Of course the arguments for life didn’t end at the compound’s walls. It had collected the people who wanted to be closest to a sure, abundant source of food and were willing to live by the rules someone else had set up around it, but there were so many more who didn’t fit within those walls or rules. The static’s spread had driven them through the mountains and out of every stubborn town lodged between the peaks, into the lowlands and to the last city that may as well have existed.

They had brought their families and animals, tools and heirlooms and stubbornness with them. Where the concrete desert of the parking lot closed into downtown’s shaded canyons, cavernous avenues, a trio of young men were using their tools to pry up one of the cracks in the street. Trying to cut and whittle their way, she would guess, to the pipes and wires running underneath – dead and dry now, but useful to places like the compound, which never had enough spare parts to go around.

A radio wailed incongruously from the curb beside them, all but new, she knew, except for a dent laying open the finish on its lower left corner. She had seen a dozen of it, scuffed in exactly the same way, carried out of the same Saturday that would be starting over for something more than the thirty thousandth time just a few hundred blocks to the south.

Most of them tuned to the same station, one of the few with enough superfluous power to pour music back into the city. No announcements, no requests, no rhyme or reason – just the immortal caterwauling of an electric guitar, serenading Eve’s procession and several blocks of the city’s stubborn life.

Fior could have sung along with it flawlessly if she had seemed to have that sort of air in her lungs. Not a full block from that open-heart street surgery, a woman with sleeves rolled up past her elbows was doing so, belting out the lyrics to time hammer blows as she fixed a board to one side of a warped door frame. You could run a hundred miles away, cross sun and rain, I know you’re still right here…