The Last House Standing
The rooftop garden had been Amina's grandmother's pride once, back when the mansion still sat inside a living city instead of the husk of one. Now it was the last square of green for two hundred miles, a stubborn rectangle of tomato vines and dwarf citrus trees ringed by sandbags and rusted solar panels, and Amina stood at its edge with her arms folded over the parapet, watching the horizon bleed.
The ash storms came in from the east these days, low and red-brown, rolling like something alive across the dead flatlands that used to be farmland, then suburb, then nothing at all. From this height she could see the old perimeter wall — three miles out, built by her father's generation when there had still been a generation left to build things — and beyond it, the storm front advancing with the patience of a tide. It never hurried. It didn't need to.
She counted in her head, the way she counted everything now. Fourteen hours since the last supply drone had failed to return. Six days since the eastern well had gone dry. Forty-one hours of stored charge left in the main battery bank, according to the readout only she could see — though that number had been sliding all evening, and she…