GW's sirens fade behind us. Other sounds take their place. The distant crash of something large moving through wreckage. Skittering in the storm drains. The occasional human scream that cuts off too quickly to triangulate.

  New Atlanta after dark. I've stopped flinching at most of it.

  Twice we freeze. Once for a pack of feral dogs hunting in formation, eyes reflecting green in the distant street lights.

  Once for something bigger. Something that moves between buildings with a sound like wet canvas dragging across concrete. We wait in the shadows until it passes. I don't risk identifying it.

  Sofia doesn't make a sound either time.

  Maybe she'll survive after all.

  Twenty minutes, then thirty. The buildings change around us. Commercial downtown gives way to municipal government. Glass and steel giving way to older brick and limestone, the government district, the one I've made Lily and I's home in.

  I used to hate coming down here for licensing renewals. Parking was impossible, the bureaucrats moved like they were paid by the hour. Now most people avoid it entirely. Too many open plazas, too few places to hide.

  That's why I chose it.

  200 Piedmont Ave SE. Twenty floors. Pre-System, it housed the State Medical Board Licensing Office. Bureaucrats processing paperwork for doctors who wanted to practice in Georgia.

  Now it houses me and Lily. And one more, apparently.

  My favorite part was the ground floor, a natural kill box. I've made additions. Furniture piled against windows, sight lines cleared, three exit routes leading to three different contingencies. Anyone coming through anything other than the front door navigates a maze of overturned desks and filing cabinets while I watch from several pre-staged positions.

  Still we have interested parties that come along to visit, two groups have tried so far. Both are dead. The building looks abandoned after all. That's the point of choosing it..

  "Stay close," I say. "Don't touch anything."

  Sofia nods, her eyes are moving, cataloging, assessing. Doctor's instincts, maybe. Or survivor's sense, same thing now in this new world.

  I lead her through the maze. Up the central stairwell. Third floor, fourth, fifth. Behind me, Sofia's breathing gets ragged. Level 6 legs on a nine-floor climb. But I don't slow down for her. Every minute I'm not with Lily is a minute something could go wrong.

  Ninth floor. I proceed down a standard generic hallway and stop at a normal door, one that looks deliberately random, I take the time opening it so that it continues to look generic.

  Right behind it is an actual door. A fire door reinforced with steel bars I salvaged from a construction site. Three locks, three keys.

  I take the time to open it.

  "In here," I say when I hear her finally make it to the ninth floor.

  One of my storerooms was a conference space once. Long table, ergonomic chairs, a whiteboard now covered with my medical notes. Now it's a medical prep room held together by desperation and whatever I manage to scavenge from the streets below.

  IV stands improvised from coat racks. Tubing I sterilized with absinthe because proper antiseptic stopped existing three weeks ago. Monitoring equipment from a veterinary clinic, half of it held together with electrical tape and a soldering iron. Equipment clearly designed for dogs and cats and now used to care for my sister.

  The conference table too is covered in supplies, but not the organized rows of a proper trauma bay.

  Bottles of amoxicillin with expired dates. Azithromycin packets from a ransacked CVX. A half-empty bottle of Ceftriaxone I found in an apartment where the owner died before he could use it.

  And books. Everywhere, books. Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine open to the chapter on sepsis, pages marked with torn strips of paper. The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy. A nursing pharmacology textbook from the Georgia State library. Handwritten notes in every margin. Dosing calculations scratched onto Post-its. Cross-references I've checked and rechecked at 3 AM while Lily's fever climbed another half degree.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Three weeks of teaching myself medicine from corpses' bookshelves.

  Three weeks of knowing it wasn't enough.

  Sofia stops two steps inside. Her eyes move across the room. I watch as she catalogs it all. The inadequate antibiotics. The improvised equipment. The desperate margin notes of someone trying to learn in weeks what takes a decade of work.

  She picks up the Sanford Guide, looks at my annotations. Set it down without comment.

  That silence tells me everything.

  "Lily’s through here," I say. "But first."

  I swing the duffel off my shoulder. Unzip it on the table. Start pulling contents.

  Linezolid first. Four boxes. My last-resort position.

  Daptomycin second. Four vials. Backup that might destroy her kidneys before it saves her.

  Meropenem, broad-spectrum. Yet another drug that doesn't exist outside Level 1 trauma centers anymore.

  Norepinephrine. Vasopressin. Epinephrine.

  And things I didn't grab. Things Sofia must have added while I wasn't watching. A central line kit. Proper IV tubing. Sterile saline in sealed bags, not the expired bottles I'd been using. She was thinking three steps ahead while I was stripping the security team. Maybe this deal wasn't as spur of the moment for her as I had calculated on the street.

  Sofia's hands stop halfway while handling one of the vials. She's staring at the spread. At the gap between what I had and what I have now.

  "This is why you were in our trauma stockroom." It’s not a question. I answer it anyway.

  "Yes."

  She's looking at me. Waiting for something. An explanation, maybe. A justification.

  I keep unpacking. Clearly she thinks I’ll fill the silence.

  Intubation kit. A pulse oximeter. A dozen other items only half of which I can name.

  She finally looks away, picks up the meropenem, checks the concentration and sets it down with a care that means she's already running calculations in her head.

  "Show me the patient."

  I lead her into an interior office with big windows. Concrete walls holding the night's cold air in. I'd calculated the ambient temperature would help. Low sixties temp, reduced metabolic demand.

  My calculations stopped mattering two days ago.

  Lily lies on a cot I built from shipping pallets and memory foam. Emergency blanket over her lower torso for modesty sakes. Improvised IV dripping the last of the ceftriaxone into her arm.

  Her breathing is wrong. Too fast and too shallow. Compensatory tachypnea. The body burns through oxygen it can't spare.

  She’s eleven years old. Small for her age, smaller now after three weeks of fever eating through whatever reserves she had. Dark hair plastered to her forehead. Skin with a grayish pallor the textbooks warned me about.

  "Lily." I cross the room. Kneel beside her cot. Her eyes don’t even flutter open, not quite conscious, not quite asleep. Somewhere in the space between, where the fever keeps her trapped.

  "Lily, I'm back. We will fix this." Her hand moves then to find mine. Squeezes once, weakly, she’s barely there. Even though I don’t understand how. How her body keeps pushing on.

  Our ritual. The one we've had since she was four years old and scared of thunderstorms.

  One squeeze means I hear you. Two means I'm okay. Three means I love you.

  One squeeze, just one. That’s all she can manage.

  I squeeze back. Three times. Always three times.

  Yet this close, I can see what I've been trying not to see. Mottling beneath the skin. The capillaries failing perhaps her body was finally giving up hope.

  Sofia moves past me. Fingers on Lily’s wrist, counting. She takes a thermometer. The old kind, mercury inside and holds it under Lily's arm for sixty seconds.

  109°.

  Neither of us says anything.

  Until she breaks it for us both. "Ice packs," she says.

  No, she demands it.

  “I’ve got half a case left of instant activation cold packs."

  "Get them. All of them. Axillary, femoral, cervical." She's already moving back toward the duffel bag while I get the case. "Do you have power?"

  "We do. We have a personal generator and there’s a huge one in the sub basement. But they're both diesel. They're both loud." I look out into the night then having returned with the case.

  "I need monitoring for her. If we drop her temperature too fast, her heart might not handle the shock."

  I look at Lily. At the flush that keeps spreading. At the number that keeps climbing in my head. Tonight she might hit 110°. I still had no understanding of how her little body could still possibly be fighting back.

  But it was Nighttime.

  Nighttime. The worst time for noise. Everyone outside the encampments sleeps during the day, moves at night. If you have a generator, you run it when the sun's up or you don’t run it all.

  The sun went down four hours ago.

  Whatever's hunting out there, whatever the generator noise brings. It's a known risk. Lily hitting 110° is a certainty.

  The spread on the risk is ugly. But it's clear.

  "I'll start it," I say. "You keep her alive."

  I'm at the door when her voice stops me.

  "You taught yourself all of this. The dosing, the protocols, the drug interactions?"

  "I tried."

  "It's not nothing." She's already working, hands preparing the meropenem. "It's not enough. But it's not nothing."

  I don't know what to say to that. So I don't say anything.

  I grab my spear from outside the door. Head down to start the generator.

  And wait for whatever the noise brings.