I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

I sat on the bench alone and let the morning happen around me.

Everything Jisoo had ordered last night was visible from here— the reinforced north wall, new concrete barriers arranged in staggered lines, the watchtower fences, the trucks repositioned along the east wall at exactly the angle she’d specified.

The camp looked like a different place from the one we’d dropped into yesterday. Sharper. More deliberate. Probably 90% more safer than it had been when we arrived, which was a strange thing to be sitting in the middle of knowing exactly one person was responsible for all of it, and that person was currently asleep.

I yawned.

5 in the morning to now had been a lot of hours of moving heavy things and arguing with people who didn’t understand why the ammunition couldn’t stay where it was and learning that Jisoo had very specific opinions about fence angles.

My everything hurts... like I mean it, my ribs, my back, my neck, my backbone again, my head, my nose, my eyes and more!!! Everything!!!

Though, it feels nice here... no sunlight... because the building behind the bench was blocking the sun perfectly. I closed my eyes for approximately 4 seconds.

"AHJUSSI."

I opened them.

And shit...

Mio was beside me.

She’d arrived without me noticing somehow, which tracked. She was holding a stitched bunny in one arm and had a piece of bread in the other hand and was vibrating at a frequency I could feel through the bench slats.

She showed me the bunny first. Then told me about the bread. Then began a negotiation about us staying another day that I didn’t have the energy to engage with directly, so I let her words wash over me and nodded at random and watched the camp wake up around us.

"Ahjussi."

"Hm."

"Can birds get married?"

I looked at her. She was watching me with genuine expectation, like this was a question with an answer I might actually have.

"..."

Mio:"What?"

"I don’t know."

Her face broke into a grin. "SEEMS LIKE YOU DON’T KNOW TOO! Haha!" She pointed at me like she’d caught something.

"Do you know?"

The grin stayed but she went quiet.

"Figured."

We sat. She ate her bread. The camp kept doing its morning things— fires getting started, people moving between buildings, the supply runners beginning their rounds. Mio finished the bread and looked at the sky and said, with complete sincerity: "Do you know why bread is called bread?"

"Why?"

"Because if it was called table, people would get confused."

I sat with that for a moment.

"If zombies bite vampires," she continued, unprompted, "who gets infected?"

"...ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ"

"Here’s a joke," she said. "Why are there two moons?"

"Why."

"Because they are backup moons."

I stared at the middle distance.

She nodded to herself, satisfied, and kept going.

"Trees were weird because they’d been standing for years without getting tired... cant be me."

....ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

Stairs only went up, which she found suspicious. If tomorrow became today, she wanted to know where yesterday went, and she looked at me like I might actually have know all the answers to that information somewhere.

I didn’t have any of it. Obviously... I can’t larp.

But I listened, because— and I would not be saying this out loud— it was genuinely interesting.

Not the answers. Just the questions. The specific shape of a brain that looked at stairs and found them philosophically suspicious.

Eventually I stood up and walked toward the building entrance.

She followed immediately.

At some point her hand found mine and I didn’t do anything about it.... I swear it’s not because it’s CUTE. We climbed, floor by floor, until the rooftop opened up around us and the full camp spread out below with all of Jisoo’s modifications visible from above.

"Hey," I said.

"Yea?"

"Tonight." I kept my eyes on the treeline to the north. "Don’t leave your parents. Stay close. Stay inside. Okay?"

She turned and looked at me with her head tilted.

Then her eyes went wide. "Wait— is something gonna happen?? Don’t tell me you’re like the villain in a book that goes around massacring people—"

"No."

"I know," she said, immediately flat.

I very seriously wanted to pinch her cheek. I didn’t. "Be safe tonight, alright?"

She was quiet for a second. "...Is something bad going to happen?"

I nodded.

She looked at the treeline too, for a moment, like she was trying to see what I was seeing. Then she looked back at me. "If tomorrow is peaceful... can we go outside the camp?"

"Sure." I put my hand on her head.

She leaned into it like a cat, her whole posture shifting toward it, bunny tucked under her arm. "And," she added, eyes still on the treeline, "teach me how you teleport."

"Yeah."

She nodded once, to herself, and that was that.

***

(Mio.)

She went home the way she always did, cutting through the courtyard and up the stairs to the apartment her family had been given on the second floor, and when she opened the door the first thing she heard was her parents arguing.

Dad wanted to know where she’d been.

Mom said she’d disappeared the whole day again.

Shiori stood in the doorway with her bunny and her one remaining piece of bread saved from this morning... which is actually the bread yesterday and she’s just waiting for the chance to give it to her parents— and said, simply: "I made friends."

They barely heard her. Dad sighed and told her to go wash her hands.

Normal. Completely and entirely ordinary, the way evenings were supposed to be, full of small complaints and nothing urgent and the specific comfort of people who were annoyed at each other because everything was fine enough to be annoyed at each other.... The fuck... the author note said.

Shiori washed her hands and ate dinner and put the bunny on the pillow next to hers and fell asleep to the sound of her parents talking in the other room about something that didn’t matter.

Probably arguing again.

And that’s the last ordinary evening they would ever have.

***

(Si Hon.)

I noticed it first.

Not a sound— the absence of one.

The jungle past the northern wall had been making continuous noise since we arrived, the specific layered texture of a dense ecosystem doing what ecosystems did— birds, insects, things moving through leaves, the butterfly looking shit, the occasional distant call of something larger. Constant. Background. So consistent I’d actually notice it felt quiet when it got QUIET... get it?

Now there was nothing.

No birds. No insects. Not even wind moving through the canopy, which didn’t make sense because I could feel it on my face from where I was standing at the rooftop edge.

The treeline sat dark and completely, specifically silent.

"Hon."

I turned. Jisoo had appeared from the stairwell, still pulling her hair back, looking like someone who had slept hard and woken up on purpose.

She came to stand beside me, looked at the treeline for exactly 1second, and didn’t look surprised.

"Three hours," she said. "Give or take."

"You can tell from the quiet?"

"I can tell from the pattern... I tracked it yesterday you know."

She paused.

"Oh, my... other self... She’s so competent, honestly. Did all of this—" she gestured at the reinforced camp below us, "in one night...."

Another pause, something complicated moving through her expression. "...Don’t tell her I said that."

I looked at her... is she still asleep? She knows her other self remembers everything.