of food. But I’ve learned: The world is now full of monsters in human skin.”

My rant and tears continue for a good while. It’s become a routine—a grim part of my morning ritual, a moment of grief before facing the day ahead. Not something I’m proud of, but it helps me cope. It’s far better than turning to other alternatives that people here have found.

I take a deep breath and wet the shawl in a small bowl of water beside my bed. I grimace as it soaks up more than half of my water ration for the day, but I can’t go without it. Not when the air is so filled with smoke from the fires that never really stop; broken electronics burn down buildings with no one really trying to stop them; people burn whatever they can find to stay warm or cook, making the air heavy with ash and despair.

Wrapping the shawl around my nose and mouth, I push aside the tarp that functions as a door and step out into the camp, where the chaotic sounds of survival greet me. The mix of people up at this hour makes for an interesting combination. Some hurry about, talking in hushed tones, preparing for the day ahead. These are people who are actively trying to carve out a place in this world with the hand they’ve been dealt, earning my respect.

The other types, I wish never came here or that the camp had denied them entry. We thought they would allow us to help more people, but instead they became a drain on our resources, forcing us to turn away an ever-increasing number of hopefuls at the gate as the bar for entry rises.

Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to be removed because of the politics involved in running a camp for over 10,000 refugees.

But I’m digressing; the second type are those who are so despondent, lost in the horrors of their own minds, that even time has lost meaning for them. Then there are the ones who are high on whatever substance they’ve managed to get, wasting away, or those who only care to gain as much happiness and satisfaction as possible in the little time we probably have left.

I may dislike the addicts, but the happiness chasers are the ones I hate. Watching them act smitten and making out whenever they get the chance grinds my nerves, probably because I know the numbers. They are fewer than half the number of the other two non-working types but consume over three times as many resources. Equaling the working type.

There are a couple more types, but those are the people I go out of my way to avoid.

Yet despite this, I can’t help but feel a bit of kinship, however little, for everyone is on edge, either from hunger, thirst, or sheer exhaustion. “But seriously, can’t they at least take a quick cleaning in the ion showers? It takes less than a minute, and I wouldn’t have to hold my stomach in every time I walk anywhere,” I murmur to myself as a particularly bad-smelling breeze blows by, cutting through even my shawl.

Hygiene isn’t a joke; our immune systems are already weak, and on top of that, you want to live like pigs. Just because the world ended doesn’t mean there’s no excuse not to have basic personal hygiene. Hell, half the patients in the medical tent wouldn’t be there if they exercised basic hygiene.

My rant ends as I finally reach the ion showers and step inside, letting out a moan of satisfaction as the shower strips most of the ash, dust, and smells, softening the blood spots on the shawl a bit more. Stepping back out into the camp, reality disappoints me by not changing into something better in the brief moment I wasn’t looking. This place used to be a national park, a vast green space in the center of Nova, offering a brief respite from the bustle of city life. Now, it’s a sprawling refugee camp, packed with tents, makeshift shelters, and the occasional lean-to. The once-lush trees are now skeletal reminders of a world that no longer exists, their leaves long gone, their bark blackened, and slowly dying from the radiation they’ve received.

My walk takes me past various pieces of conversation, and I strain my ears to overhear them. It makes me feel dirty, but those conversations are a lifeline to me, being one of the few sources of news available to me.

***

“I swear, Svetlana, if I catch Asher and that witch Elara behind another tree again, I’m going to scream. Yesterday, she was crying about losing her husband, and today she’s...”

“Can’t take this place anymore, mon. If t’ings get any worse, I swear, I’m takin’ what little I have left and joinin’ up with one of those rich folk’s colonies. Heard they’ve got clean air in the towers from the searching parties.”

“Y’all heard the latest? Luna and Mars are startin’ relief operations in the big cities. But Nova? Not a chance. We’re too small to matter.”

“I heard there’s a group rising up to take control of one of the mega buildings or the flow of drugs here. They’re desperate, but they’ve got a plan. Might be a way to get a bit more control over our lives.”

“You know what I hate the most? The waiting. The not knowing. Are we gonna get out of here? Or are we just sitting around, waiting to die?”

“Did you hear? The searchers found a whole stash of toys in that broken-down mall! They’re giving them out later today. Maybe we’ll get something new!”

“I told you, bro; we gotta be careful. The guards at the gate? They’re getting stricter. Heard they’re turning people away, even if they’ve got the right papers. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of them.”

“I don’t get it, mate. Those rich bastards who went to Venus got off easy. Meanwhile, we’re left to rot down here. I heard they’ve got manufacturing centers up and running already, sending food and supplies to their own. What about us, huh?”

“Don’t waste your time hoping for relief. We’re on our own. Those people up in space? They’ve left us to die. And the ones who make it to the colonies? You think they’re living any better?”

“I miss home. The smells, the food, the festivals… everything.”

“This place is getting worse and worse, but the council won’t lift a finger. Nooo, gotta help everyone, even the ones who are far too high to care if they’re inside the camp or outside. I say send them out; let them live on their own. Better kill them and take their supplies as our own rather than letting them waste it.”

***

I finally reach the processing station's entrance—a squat, brick structure that has managed to survive the initial chaos. It's right inside the park's old gates, which are now shut to keep the hordes of desperate people out. Beyond the gate is a tangle of activity. A queue of people waits to enter the camp, grouped up against the gate and stretching all the way back along the path. Their expressions are a mixture of fear and hope as they cling to the few pieces of paperwork they have, realizing this may be their only chance to get to safety. I duck through a side door, avoiding eye contact with the busy guards that roam outside, trying to keep everything under control and the mass of people slowly getting crushed against the gate.

Inside the building, the atmosphere is different—quieter, but not by much. The sound of papers being shuffled and conversations is constant. Someone has taken the trouble to hang a few dim lanterns to add a semblance of normalcy, though it hardly helps with the air being stale and the windows too dirty to let in much light. A tiny, antiquated CD player sputters out an old pop song as it sits atop a jumbled desk. Even though it wastes valuable batteries, nobody seems to care. Music, even this outdated stuff, is a rare comfort.

We would probably protect it with our lives, given that it was a rare find by a search party who found it in a museum and was happy enough to trade it away for some privileges. Modifying it to work with more modern batteries took calling in favors with some people who are good with tech. But the final product was well worth it.

“Morning, Dev,” greets a deep voice as I walk in.

Glancing up, I see Dalia, a woman in her late twenties, seated behind a desk covered in forms. She’s wearing the same worn-out jacket every day, and her dark hair is pulled back into a messy bun. She’s been here from the start, and it shows in the way she speaks: quick and direct, but there’s a faint accent that I can never quite place.

“Good morning, Dalia,” I respond, feigning a smile because I have to come across as kind but not overly so. Just enough to give off the impression that I’m an introvert and to keep people from getting too close, lest I grow to like or, god forbid, trust them.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I walk over to my workstation. It’s not much—just a little desk wedged into the room’s corner holding an ancient computer that somehow still works, at least most of the time. I toss my bag on the ground and settle in, ready for another day of mind-numbing paperwork.

I glance over at the elderly man stretched out on the couch just in front of me as I take a seat. The couch has seen better days—the couch is tattered at the corners, yet it still functions as his temporary bed. He has been a part of the camp since the beginning, when conditions were only slightly less chaotic. His face is a roadmap of deep lines that tell of a life lived on the edge, and his hair, what’s left of it, is a wispy silver.

His snoring—more like a deep, rattling wheeze—adds to the room’s background noise. Now and then, his breath catches, as though his body is still fighting for survival.

Though everyone here just calls him Doc, his name is Elias. Elias is a veteran military medic who has witnessed more fights and fatalities than anyone should. His body is tense even while he's sleeping, as though he's always prepared to wake up and take action. His respiration is shallow. Even when he's sleeping, he insists on covering most of his face with his old, military-grade mask.

He is a gruff man, but a good one, if you can get past his constant mutterings of, “Back in my day, doctors actually knew how to treat people instead of just stuffing them full of metal.”

Not that he is incorrect; the majority of people over 30 are now deceased because of all the treatments that stuffed metal into their bodies, which then killed them when it short-circuited as the magnetic field flipped. The same goes for all the people who went big on the cybernetic enhancements. All dead now, rotting away, along with the doctors, who are pretty worthless now without all their fancy gadgets.

At that moment, the door flings open, and a man rushes inside, almost tumbling over a pile of papers, IDs, and old-fashioned paperwork. Amari, despite the lines of tiredness that crease his black skin, is thirty years old and has the vigor of a ten-year-old. When he speaks, his voice has a melodious, rhythmic cadence that is always moving and always changing, much like ocean waves.

“Morning, Dev!” His smile barely reaches his eyes as he says, “Hope you’re ready for another day in paradise.” Even if you’re not very interested in what he’s saying, you can’t help but listen to his calming, thick accent. He’s been here almost as long as Doc, and he’s our closest logistical manager; he runs around the camp, ensuring that everything goes as smoothly as possible.

I whisper under my breath, “More like purgatory,” loud enough for Amari to hear.

He chuckles, setting down the stack of papers on my desk, “Still got that sense of humor, I see. Good—means you’re still human.” With that, he rushes out of the door to the next thing on his checklist.

I groan at the size of the pile—my first of the day, yet larger than yesterday’s boss monster. I begin to sort through them, my fingers moving on autopilot as I scan the information. It’s all the usual stuff—names, ages, any skills they might have that could be useful, and a brief history of where they’ve come from.

Some I assign to various teams or jobs; a few I pass up to the council; most, however, I have to reject; their skill set is useless now. Yet for the hundreds that I process, thousands are rejected on the spot for not having any kind of paperwork.

My hand hurts from typing hundreds of names on the old computer, but not as much as when I have to write out everything by hand, one to keep a paper copy and one to give to the guards.

The general chatter of other coworkers, the old man snoring and the music are the comforting white noises that allow me to slog through the mountain of paperwork.

Dalia, who is still typing away at her own desk, is deep in conversation with Leon, a middle-aged man with a thick beard and a stomach that strains against his overly tight shirt. Leon is our resident pessimist, with a gravelly voice that always belting out one pessimistic prediction after another.

Being correct once in his life has made him far too smug, always using it as proof for whatever new crazy theory he has.

“Dalia, I’m telling you, the council’s going to screw this up,” Leon grumbles, shuffling through various reports of the camp’s inventory. Allocating resources to the multitude of functions and teams that the camp runs on.

Dalia doesn’t even look up; her tone dismissive. “You say that every day, Leon. Just do your job. We’ve got enough to deal with without your constant moaning.”

“Yeah, yeah. But I’m right, aren’t I? You know as well as I do that they’ve got not even the faintest whiff of how to run this place.”

“That’s why we do what we do, Leon. It is not their job to keep this place running. It’s to make the hard decisions we can’t make.”

Amari has returned across the room, moving like a whirlwind, dumping stacks of paperwork, seemingly unaffected by the passing of time. He stops at the door and rests a stack of paperwork in his arms, leaning against the frame. “Leon, my man, if I had a penny for every time you predicted the end of the world, I’d be the richest man in this camp.”

Leon grunts, flipping a paper over with a scowl. “It already ended, Amari. We’re just too stubborn to admit it.”

Amari laughs. “That’s the spirit! But, hey, stubbornness is what’s keeping me alive. So I’ll keep being stubborn.”

In the meantime, I catch pieces of a conversation between Mei-Ling and Jorge, two more of our employees. Mei-Ling is a little, slender lady in her early thirties, with keen eyes that seem to be mentally calculating something. Conversely, Jorge is a tall, broad-shouldered man from somewhere in South America.

“Did you hear about the fight near the north gate last night?” Mei-Ling asks, her voice low and quiet.

Jorge nods, “Si, I heard. Nasty business, that. People are becoming desperate.”

“To say they were desperate is an understatement. We need more or better guards. The ones we currently have can barely keep things under control.”

“Better guards, more food, more medicine… We need everything, Mei,” Jorge sighs. “But where do we get it? The council is stretched thin, and the city’s a burning skeleton.”

Suddenly, the old CD player sputters and stops out, leaving the room in awkward silence. Dalia looks up abruptly, her brows knitting together in an unusual display of intensity. “Damn it! It was the last battery. Better hope the search teams get a good haul and there are extras left over that the camp does not require.”

The silence lingers, heavy and limiting, until Leon’s voice breaks it. “Figures. This place is going to hell, and the music is the first thing we will lose. They better get a bloody decent haul; someone or other has demanded roughly 11 batteries.”

Jorge gives a halfhearted chuckle, but no one else says anything. Busy praying.

But there isn’t time to dwell on it. Just as I’m ready to return to my work, the alarm goes off with a harsh, piercing sound that cuts through the silence like a dagger. Elias jumps awake, his hand reflexively grabbing for the mask that is already covering his face. His eyes open wide, immediately alert, and he swings his legs off the couch, cursing under his breath as he stands up.

Amari is already at the door, his typical smile replaced with a look of urgency. “Doc, we need you. It’s bad.”

Elias nods, “Of course it’s bad. It’s always bad,” he grumbles, reaching for his bag of tools and medicines while listening attentively to Amari’s hushed words.

When Amari finishes talking, he stops and looks around the room before his gaze lands on me. “Dev, you’re coming with me. I need someone with a steady hand for this. Get your mask and meet me at the critical tents in five minutes.”

I hurry to my feet, heart thumping, and grab my shawl from my bag. I follow Amari out the door, my footsteps echoing throughout the narrow hallway of the processing station.

As we step outside, the cacophony of the camp surrounds us once more. The alarm is still blasting, but it’s the sight of scared people rushing in all directions that really gets me on edge. The critical tents are positioned at the camp’s far end, near what was formerly a playground for children. The swings are now lifeless and rusted, and the sandpit has long been used to dump whatever scraps people can find.

Mercifully, the alarm shuts off after a couple more seconds, and people slowly return to their posts.

Amari jogs, his long strides eating up the space between us and the tents. “It’s a teenage girl,” he says, hardly turning his head to speak with me. “We found her outside, crawling towards the gates. She’s in awful shape, Dev. We need to move quickly.”

I nod and tighten my scarf around my face. Even through the layers of fabric, I can smell smoke and burning plastic.

When we arrive at the second of two critical tents, the Doc hands me a strange apron made of a material similar to that used in raincoats but in an aquamarine hue.

“Put it on and step into the ion showers for a moment.” The Doc barks, already donning a similar apron and some disposable gloves, which he then throws at me before walking to the ion showers himself. Amari helps with my apron before being forced to attend to his other duties, promising to check in on us.

The ion shower, though quick, feels like an eternity. I can hear muffled noises from the camp outside—people yelling, the occasional clang of metal, and the low hum of the repaired generators struggling to keep going. The shower sprays me with an invisible mist, removing any contaminants that cling to my clothes and skin.

I step out, tightening the apron around me. The Doctor offers me a curt nod, his gaze far away and buried in thought. I'm simply a pair of hands for him right now, and that's fine with me.

The inside of the tent is barely lit, and the air is dense with the odor of blood, disinfectant, and something else—something metallic and harsh that turns my stomach.

My gaze focuses on the patient laying on the makeshift operating table. A girl's complexion was as pale as death, save for the dirt and blood marks on her face. Her vivid, recognizable green hair pours over the edge of the table like a river of emeralds, dimmed by grime. She is unconscious, her chest rising and falling shallowly, and her breathing laborious. Her body is riddled with bullet wounds, and the homemade cloth bandages do little to prevent the flow of blood.

I freeze. The universe narrows down to just her and me. My pulse is pounding in my chest as recognition hits me like a frigid wave.

“Lylla…” I mumble.

The name slips out before I can stop it. I knew this girl once, before everything went wrong. We weren't close; in fact, hell we were enemies filled with a childish hatred over who scored higher than the other. The hatred of a naïve person who is blissfully unaware of the triviality of their petty squabbles.

My hands shake and I grip the edge of the operating table to keep myself steady. Lost in my inner turmoil. Should I listen to the childish hate or to the rational human part? She is someone who I considered my enemy at worst, my arch-rival at best and the cause of so many beatings.

Is my hatred so strong that I would leave another human to die when my help could save their life?