Chapter 1: The Real

She dreamed of gardens.

Green things growing in rows, soil that smelled like life instead of copper and ash. A man's hand in hers—rough, warm, real. Children laughing somewhere behind a wall she couldn't see past, and a sky so blue it hurt to look at directly. She dreamed of a fortress falling, of a woman in chains who said the word *necessary* like it was scripture, of a ring made from scrap metal that fit her finger like it had been waiting there all along.

She dreamed she was someone who mattered.

Then the rain hit her face, and River Nakamura-Blake woke up in the mud.

---

Cold. That was the first thing. Cold that had soaked through her grandmother's coat—her coat now, ash and dust, hers now—and settled into the meat of her. She'd fallen asleep under what was left of a gas station awning, tucked between a rusted ice machine and a pile of concrete that used to be a wall. Not a good shelter. Not even a passable one. But her legs had stopped working around sunset, and her body had made the decision for her.

The rain was the acid kind. Light, more mist than drops, but it left that familiar tingle on exposed skin. She pulled her hood up and wiped her face with a sleeve that was already damp.

Three days since the village. Three days since she'd watched the Crimson Riders pour through the east gate like red-painted locusts, since she'd heard her grandmother say *run* in that voice that didn't allow for argument, since she'd smelled the smoke and known—

Don't.

River sat up. Her back screamed. Her left knee had stiffened overnight, the bruise from where she'd fallen climbing the ravine wall now a swollen knot of purple and yellow. She was seventeen years old and she moved like her grandmother had moved in the last years, all careful angles and held breath.

Had moved. Past tense.

*Don't.*

She took inventory. It was the first thing Grandmother had taught her—before you panic, count what you have. Panic was for people with options.

One knife. The good one, the one with the antler handle that Grandmother had traded three days' worth of dried rabbit for at the Crossing Fair two summers back. Still sharp. Still the most valuable thing River owned.

One pack. Inside it: a tin cup, a length of rope that was more fray than fiber, a fire starter that worked about half the time, a water skin that was—she shook it—maybe a quarter full, and a bundle of cloth that held four strips of jerky and a handful of dried berries that were starting to go soft.

One coat. Too big for her, smelling of woodsmoke and the lavender soap Grandmother made from—

*Don't. Don't. Don't.*

River stood up. The world tilted, righted itself. Hunger sat low in her belly, not the sharp kind anymore but the deep, heavy kind that meant her body was starting to eat itself. She'd been rationing the jerky, half a strip per day, but half a strip wasn't enough to keep a seventeen-year-old moving across broken terrain for hours at a time.

She needed water. She needed food. She needed to figure out which direction was north, because north was where the Sanctuary was supposed to be, and the Sanctuary was the only word that still sounded like hope in a vocabulary stripped down to survival basics.

First, water.

---

The gas station was at the edge of what might have been a small town once. Hard to tell. Twenty years of weather, decay, and desperate scavenging had turned most pre-Collapse settlements into abstract sculptures of rust and concrete. This one was no different—a main street visible only because the rubble piles were roughly parallel, fragments of buildings poking up like broken teeth.

River moved through the ruins with her knife out. She'd learned to walk quietly from Grandmother, who'd learned it from surviving twenty years in a world that punished noise with death. Heel down first, then roll to the toe. Watch where you step. Broken glass, loose rubble, anything that might shift or crunch. The Wastes were full of things that listened.

She found a basement cistern in the third building she checked—a house, or what was left of one. The floor had collapsed inward, creating a bowl that collected rainwater. The water was gray-green with algae and tasted like the inside of a pipe, but her fire starter and tin cup could fix that. Boil it, let it cool, try not to think about what was living in it before the heat got to it.

While she waited for the water to heat over a tiny fire built from chair legs and old newspaper, she ate one strip of jerky. Chewed it slowly. Made it last. Three strips left after this. Maybe two days of food if she stretched it, and that was two days of walking on a body already running on empty.

The fire popped and hissed. Rain found its way through gaps in the wreckage above, occasional drops that sizzled when they hit the flames. River pulled Grandmother's coat tighter and tried to think.

North. The Sanctuary. That was the plan—the only plan. Grandmother had talked about it for years, the way she talked about everything from Before, with that mix of longing and hard-eyed pragmatism that meant she believed it but knew believing might kill you. *There's a place in the mountains, River. Where the old technology still works. Where people grow food in clean soil and children learn from books instead of from blood. I've heard it from traders who've heard it from other traders who've heard it from someone who claims they've been there.*

Thirdhand rumors and wishful thinking. But Grandmother had drawn River a map, scratched on a piece of leather with a sharpened nail, showing the general direction and the landmarks to look for. River had that map in her pack. She'd looked at it so many times in the last three days that the lines were starting to blur, or maybe that was her eyes.

The water boiled. She let it cool, drank half, saved the rest in the skin. Three swallows. Enough to keep her moving for a few more hours.

She stamped out the fire and moved on.

---

The town gave way to open road, which gave way to scrubland, which gave way to the kind of landscape that made River understand why people called it the Wastes. Flat, scarred earth stretching in every direction, dotted with the skeletons of trees that hadn't survived whatever chemicals the old world had pumped into the ground. The sky was bruise-colored—not quite clouds, not quite clear, just a perpetual gray-yellow haze that turned the sun into a pale disc you could stare at without blinking.

She walked. There wasn't much else to do.

Walking gave her time to think, which was the problem. Her mind kept circling back to the village, to the sound of the Riders' horses, to the way the fire had started at the granary and spread so fast it seemed alive. She kept seeing faces. Tomás, who was fourteen and had just started learning to work the forge, standing in the doorway of his family's house with his mouth open. Mrs. Oba, who taught the younger children their letters, running toward the well with a bucket that wouldn't have mattered even if she'd made it. Kenji.

River clenched her jaw.

Kenji, who she'd kissed exactly once behind the smokehouse during the autumn festival, who had tasted like cider and smelled like sawdust from his father's workshop. Kenji, who she'd been planning to kiss again. Kenji, who she'd last seen running toward the east gate with a pitchfork because he didn't have a real weapon and didn't care. Kenji, who—

She stopped walking. Pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw sparks.

*Don't think about it. Thinking about it doesn't help. Thinking about it uses energy you don't have. Walk. Just walk.*

She walked.

---

By midafternoon, the scrubland turned into something worse. The ground sloped downward into a shallow valley, and at the bottom, the earth was cracked into plates like a dried-up lakebed. Except this hadn't been a lake—it had been farmland, River guessed. The regularity of the cracks suggested old irrigation channels, and she could see the collapsed remains of fencing at intervals.

The problem was the dogs.

She heard them before she saw them—a low, collective growl that came from everywhere and nowhere, the kind of sound that made the back of her neck go cold. Wild dogs. Packs of them roamed the Wastes, descendants of pets and strays that had bred and starved and fought their way through twenty years of apocalypse. They weren't the dogs from Grandmother's stories, the ones that curled up by fires and fetched sticks. These were something else. Lean, scarred, smart enough to coordinate and mean enough to take down prey twice their size.

River froze.

There were six of them. No—seven. They emerged from behind a collapsed barn, moving in that loose formation that meant they'd already decided she was food. The leader was a big brindle thing, maybe eighty pounds of muscle and bad intentions, with one ear torn off and scars crisscrossing its muzzle.

Seven against one.

"Ash and dust," River muttered.

She had her knife. She had a rock she could throw. She had her legs, which were tired and stiff and not going to outrun anything with four feet.

The pack spread out. Two circling left, two right, the big one and two others coming straight at her. Textbook flanking. They'd done this before.

River's options were limited. She couldn't fight seven dogs. She couldn't outrun them. She couldn't climb—there was nothing to climb in this flat, dead valley.

She could die. That was always an option in the Wastes. Probably the easiest one.

The brindle leader barked—a sharp, commanding sound—and the pack tightened its circle. Twenty feet away. Fifteen. She could see their ribs now, the way their hip bones jutted through patchy fur. Starving. A starving predator was the most dangerous kind because it had nothing to lose.

Her hand shook on the knife. She hated that. Grandmother's hands never shook. Grandmother had killed a man once, a raider who'd come to the village at night, and she'd done it with a hatchet and steady hands and told River about it the next morning over breakfast like she was describing the weather.

*"Killing's easy, girl. It's the living after that's the hard part."*

The dogs lunged.

River threw the rock at the one coming from her left—hit it on the shoulder, hard enough to make it yelp and stumble. She pivoted, putting the stumbling dog between her and the two on that side, and slashed at the first one coming from the right. The knife caught it across the nose. Blood sprayed. The dog screamed—a sound River hadn't known dogs could make—and fell back.

Then the big one hit her.

Eighty pounds of animal slammed into her chest and knocked her flat. Her head cracked against the hard-packed earth. Stars. The sky spun. Teeth snapped inches from her throat and she got her forearm up just in time, the coat's thick leather taking the bite that would have opened her jugular.

She stabbed upward. The knife went into the dog's side, slid between ribs. Hot blood poured over her hand, her wrist, soaking into the coat sleeve. The brindle leader made a sound—not a yelp, not a growl, something closer to a sigh—and its weight went slack on top of her.

River shoved the body off. Got to her feet. The world lurched. Blood in her eyes—no, sweat. Blood on her hands, her arms, the front of her coat. Not hers. Mostly not hers.

The remaining dogs had pulled back. They stood in a loose semicircle, staring at her, staring at their dead leader. One of them whined. Another licked its injured nose.

"Come on," River said. Her voice was shaking. Everything was shaking. "Come on, then."

They didn't come.

One by one, starting with the injured ones, the pack turned and melted back toward the barn. The last one—a small gray animal with yellow eyes—looked at her for a long moment, something almost like recognition in its gaze.

Then it was gone, and River was alone with a dead dog and the sound of her own breathing.

She sat down. Not by choice—her legs gave out and she sat.

The shaking got worse. Her teeth chattered. Her hands cramped around the knife handle and she couldn't make them let go. She stared at the dead brindle, at the blood pooling in the cracked earth, at the cloud of flies that was already gathering.

She'd killed something. Not the first time—she'd killed rabbits, birds, once a snake that had gotten into the grain store. But this was different. This had been trying to kill *her*, and she'd felt its breath on her face and its teeth on her arm and the moment the knife had found the gap between its ribs, the way the resistance had suddenly given way to nothing.

*Killing's easy. It's the living after that's the hard part.*

"Shut up, Grandmother," River whispered. "You're dead."

The words landed in the silence like stones in water. She pressed her face into her bloody hands and breathed until the shaking stopped.

---

She butchered the dog.

Not because she wanted to. Because three strips of jerky wasn't going to get her north, and meat was meat. Grandmother had taught her how to field-dress game, and a dog wasn't that different from a rabbit if you didn't think about it too hard.

River thought about it too hard. She vomited once, halfway through, wiping her mouth on a clean corner of her sleeve before going back to work. The meat was stringy and dark and she'd need to cook it before it was safe, but it was protein. It was survival. It was the difference between reaching the next settlement and collapsing in the dirt somewhere to become food for the next pack that found her.

She built another small fire in the lee of the collapsed barn, keeping it low and smokeless the way Grandmother had shown her. Smoke drew attention—raiders, scavengers, things worse than dogs. She cut the meat into thin strips and cooked them over the flames, trying not to gag at the smell.

While the meat cooked, she cleaned her knife and checked herself for injuries. The bruise on her knee was worse. She had a scrape on the back of her head from hitting the ground that was crusted with dried blood. Her forearm, where the dog had bitten through the coat, was already bruising but the leather had held—no broken skin.

Lucky. Grandmother would have called it that. River called it what it was: not dead yet.

She ate two strips of the dog meat. It tasted exactly as bad as she'd expected—gamey, tough, with a metallic aftertaste that might have been the animal's diet or might have been the iron in her own mouth. She wrapped the rest in the cloth bundle and packed it away. Four days of food now, maybe five if she was careful.

The fire died. The sun was going down, painting the haze-sky in colors that shouldn't have been beautiful but were—oranges and reds bleeding into the perpetual yellow-gray, shadows stretching across the dead farmland.

River checked the map again. The leather was warm from being pressed against her body in the pack. Grandmother's scratched lines showed a road heading north, marked with symbols River had memorized. A square for settlement. An X for danger. A circle for water. The nearest circle was maybe two days' walk, if she kept a good pace.

Two days. Through open terrain. Alone. With a bruised knee and an aching head and the taste of dog in her mouth.

"Great," she said to nobody. "Just great."

She found a better shelter for the night—a drainage culvert under what had been a road, dry inside, narrow enough that nothing bigger than her could fit through the opening. She plugged the far end with rocks and debris until only a gap remained for airflow, then crawled in and pulled the coat around her.

The concrete was cold against her back. Above her, she could hear the wind picking up, carrying the sound of the Wastes at night—distant animal calls, the creak and groan of structures that had been dying slowly for two decades, the occasional crack of something falling. This was the soundtrack of the world. She'd grown up with it. It should have been familiar, comforting even.

It wasn't. Because she'd always heard it from inside walls. From a bed, with Grandmother in the next room, with the sounds of a village—people breathing, fires crackling, the occasional murmur of the night watch—around her.

Now there was just the Wastes. And her.

The dream came back to her—the gardens, the ring, the blue sky. It had felt so real. She'd been someone in that dream, someone with a name people knew and a purpose that mattered and a man who looked at her like she was worth looking at. Someone who'd won. Who'd built something. Who'd survived long enough to see the other side of all this.

Stupid dream.

She was a seventeen-year-old girl alone in the Wastes with a knife and some dog meat and a map scratched on leather. She wasn't going to build anything. She was going to walk north until she found the Sanctuary or died trying, and if the Sanctuary turned out to be a myth—which it probably was, because everything good turned out to be a myth—then she'd die in the mountains and the dogs would eat her and that would be that.

But she was going to walk.

Because Grandmother had said *run*, and then Grandmother had turned back toward the fire with the hatchet in her hand, and the last thing River had seen was the old woman's back, straight and sure, moving toward the sound of hooves and screaming.

She owed it to that back. To those steady hands. To the woman who'd spent seventeen years keeping her alive in a world that wanted her dead.

She owed it to keep walking.

River closed her eyes. Sleep came slowly, in jagged pieces, interrupted by every sound the night made. She dreamed again—not of gardens this time, but of smoke and horses and a voice saying *run* with the weight of the world behind it.

---

Dawn was gray and cold and smelled like rust.

River crawled out of the culvert, stiff and sore and alive. That last part still surprised her, three mornings running. Each time she opened her eyes, there was a half-second where she expected to see the ceiling of her room in the village, the water stains she'd memorized, the crack that looked like a river on a map.

Then the Wastes reasserted themselves, and she remembered.

She ate a strip of dog meat for breakfast. Drank two mouthfuls of water. Checked her bearings against the leather map, orienting herself by the pale disc of the sun behind the haze.

North. Keep walking north.

The terrain changed as she moved. The dead farmland gave way to a stretch of old highway, the asphalt crumbled and heaved by two decades of freezing and thawing and whatever else the Collapse had done to the infrastructure. Old cars sat on the shoulder like monuments, rusted through, their interiors colonized by weeds and small animals. River checked each one as she passed—habit. Sometimes you found things in old cars. Useful things. Usually just bones.

The third car she checked had a toolbox under the passenger seat. Inside: a flathead screwdriver, a pair of pliers with one jaw broken, and—

A compass.

River stared at it. The glass was cracked, the housing dented, but when she held it flat in her palm the needle swung and steadied. Pointing north. Actual, reliable north, not the guesswork she'd been doing with the sun and the moss on rocks and the direction water flowed.

She closed her fist around it and pressed it against her chest.

"Thank you," she said, though she didn't know who she was thanking. The driver of this car, maybe. The person who'd put the toolbox under the seat twenty years ago and died without knowing they'd just saved a girl who hadn't been born yet.

The screwdriver went in her pack too. Pliers she left—too broken to be useful, and every ounce of weight mattered when you were walking all day on not enough food.

She kept moving.

---

Midmorning, she heard engines.

The sound came from the east—a low, grinding rumble that carried across the flat terrain like thunder that wouldn't stop. River dropped flat behind a burned-out truck and pressed her face into the dirt.

Engines meant vehicles. Vehicles meant fuel. Fuel was the most precious commodity in the Wastes—more valuable than food, more valuable than weapons, more valuable than almost anything. The only people who had fuel were the kind of people you didn't want to meet.

The rumble grew louder. River risked a look over the truck's rusted hood.

Two vehicles. Old military trucks, the kind with the canvas-covered beds, painted in a color that had probably been olive drab once but was now the same rust-brown as everything else. They were moving fast on the highway, kicking up a plume of dust that hung in the still air like a signal flare.

Crimson Riders.

She knew before she saw the markings. The red slash painted on the doors, the banner trailing from the lead truck's antenna. She'd seen those markings before—had seen them three days ago, in the firelight, on the armor of the men who'd ridden through her village.

She went flat against the ground. Pressed herself lower, trying to become part of the earth, trying to be dirt and rust and nothing. The trucks were maybe two hundred yards away. If they had someone watching the roadside—

They passed.

The rumble faded east. The dust settled. River stayed down for a long time after, her cheek against the gritty asphalt, her heart going so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

They were out here. Patrolling. Looking for survivors, maybe. Looking for people like her—villagers who'd escaped, who might talk about what the Riders had done, who might find someone with enough anger and enough weapons to do something about it.

Or maybe they weren't looking for anyone. Maybe they were just moving, the way the Riders always moved, taking territory and resources and lives because that was what they did. Because the Collapse had made a world where the strong took from the weak, and the Crimson Riders had decided to be the strongest.

River got up. Her legs were water. Her hands wouldn't stop trembling.

She left the highway. Moved into the scrubland, where there was cover—sparse, pathetic cover, but better than standing on an open road waiting to be spotted. It meant slower going. It meant picking her way through rocks and dead brush and gullies that hadn't held water in years. It meant her bruised knee screaming with every step.

But it meant she was harder to see. And right now, that was the only advantage she had.

She walked until dark.

---

Night again. Another culvert, this one with half an inch of standing water at the bottom that she had to lie on a shelf of concrete to avoid. The cold crept in through the coat, through her clothes, through her skin, and settled somewhere in the center of her chest.

Four strips of dog meat left. Water skin almost empty. Knee swelling worse. Head wound itching, which might mean healing or might mean infection.

River held the compass in her hand and watched the needle point north.

*Two days to the next water source, if the map is right. If Grandmother's sources were right. If the water is still there after twenty years.*

A lot of ifs. Her whole life was ifs now.

She thought about the dream again. The gardens. The ring. The children laughing. It had felt like a vision—the future showing her what it could be, if she was strong enough, stubborn enough, lucky enough.

Or it was just a dream. Just her starving brain making pretty pictures out of desperation.

The wind howled outside the culvert. Something screamed in the distance—animal or human, impossible to tell.

River tightened her grip on the knife and stared into the dark.

Somewhere north, there was a place where the rain didn't taste like metal. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.

She was going to find out.

Or she was going to die out here, in the dirt, in the cold, with a stolen compass and the taste of survival in her mouth.

Either way, she was done dreaming about gardens.

Time to walk.