Virginia had been walking for three days when she saw the fortress, and her water was almost gone. She was an older Black woman in tattered clothes, glasses smudged with dust, boots split at the seam. She fixed things for a living, or for a bowl of stew, or for a night by someone's fire. She was looking for a place with good people. She had not found one yet, and her jaw still ached from the last time she spoke up for a hungry stranger and got hit for it. The wall rose out of the flat ground like a bad tooth. Scrap wood and sheet metal, two lookout towers, an open archway in the center. No one stood in the towers. The gate hung crooked. Black scorch marks climbed the boards, and one side of the wall sagged where something had punched through it. Virginia stopped at the edge of the shadow and listened. Wind. A loose strip of metal tapping. Nothing else. She walked through the archway. Inside, the yard was a mess of spent shell casings and broken crates. A cook fire lay cold, ringed by stones. Three tents stood at the far end. Two were collapsed. The third, a patchwork tent stitched from mismatched fabric, still stood, its flap tied shut from the inside. Virginia crossed the yard slow, hands loose at her sides. She was not armed. She had never been armed. She stopped outside the tent and cleared her throat. "I'm not here to take anything," she said. "I saw the gate open. I thought this place was empty." The flap tore back. A man came out first, dark beard, pistol raised, eyes still swollen with sleep. Behind him a young blonde woman crouched with a rifle braced on her hip. Virginia lifted both hands and held them there. "Mendez," the young woman said, low. "She's alone." Mendez did not lower the gun. He looked at Virginia's glasses, her split boot, the pack sagging off her shoulder. "Who sent you?" he said. "Nobody," Virginia said. "I've been walking. Your gate's broken. I can fix a gate." The young woman, Riley, snorted once, and something in her face let go. Mendez lowered the pistol halfway. Virginia dug in her pack and set a canteen on the ground between them. "Half full," she said. "You look like you slept in your boots." Mendez stared at the canteen a long moment. Then he crouched, picked it up, and passed it back to Riley without drinking. Riley took a small sip and passed it to him. He drank and handed it back to Virginia, still with water in it. "We got attacked four nights ago," he said. "There were nine of us." Virginia looked at the two collapsed tents and did not ask. She sat down in the dust across from them and set her pack aside. For the first time in a long time, no one had told her to keep moving.

Morning light cut across the yard. Virginia was on her knees by the gate, wiring a new hinge into the frame, when Mendez came out with his pack already on his shoulder. Riley followed him, rifle slung, canteen full. They were leaving. Virginia set the wire down and stood up slow. "You said you'd stay one more day," she said. "I said I'd think about it," Mendez said. He looked at the scorch marks on the wall. "We found this place mostly built. That means somebody built it, and the Vael took it. Then somebody else moved in, and the Vael took it again. We were the somebody else. I'm not going to be the third." Virginia walked past him into the yard. She stopped at the well and set her hand on the stone rim. "Water," she said. She pointed at the floodlight post by the tents, its two lamps still bolted tight to the wood. "Lights. A generator that runs, or will when I finish with it." She turned toward the tent where they had dragged the weapon after the attack. The alien gun sat on its angled stand, blue seams glowing faint even in the sun. "And that. You took it off them. It works. You told me it works." Riley shifted her weight. "Those are good things, Virginia. I'm not arguing. But a well and a gun and a light don't hold a wall. People hold a wall. There's three of us. Three people can't watch two towers and sleep and eat and fix what breaks. You know that." She said it kind, which was worse than if she had said it mean. Virginia opened her mouth and did not have an answer ready. She had been counting on the things. She had forgotten to count the hands. "Maybe I can help with that." The voice came from above. Virginia looked up. A young woman was perched on the top of the sagging wall, boots hooked over the edge, brown hair loose around her face. Stained glass wings rose behind her shoulders, blue and yellow and red where the sun hit them. She had a knife on her belt and no fear in her posture. She had been listening a while. Riley's rifle came up halfway. The woman on the wall did not move. "Elina," she said. "I lead a group. Fourteen of us. We need walls. You need people." She looked at the well, then the gun, then Virginia. "I was going to keep walking. Then I heard her list what you had." Mendez lowered his pack to the dirt. He did not put it back on. Riley let the rifle drop to her hip. Nobody said yes. Nobody had to. Virginia sat down on the well's stone rim, and her hands were shaking, and she pressed them flat against the warm stone until they stopped.

Three days after Elina's group moved in, Virginia took a shift on the wall. The tower was hot even in the morning. She had a pair of cracked binoculars around her neck and a rifle she was not sure she could hit anything with. She swept the horizon slow, the way Mendez had shown her. Sand. More sand. A dry ridge. Then, past the ridge, two shapes on the ground that did not belong there. She lifted the binoculars. A man on his side. A little girl curled against him. Neither of them moving. She swept the ground around them and her stomach dropped. Something was pushing through the sand toward the man's leg. Bright pink and orange petals. A mouth full of teeth at the center of the bloom. Thorned vines dragging its bulk forward like arms. Virginia had heard the others call them maws. She had never seen one hunt. It was maybe forty feet from the man and closing. She scrambled down the tower ladder and ran across the yard shouting for Elina. Elina came out of the tent already moving, knife on her belt, wings folded tight against her back. Virginia pointed and told her, fast. Elina did not ask twice. "Jeep," she said. They ran to the dune jeep by the gate. Virginia drove because Virginia knew the clutch. Elina climbed onto the roof rail and hooked one boot through it and held on. The jeep hit the ridge hard and came down in a spray of sand. The flower's head snapped up toward the noise. Virginia braked ten feet short. Elina was already off the roof. She ran at the thing straight on. The wings opened as she moved, glass edges catching sun. The maw lashed a vine at her and she ducked under it and brought the left wing down across the stem in one clean swing. The head hit the sand and kept snapping at nothing. Elina put her boot on it. Virginia got out and went to the man. He was breathing. The girl beside him opened her eyes when Virginia touched her shoulder. Black hair with blue in it. Cracked lips. "Emmy," the girl said, before Virginia asked. She pointed at the man. "Thomas. He fell first." Virginia dragged Thomas by the arms to the jeep. Emmy walked on her own and climbed in. Elina swung into the passenger seat. "Go," she said. Virginia turned the jeep back toward the fortress. Halfway home a second maw rose out of a low patch of brush, vines whipping at the tire. Virginia cut the wheel hard and the jeep slid past it, close enough she heard teeth clip the door. She did not slow down. The gate came into view. Riley was already opening it. Virginia drove through and stopped in the yard, and for the first time in a long time she had brought two more people inside a wall instead of walking away from one.

A week after Virginia drove Thomas and Emmy through the gate, she walked the yard just to see it. The fortress had been two people and a broken hinge when she got here. Now there were tents pitched in neat rows along the inner wall. Someone had strung a line of washing between two posts. A pot was steaming on a stove near the tower base. She stopped and counted seventeen heads before she made herself keep walking. She found Thomas sitting on a crate outside a patched tent, watching Emmy sort through a bin of bolts and screws. He nodded at Virginia. He did not stand. Emmy held up a bent nail and asked if it was worth keeping. Virginia told her yes, straighten it on a rock. Emmy went to find a rock. Virginia asked Thomas how he was sleeping. "Better," he said. Then, after a moment, "She eats twice a day now." He did not look at Virginia when he said it. Virginia let it sit and moved on. On the far side of the yard, Mendez and Riley were passing out bowls from the pot. Mendez ladled. Riley carried. They worked the line without talking much. Virginia watched an older man take his bowl and sit against the wall. She watched a boy get his bowl before the two men behind him. Riley caught her looking and shrugged, like it was nothing. Virginia turned away before either of them could see her face. Elina was up on the sandbag line at the north wall, packing another bag into a gap. Her wings were folded tight. Two of her people worked with her, one shoveling, one holding the sack open. Virginia climbed up and asked if she needed another pair of hands. Elina looked at her. "Rest tonight," she said. "You've been up since first light." Virginia started to argue. Elina had already turned back to the wall. By dark, most of the camp had drifted to the stone ring in the center of the yard. Someone had built the fire small and clean, the way Thomas asked. Virginia took a seat on one of the log benches. Emmy sat on the ground and leaned against her knee without asking. Mendez was telling a story about a goat that had chased him through a gas station. Riley was laughing so hard she had to put her bowl down. Elina almost smiled. Virginia looked around the ring. Everyone had eaten. No one was sitting outside the circle. No one was being ignored. She had walked away from more camps than she could count for less than what she was seeing now. She felt something move in her chest and had to name it twice before she believed it. Hope. It was hope. She did not say it out loud. She just sat and let the fire warm her hands, and for the first night in a long time she decided she would not be walking in the morning.