The world had gone quiet long before Rhea was born. Cities were bones now — hollow towers eaten by moss and wind. The roads had cracked open like dry skin, swallowing what was left of the old world’s promises. Nobody talked about how it started anymore. A sickness, some said. A fever that cooked people from the inside, left them twitching and wrong when they came back. Others blamed the government, or the weather, or God.

Rhea just knew it had ended things.

After one of the things took the woman who raised her, not her mother, no, she died after Rhea's birth. Just a kind woman who took in a wailing child and raised her into a fighter, Rhea walked for six days, following rumors scraped together from strangers — a place that still worked, a place that shared. “The Commune,” they called it, like it was the last word left in the language.

When she finally saw the fence, she almost laughed. Rusted wire, metal sheets, car doors welded into a wall — ugly, desperate, and somehow still standing. Smoke rose beyond it, thin and gray against the dead sky.

People lived there. Real people.

Rhea stopped just short of the fence line, her breath catching. She wasn’t sure what she expected — salvation, maybe. Or a gun barrel aimed between her eyes. Out here, they were almost the same thing.

The first voice Rhea heard in days was a kid’s.

“Stop right there!”

It cracked halfway through, not quite the sound of authority — but the bow in the kid’s hands made up for it. The arrow was drawn, steady, aimed right at Rhea’s chest. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Pale, thin, with hair that looked like it hadn’t seen clean water in weeks. The kind of survivor the world wasn’t supposed to make anymore.

Rhea froze. The weight of her pack dug into her shoulders, heavier than it had any right to be. Behind the boy, a wall of welded scrap stretched in both directions — car doors, refrigerator panels, old fence wire. Smoke curled above it in careful ribbons. Civilization, fenced in and guarded by children. She raised her hands slowly. “I’m not here for trouble.”