Grey. Grey clouds. Grey puddles. Grey sheets of acidic rain. Grey expanses of concrete. Grey people, sick and dying or already dead. Even my own hands, once full of color and vigor, were now grey, callused lumps of flesh hanging numb at the ends of my arms.

The chill in the air had worked its way deep into my bones to the point where I was one with it. I shivered, but didn’t feel cold.

I felt movement as something shifted against me. Ryan, my son, groaned and pressed his body against mine, seeking warmth I didn’t have to offer him. Still, I pulled him into a tighter embrace and tried to shift to a position where I better acted as a barrier against the freezing rain blowing in through the torn walls of our hovel.

He was grey, too. Where once his cheeks and ears had always been rosy and flushed with lifeblood, they were now sallow and pale. Once-red lips now blue-grey. His breath escaped those lips in little clouds of steam that flowed over my shoulder and out into the uncaring colorless world beyond the soaked cloth walls of our lackluster shelter.

Except for his eyes. His eyes remained the same vibrant hazel they had always been, with green clinging to his pupils and spreading out like vines into the golden expanse of his outer iris. He opened them to look up at me, and thorns cut into my heart through the numbness. Those weren’t the eyes of a five-year-old boy—they bore too much pain.

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His voice crept out from between his chattering teeth. “Mom, tell me a story about Dad.”

My sinuses ached and I blinked some errant moisture from my eyes. He sounded so weak. His body was so cold. But I offered him a smile all the same.

“Your dad was the bravest man in the world. You already know the story about how he saved humanity with his Bridge around the same time you were born. You know the story about how he loved even the people who hated him, and how now those same people call him a hero while they rest in the new World. You know how he gave jobs to the jobless and rest to the overworked. Do you suppose there’s a story you haven’t already heard?”

“I know those, Mom. You’ve told me all the Dad stories. I’m okay if you tell me the same ones again.”

I stroked his damp, ash-stained—once strawberry blond—hair, silent for a moment as I came to a decision. “You know, I think there is one Dad story you haven’t heard before.”

“Really?” The wonder and excitement in his voice was evident despite its shakiness. I played with one of the curls in his hair with a numb finger.

“Yes. It’s a little different from the others, though. It’s the story of how we're going to save him.”