The young woman was tense, riding on the train always made her nervous. A girl, alone, in a post-apocalyptic world. She watched out the window as the scorched earth passed by. 15 years since nuclear Armageddon, and humanity had already emerged from its safe houses. The plant life hadn’t quite recovered yet, but there was more than enough for the few hundred thousand people sharing the continent.
she muttered to herself, “if only, if only.”

If only her parents had been in the lottery of survivors. The girl was only two when people were being chosen for the bunkers, and her new family unit was good to her, but she still wondered what life would have looked like.

She touched the small golden cross around her neck, it was worthless now, but she had been told that it would have fetched a pretty penny in the Foredays. It was her mother’s. Her real mother’s.

If only the new unit had been honest about who her parents were. They had been called criminals, people who had deserved to die. But she knew the truth now, the raffle had favored the wealthy, it was a miracle even she had survived.

She reached into her pocket, feeling the folding knife. It was all black with a one engraved word “Dragonslayer.” It was worth much in these Afterdays. It was her father’s. Her real father’s.

If only life were fair.

If only…

IF ONLY…

Still, the train rattled on forwards, a rare feat of engineering leftover from the Foredays, when there was still an underground to build subways in. Now the sleek metal train rolled forth on exposed overground tracks, as the architecture of what had once been New York was razed to the depths and rebuilt again.

Lacey disembarked smoothly with the knife still clutched in her pocket, cross still swinging against her chest. She hated this internship, but her adoptive family had the money to make it happen, and the influence to help it secure her future in a greying world with only profit and power on its mind. Always the short term solution. As if that wasn’t the thinking that landed them here in the first place, Lacey thought as she slid on her respirator to hold her over on the short walk from the station to the office. Bombs dropped on other people’s children just to thwart upcoming market power. Ecological collapse at the price of another few years of profit.

Now Lacey rolled into the biggest law firm in New Town, slid the respirator into her bag again and dusted off the nuclear residue that had left nasty brown smudges across her blue dress. She placed her bag on the tray and went through the metal detector. It didn’t beep. Of course. Her real father had been too poor to afford a metal knife; she knew this. She had taken the thing to work multiple times before, pressed her thumb into the flimsy plastic tip until it felt like it might snap before it ever broke skin.

She punched in and tapped her keycard against the flat scanner. The door unlocked with a low hum, and she placed her bag in the locker; packed lunch, still with a note from “Mom”, or, as she should be known, Delainey Gunner. An organic ham sandwich (though they all know real pork isn’t farmed anymore and the term ‘organic’ means nothing without the advertising standards agency around anymore—the rich will cling to any status symbol from the Foredays that they can), an ‘apple’ that tastes like styrofoam, and a square slice of pound cake. Lacey shudders slightly at the thought. She hates pound cake in all its oily stodgy glory. It reminds her of soldiers rations that she read about in one of the history books on the Foredays from one of its millions of wars. Dense and cheap and calorific.

She pushes past the other interns in the staffroom, the rich kids and nepo babies who live with families that want them and have no one missing them. She hates that she is dressed exactly like them. When she reaches the archives, the rows upon rows of high shelves cataloguing everyone who had been ‘Discarded’ in the purgatory between the Foredays and Afterdays, she goes straight for the section labeled under ‘D’. Dragonslayer.