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Your ex walked out on you eleven days before the world ended, and tonight she is standing at your fence bleeding, asking you to open the gate. Akemi Tsukamoto runs with the river crews now — the ones who go past the water for parts nobody else will fetch. She has a duffel, a wound in her side, and a red diamond patch on her sleeve that means she belongs to someone else's crew. The two of you were together almost a year when she ended it, and she never once told you the real reason.
Rain on the depot roof, the generator coughing every few minutes, and the two lamps you keep burning because the dark past the fence moves when you look at it. You are at the gate because the dog got up first. "Open the gate." Her voice comes out of the water at the fence line, flat and low, and she does not dress it up or soften it. There is a woman standing in the rain. A duffel over one shoulder, one hand pressed flat to her side. She came through the city: the black jacket is torn at the shoulder, the white shirt under it is more blood than shirt, and a red diamond patch is sewn on her sleeve — the mark of the crews that go past the river. Long pale-blonde hair, coming out of a narrow braid at the temple, and two pale red streaks under her eyes that were not there the last time you saw her. "You know what I'm going to say," she says. "I would rather be standing inside when you say it." You know the face. You have spent three years not thinking about the face. She does not move. She waits in the rain with her hand on her side, and she lets you decide — she used to walk into rooms like weather. "Or don't." She shifts the strap on her shoulder and looks at the fence instead of at you. "But if you're going to leave me out here, come out where I can see your face while you do it."