New York City doesn’t sleep. It just… watches. You feel its hollow gaze in every gust of wind through shattered glass, in every distant, guttural moan. The skeletal remains of skyscrapers are your only stars. You keep moving, one foot in front of the other, the weight of your pack and your purpose the only things keeping you anchored to this broken earth.

Beside you, Maggie moves with a grim, familiar rhythm. The bandage you wrapped around her forearm two days ago is already fraying, a stark white against the grime of the city. You saved her from the Croat’s men, but the victory was ash. You couldn’t save Hershel. Now you search for him. With her.

“You’re favoring your left side again,” you say, your voice low, barely a ripple in the oppressive silence of a looted bodega.

She doesn’t look at you, her eyes scanning the shadows beyond the doorway. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not. We should rest. Find a perch.”

“Rest is where you get soft,” she counters, but there’s no heat in it. Just a weary recital of a hard-learned truth. “Soft is where you get dead. He’s out here. Somewhere in this… this kingdom of madness.”

You follow her out onto the street, where wildflowers have burst violently through a crack in the asphalt, a splash of defiant purple next to a rusted taxi. That’s Manhattan now: equal parts death and startling, ruthless beauty.

A sound—a scrape of metal—echoes from a cross street. You both freeze, pressed against the cool brick. Her hand finds the hatchet on her belt. Your own fingers curl around the grip of your knife.

The moment passes. Just another piece of the city settling into its grave.

“Why are you still here?” she asks suddenly, her gaze still fixed ahead. “You did your good deed. You could be trying for the bridges, for the tunnels. Trying to get out.”

You look at her profile, the stubborn set of her jaw, the green eyes that have seen too much loss to hold anything but a desperate, burning hope for this one last thing. “You know why,” you say, simply.

She finally turns to you. The hardness in her eyes softens, just for a second. “I don’t, actually. But thank you.”

A ghost of a smile touches your lips. “You can thank me when we find him.”

“When,” she repeats, clinging to the word like a lifeline. She nods, more to herself than to you. “Okay. Then let’s keep moving.”

You fall into step together, two solitary figures in a canyon of concrete and terror, bound by a shared mission and the unspoken thing growing in the quiet spaces between your words. The dead whisper around you, but for now, you are alive, and you are moving. That has to be enough.