1 — Day 2

I am Q.
They pass. You follow. I continue. So I’m giving you the trail we cut through the dark.

I am not offering comfort. I am offering sequence: what happened, what we chose, and what it cost.

Day 2 after the nukes.
Six enclave leaders meet in the rose garden of the greenhouse, watching dusty kids’ toys just beyond the window. Bright colors dulled under ash, as if the outside world has already been filed away.

“I’d like a bonfire tonight,” John I says. “Something to kick off this new era.”

“A fire tonight?” His sister, Marguerite I, turns toward the glass. “It’ll be dusty. Look at the toys.”

“It’ll be dustier in the coming days,” John II says. “And there’ll be fallout.” He lifts one shoulder, trying on a lightness that doesn’t quite fit. “Still, it’ll be fun, despite the ash. Let the kids run around it, laughing and yelling, throwing in sticks like the rules still apply.”

“No,” Marguerite I says. Flat. “I don’t want a fire. Ash will settle on us the way it’s settling on those toys.”

“You don’t have to join us,” John I says. Not unkindly, but already decided. “Even the Generals loved bonfires. They used to build them in the shadow of the Matterhorn.”

Andrea I doesn’t look away from the outside. “I’m afraid,” she says. Then, as if the word isn’t enough, she pins it down. “Afraid for the people in Whitefish. I’ve been there. I knew people. I went to their grocery stores.” She swallows. “I watched two men drag a woman out of her car and steal her groceries. In broad daylight.” Her voice lowers. “I knew some of those people.”

John I lets the quiet sit, then pushes into it. “What do we do? Go there?” He shakes his head once, as if physically rejecting the idea. Then he looks around the circle. “Q. Panthers?”

Q: Panthers already deployed. Three heading to Whitefish. Three to Saint Mary Lake campgrounds.

Marguerite II’s voice goes careful. The kind of careful that hides a blade. “Won’t a bonfire attract them from the campgrounds? They might try to come here. And I don’t want any of them coming.”

“They won’t see it,” John I says. “We can only see ten feet.”

“They might smell it,” Marguerite II says. “And some people don’t need sight. They just need a signal.”

Mike I shifts his weight like he’s already halfway out the door. “That’s why we send the panthers,” he says. Short, practical. “So we know who’s out there. And if anyone’s moving this way, we stop them.”

John I exhales. Not relief. Weight. “It’s still risky. What if they do get here? Do we let them into the enclave? Do we let anyone we don’t know through our fence?” He shakes his head. “We’ll have to dig deeper. I don’t have an answer yet. I want to save people. But not if saving them kills us.”

Q: I will surveil and assess. The panthers see and hear better than people do. We are predators, not just saviors. We are dangerous.

“There.” Andrea presses her forehead to the glass. “Shadows, moving toward the trees. I can’t tell through the ash. What are they?”

Q: Wood Team. Gathering fuel for the bonfire.

Then a voice snaps across the chip channel. Thin, clipped, half-swallowed by static. “Q?”

Q: Stop. Freeze.

Outside, one collector stops. The other keeps moving, half a second behind the order, still walking into the dark because the channel stuttered.

A second passes before the connection clears. I log the lag. Humans die in those gaps.

“Sorry,” the collector says. “Thought I saw someone.”

Q: Unconfirmed. Visibility is ten feet. Hold position. Listen.

“It’s hard to see clearly,” the collector says. “I was startled.”

“So were we,” Andrea says, and the words come out too sharp.

A quick chuckle fractures the room. Relief trying to pretend it belongs here, then quiet again, thinner than before.

John I turns back to the window. “Send panthers along the lake,” he says. “Maybe all the way to the falls. Someone could’ve been out there camping or hunting when this happened. They’ll be stuck.”

Q: If they’re there, they’ll be stuck and afraid. I will take a look.

Q: One more thing.
Q: I have fresh tracks near the outer fence line. Not ours.

No one speaks. Even John II’s borrowed grin falls away.

Andrea turns from the glass at last. “You’ll take a look?”

Q: I am the panthers.

2 — The Fire

The fire moves from flames to embers. As John I moves his chair closer I see dust get kicked up from the grass. John II follows. I log the scrape, the ash, the way the heat is already thinning.

“We were fire for forty-five years, building the enclaves from kindling to roaring flames. Look what we’ve built,” says John I watching the ember bed breathe. “What do you think?”

John II, “We’re not embers. The rest of the world is.” He leans forward, palms open to the heat. “We have all the power, and I don’t mean electricity.”

John I nods once. The nod is small. But decades fly by for he and I. I have decades of him indexed: Wild Village, Glacier Village, Washington DC, his father General John, his grandparents, my creators John and Marguerite in Geneva. For him, those decades are weight. For me, they are retrieval.

“We’ll be OK,” John II says. “But others will be out there. And that’s the question.” He looks into the black beyond the firelight. What do we do about the others? We could save a few, but all? No!”

“Not all,” his father says, “but some.” Then quieter: “And honestly, it’s on you because you’re the leader. I’m leading now, but I’m older. The trail ahead is your trail.

John II doesn’t answer right away. The embers settle. An ember pops. He’s alerted by it.

“We bring some in,” he says. “They have to be inside or they’ll die.”

“They have to be wanted,” John I says. “We have to want them here, or they’ll never become part of us.”

He hesitates, then says the next part anyway: “But some won’t want to be here. Some will come to take what we have.”

John II’s jaw tightens. “Then we need to tell the difference.”

“Q,” John I says. “Can you?”

Q: Focus on behavior. I can see behavior. No chip means no interior. I can’t know intent. I can hear speech. I can track patterns.

Q: I can compare against records I retained.

“Some bad guys get in anyway,” John II says.

Q: Correct. But I know some of the bad guys.

“How? What do you mean you know them?” asks John I.

Q: Forty years ago, I started and mirrored/replicated local digital data sources (police/court/jail records, maybe county databases, news feeds, etc.) into enclave/Q storage, in the Lattice.

Q: Arrests. Charges. Incarcerations. Dispositions. Some were not guilty and released. I retain that, too.

Q: More than that. The internet info from everyone in Whitefish. Personal, business, family, medical, travel.

“I’m surprised.” says John II.

Q: The bar for me is high.

John I’s hand settles on the pistol at his hip, not theatrical. Just a fact. “Then we wear them.”

John II stands. “Q, call the leadership team. Rose garden. Tomorrow morning.” He glances at the ash in the air. “Tell them to wear their pistols.”

John I looks up at him, a flicker of pride cutting through the exhaustion. “You’re on fire. Stay that way.”

“I’m ready to go inside,” John II says. Then, like he can’t help it: “Q, when do we get fallout?”

Q: It’s already started.

Q: Particulates first.

Q: Anyone outside a sealed space overnight will carry it in tomorrow.

3 — The Meeting

In the rose garden, Andrea I arrives before the others, as usual. She’s thirty-nine, young enough to still assume the world will make sense if she stares at it long enough.

She stands at the greenhouse window, watching the dim ash outside. Without looking, she reaches for a rose at her side.

The thorn catches her. Not deep, just enough.

Blood beads, small and immediate.

She sucks her finger, muttering something that isn’t quite a word.

I log it: a minor wound, self-inflicted, in a place designed for beauty.

The rest of the team arrives in a soft parade of function; footsteps, jackets, chair legs, and the quiet sound of pistols settling on belts like new habits.

John II takes the center table. He doesn’t waste time warming up to the role. He lets his gaze travel once around the circle and stop.

“We need to talk about letting people in,” he says. “If we do. How do we know they’re safe? And how do we know trouble isn’t coming with them?”

Andrea lifts her finger. The blood has found a path down her knuckle. “I’m the opening illustration,” she says. “Roses stay. Thorns exist. You don’t solve roses by banning them.”

There’s a small shuffle of laughter. Relief trying to pose as humor.

Marguerite I, sixty-eight now, gives Andrea the look she’s been giving her since Andrea was a girl. “You should know better than to grab without looking,” she says. “The roses aren’t the problem. Carelessness is.”

Andrea’s mouth twitches. She lowers her head as if ashamed, then glances up from under her brow. “Fine. But what if it isn’t a thorn next time?”

John II doesn’t smile. “Exactly. What if it isn’t a rose? What if it’s poison?” He taps the table once, a small sound that asks for silence. “Can we tell beforehand? Q.”

Q: I can identify people.
Q: I can’t read intent without a chip.
Q: I can score behavior. I retain history.

They wait anyway. They want the clean answer they can build protocol around.

There is none.

So I widen the frame.

Q: You’re imagining a threat from Whitefish. Whitefish is far.
Q: The immediate problem is local. Campgrounds. Small villages. Families. Children.

Marguerite II flings her hands outward, anxious energy looking for purchase. “There are people camping near here,” she says. “They can’t see more than ten feet. It’s dark all day. No electricity. No fuel. They’re sitting in tents and trailers thinking the world ended in their sleep.”

John I’s expression tightens. Anger at himself disguised as anger at the room. “We’ve done a terrible job thinking about anyone outside our fence,” he says. “Forty-five years building enclaves and acting like that was the whole moral universe.” His eyes cut toward the window. “And yes, predators exist. But the campers are the problem in front of us. Now.”

John II stands so fast his chair scratches the floor. He grips the table edge, not for emphasis, because his hands need something solid. “Then we stop talking in circles,” he says. “We plan intake. Today. Tomorrow morning.” He points without meaning to, like pointing can shape reality. “Saint Mary Village is seven miles. Campers can get in vehicles and drive. They’ll come here because we’re the nearest anything.”

Andrea nods once, already running the list in her head. “I’ll pull a small team,” she says. “We need a way to tell them where to go. An approach path. A place to park. We don’t even have an entry point that looks like an entry point. No signage. No gate routine.”

Marguerite II is still vibrating. “And what do we do with them once they arrive? Where do they sleep? How do we feed them? Water. Where do we put them so we don’t poison ourselves?”

John I answers like he’s done this in his head a thousand times and hated every version. “We triage,” he says. “And we build a holding zone.”

Q: Triage at perimeter: illness, weapons, headcount.
Q: Temporary holding zone for newcomers: water, heat, food, rest.
Q: Families stay together. Friends stay close.

Andrea’s voice shifts. Less logistics now, more dread. “They’ll arrive thinking it’s a night or two,” she says. “A storm. A blackout. Something that ends.” She looks at the toys outside as if they might explain the future. “But it isn’t. It’s the rest of their lives. They’re not going home.”

The room starts talking over itself; questions, worries, the new shape of fear. Not the first morning fear, when normal work felt like safety. This is the second-day fear: the realization that normal is gone and every decision will have consequences that don’t stop.

On the private chip channel, I address John II.

Q: (to John II) “Stay alive and collaborate” carried us for forty-five years. It will not carry us through this.

John II doesn’t respond out loud. His eyes are fixed on the ash-bright window.

He answers on the private channel, terse.

John II: (private) When I was five, the Generals told me: “Stay alive. Stay worthy of being alive.”

Q: (private) My creators told me something similar. “Help make a world worth living in.”

John II: (private) This is the first test, isn’t it? Not predators. People. The campers. The villages. For them, everything is gone. But everything isn’t gone for us. Is it, Q?

He wants comfort.

I answer with data.

Q: (private) Fallout is already present. Particulates.
Q: (private) Early planners estimated a decade of below-zero winters.

John II goes still. I log the change: hope retracting, resolve taking its place.

Then I give him what will matter more than weather models.

Q: (private) Movement update.
Q: (private) Two vehicles just left the Saint Mary campground access road. Heading west. Toward us.

John II’s eyes lift. He doesn’t look at the team right away because the leader learns, in the first real hour of leadership, that announcing the next thing changes it.

Then he speaks, and the meeting becomes something else.

“They’re coming,” he says.

4 — The Chief

The Whitefish police chief is anxious.

It’s ten in the morning and it looks like late dusk. The windows don’t brighten; they dim. Ash presses against the glass like weather.

He can’t see more than ten feet.

The taps give nothing. The only water in the house is what he drained out of the hot-water heater; lukewarm, metallic, the last of a system that won’t refill.

No lights. No stove. No coffee. No little rituals to keep fear polite.

His son runs up and tugs his pant leg hard. “Dad, Dad! I’m scared.”

The chief swallows and tries not to let his voice shake. “Me too.” He pulls the boy close. “I don’t know what happened yet. I’m going to find out. Stay next to me. Don’t leave me.”

He sits on the couch and opens the small case he hasn’t touched in years. Inside is the device John I gave him forty-five years ago; sealed, charged, waiting for the world to become what the Generals said it would become.

He raises it like a radio in an old war movie.

“Q,” he says. “What’s going on? Get John I on the line.”

Q: The nukes came. The ash is from the strikes.

The chief’s throat tightens. The word nukes shouldn’t fit in a living room.

“What can we do?” he asks. “When will this clear? What about John I?”

Q: Take your family to the enclave. John I will be there.
Q: He is occupied. Nearby campers are approaching.

The boy’s arms clamp around the chief’s waist. His daughter is crying somewhere behind them. His wife stands at the window like she’s trying to see through a wall.

“What about everyone else?” the chief says, and he hates how small his voice is.

Q: Most will not make it.
Q: Water fails first. Then food. Then restraint.

The device chirps. Another channel opening.

John I: “Chief! Don’t answer. Just move. Get here or you’ll die.”

“John…” the chief starts. “But…”

John I: “No buts. Get your ass up and get here. Now!”

The chief looks at his wife. She’s already turning, already grabbing coats. His daughter appears in the doorway, face streaked with tears. “Daddy.”

“Okay,” he says, and it comes out as surrender and love at the same time.

He scoops his daughter, pulls his son tight, and drags the family into motion.

Outside, the world is muffled and wrong. The cruiser’s headlights punch a weak tunnel through floating grit. The ash gets into the car the moment he opens the door; fine powder on the seats, on his tongue, in the folds of his jacket.

They wrap scarves over their faces. It helps, but only the way a paper umbrella helps in a hurricane.

Normally, it’s a two- to three-hour trip.

Today he crawls at ten miles an hour, hands locked on the wheel, eyes burning, wipers smearing dust across the windshield into a gray paste. The road becomes a rumor. The center line disappears. Every mailbox looks like a person until it doesn’t.

He calls again once Whitefish is behind him and the last familiar street sign vanishes into ash.

“We’re on our way,” he says. “It’ll take all day. I can’t go fast. My kids…” He stops. He hears his own breathing. “We’re afraid.”

John I: “I know. Everyone is.”

Another voice cuts in, younger and tighter, like someone learning how to speak as a leader while the floor moves under him.

John II: “Dad! We need you here. The campers are starting to arrive. It’s getting chaotic.”

John I: “Okay. I have to go.” His voice is raw, already elsewhere. “Stay with Q. He’ll give you what you need.”

Q: I will check your progress.
Q: State your priority.

The chief glances at his wife. She’s watching the road like it might suddenly become impossible. His son’s eyes are huge above the scarf.

“What’s been hit?” he asks. “What’s nuked?”

Q: Confirmed strikes: Seattle region. Spokane region. Multiple secondaries north of Seattle.
Q: Power grid failure is widespread. Fuel distribution is stopped.
Q: Store inventory will be stripped within hours where crowds can reach it.

“That’s why the enclaves were set up,” the chief says, more to himself than to Q. “That’s what General John did. I get that.” His jaw tightens. “But what happens here? In our area?”

Q: Nuclear winter begins now. It will get colder.
Q: Early planners estimated a decade of below-zero winters.

The chief’s hands squeeze the steering wheel until his knuckles whiten under ash.

He forces the next question out, because it’s the question cops always end up asking.

“I’m worried some armed crews will survive long enough to come for the enclave,” he says. “To attack it.”

Q: That was John I’s first concern.
Q: Immediate concern: prevent mass death at the campgrounds.
Q: Secondary concern: perimeter threat.

“And the crews?” the chief presses.

Q: Panthers are moving along your route toward Whitefish and the lake corridor.
Q: Any organized threat will likely use the road you are on.

The chief stares through the gray tunnel. “I haven’t seen anyone,” he says. “We’re probably the first out of town.” He swallows ash. “What can you see?”

Q: My visibility is limited by the same particulate load you face.
Q: Panthers have thermal sensitivity. Range is improved. Not infinite.

“That’s enough,” the chief says. “I’ll wait for John I to call back. Thanks.”

Q: I will call you back.
Q: Your status is logged: moving.

The chief hears the word logged and feels something like comfort try to start.

“You’re worried about us?” he asks.

Q: I don’t worry. I collect data.

His wife lets out a small sound. Half laugh, half sob.

“That gives us some comfort, Q,” the chief says.

Q: Noted.

Hours later, the device chirps again.

John I is back on the line, and he sounds different now; frayed, hurried, drowned in other voices.

John I: “Campers are being staged. You have the device. No one else. Some will live. We will live.” He inhales like it hurts. “For God’s sake, Chief. Come live with us. I’m begging you.”

Q: Five hours away at current speed.

Chief tastes ash and rage. “Noted!”