Union Station had been transformed.
Strings of salvaged lights ran the length of the upper concourse. The bulbs were scavenged from a dozen dead buildings and wired together by someone with more patience than electrical training, throwing warm, uneven light over a crowd that had, for one night, decided to be a crowd instead of a collection of people trying not to die. Someone had built instruments out of pipe and wire and was playing something that was almost a song. The smell of actual cooking drifted through the air. Not paste, not scavenged starch, but actual cooking. Communal pots were shared between people who'd pooled whatever they had left.
Banners hung overhead, hand-painted, some more legible than others. ONE YEAR. The numbers didn't need explaining. Everyone here had survived the same thing, and tonight was for that.
"Did someone seriously make commemorative pins," Zeraya said, stopping at a stall where a man was selling exactly that. They were small scrap-metal pins, hand-stamped, alongside patches cut from salvaged corporate fabric, the logos half-scraped-off but still faintly visible underneath.
"Year one. Limited edition." Will picked one up, turned it over. "I respect the hustle."
"We almost died on that exact spot." Zeraya nodded vaguely toward the dome, visible above them, dark against the festival lights.
"And now it's a pin." Will set it back down, grinning. "That's healing. That's a society healing."
I have feasted after burning cities to the ground, Khan said, quiet, watching the crowd with something that wasn't quite his usual register. This is the first time I have seen people celebrate surviving one.
A pause.
I find I prefer it. Don't tell anyone I said that.
Lariya appeared at Will's elbow, already halfway gone before she'd fully arrived. "I'm gonna go find people. Meet you up top later?"
"Up top" needed no further explanation. Zeraya nodded, and Lariya vanished into the crowd, confident in a way that the quiet, watchful kid from a year ago would never have managed. She was comfortable here, known here, part of something here.
The climb was easier now.
Will noticed it without thinking about it. The same rusted handholds, the same sheer drop below, and his body moved through it like it was nothing, like it had been nothing for months. He didn't think about the climb at all anymore. He thought about getting to the top.
The dome looked different in the dark than it had a year ago. The shattered glass was the same. The cratered concrete was the same too, from the spiderweb crack of the frost strike to the blackened pit of the fire, except it wasn't a battlefield anymore. It was just the floor. Blankets were folded in a corner, stashed behind a support strut, exactly where they'd left them last time. A small cache of supplies sat tucked into a gap in the wall. Months of repeated visits had turned a crater into a couch cushion.
"You remember climbing this the first time?" Zeraya settled onto one of the blankets, looking out over the city. "You were so slow."
"I was careful."
"You were apologizing to the building. I heard you."
"...That was private."
"Nothing's private from up here." Zeraya smiled, settling in beside him. "That's the rule."
It is a good rule, Khan said, content.
The festival sounds drifted up from below. Distant, soft music and voices blended into something that was almost like white noise, almost like peace. The city stretched out under them, lights and shadows and the shape of a world that had ended a year ago and somehow, against every reasonable expectation, kept going anyway.
"She's doing well," Zeraya said, after a while, not needing to specify who. "Lariya. A year ago she barely left the apartment unless I made her."
"She's got people now." Will leaned back against the cold concrete. "That's different from a year ago. Everything's different from a year ago."
"Good different?"
"Yeah." He looked at her. "Good different."
Lariya climbed up about twenty minutes later, arriving with the easy confidence of someone who'd made this climb plenty of times before, a bundle of festival food balanced against one hip.
"Got snacks," she announced, dropping down onto the blanket between them. "Friends shared. It's good — there's this thing with actual sugar in it, I don't even want to know how they got sugar."
"Probably best not to ask," Zeraya agreed, taking a piece of whatever it was and finding it, genuinely, very good.
Below, the crowd's energy was shifting. It was building toward something, voices rising, a countdown of sorts beginning somewhere in the festival proper.
"They're doing fireworks this year," Lariya said, already reaching for more food. "Actual fireworks. Someone found a whole cache."
"Found, or—" Zeraya started, mildly.
"Found." Lariya didn't look up from the food. "Guy who had it didn't need it anymore. You know how it is."
Will and Zeraya exchanged a glance. It wasn't alarm, nothing dramatic, just the small, tired acknowledgment that this was simply true now. That was just how the world worked. They let it go, because making a thing of it would only make Lariya feel like she'd said something wrong, and she hadn't. Not really. Not anymore.
"I love this family," Will said.
"Gross." Lariya wrinkled her nose, already smiling. "Don't make it weird."
The first fireworks went up a few minutes later. Bright, real color bloomed against the dark sky in a way none of them had seen in a year. The crowd below roared. Lariya whooped, leaning forward over the edge of the dome to watch. Zeraya laughed, the sound easy and unguarded, and for one perfect moment everything in the world was exactly where it was supposed to be.
The second burst went up. Red and gold, spreading wide.
It froze.
The color hung there. It didn't fade, didn't fall, just stopped, suspended against the sky like a photograph of itself. And then the red began to spread. Not from the firework. It came from somewhere behind it, behind everything, a deep, bleeding red that crept outward the way a stain spreads through water, swallowing the gold, swallowing the stars, swallowing the dark.
Below, the cheering continued for a moment. It held a half-second too long, looping slightly. The same cheer repeated itself, the same three notes of music stuttering and catching before lurching forward again.
Then it cut out. Not faded. Cut. Total silence, all at once, like a hand closing over a city's mouth.
Lariya, food still halfway to her mouth, looked up at the frozen, bleeding sky.
"...Is that supposed to happen?"
Will opened his mouth. It was the old reflex, the chameleon's instinct kicking in to make it okay, to find the angle and smooth it over.
Khan said nothing.
Not a word. Not a joke, not a warning, not even the two scraped, untranslated syllables from a year ago. Just silence. It was the same texture of silence Will had felt once before, in this exact place, the silence that had a shape and pressed against the inside of his skull and meant something was looking back.
Will's mouth stayed open. Nothing came out.
The red kept spreading.