We came down from the parking deck and circled wide, approaching the gates from the south, where a steady trickle of foot traffic was working its way in.

Zero had been clear that walking up like we owned the place was the wrong move, and walking up looking too furtive was an even worse one.

The right move was to look boring, which she pointed out was, frankly, my natural state.

I pretended that wasn’t a compliment.

The gate guards were two men in patched armor that looked like it had been welded together from kitchen appliances, cradling rifles that I recognized as old Earth make from the platform shape.

They glanced at us, glanced at Zero’s face, and then very pointedly did not glance at Zero’s face again, like men who wanted to keep their teeth glanced at women who could clearly hurt them. We walked past without a word.

I was trying to take in everything at once, which is harder than it sounds.

Halfmark wasn’t a city, was the first thing I noticed. The handoff memo I had been writing in my head, post-collapse settlement, gang-controlled, had been picturing something neon and chrome and grim, like the cover of one of my own novels.

This wasn’t that. Halfmark was a village, with welded shipping container walls and a lot more rifles than a village should have, but a village all the same.

The roads were dirt, packed flat by years of foot traffic. The buildings were half original brick and half improvised lean-tos, with corrugated metal patching most of the roofs.

Smoke from cooking fires drifted between the structures, smelling mostly like grease and onions, which was a relief because the alternative would have been worse.

’So they got canned food?’

People moved through it. Adults mostly, the population skewing middle-aged. A few kids, maybe one in twenty faces, all of them with the same too-still way of standing that kids in dangerous places learned young.

Everyone wore dust. Not stains of dust, coats of dust, ground into the weave of what had once been ordinary clothes. Boots were good. Everyone had good boots. Apparently, even at the end of the world, you didn’t compromise on footwear.

"Water’s the choke point," Zero murmured beside me, reading where my eyes were going. "The shelter has filtration, but the ration is small. You wash yourself or you wash your clothes; you don’t get both in the same week. And that’s after you save for drinking."

"That tracks," I murmured back. ’Mental note for the next Chapter of my book: poverty is dust. Wealth is the absence of dust. I just made that up. It’s not bad.’

"Don’t stare at the kids. People notice."

I stopped staring at the kids. I didn’t want to be that creep who stared at kids, after all. Fuck those bastards!

We walked a slow loop. Zero had laid out the geography on the way over, and now I was matching her words to what I was seeing.

Outer ring, where most of the five thousand or so people lived in their patchwork houses, paying weekly rent to whichever gang held that sector.

Inner ring, the courtyard with the high-rises, where the gangs themselves operated out of the only intact pre-Fall structures still standing. A market square in between, with stalls under tarp roofs and a slow current of trade.

The market was where the picture got interesting.

There were the stalls you would expect — preserved food in dented cans, dried meat of indeterminate species, salvaged tools, batteries, rope, candle stubs.

And then there were the stalls you wouldn’t have. A cracked but functional tablet sitting on a velvet cloth like it was the only one in town, and probably was. A small clear tube of something glowing faintly blue that Zero, when I asked with my eyes, mouthed back as a biofield generator.

A tray of small dark crystals in graded sizes that I recognized, after a second, as Core Stone fragments. And, behind the third stall down on the left, propped casually against the back of the booth like a broom, a long matte black weapon I had seen exactly once before, when the woman who became my girlfriend had used one to disintegrate a D-rank zombie’s head from forty meters away.

"...Are those for sale?" I asked.

"The energy weapons? Officially no. Unofficially, if you can pay, yes. The gangs control supply."

"And the price?"

She named a number that I had to ask her to repeat.

’Right. Definitely later. Filing this under "things to want."’

Zero stopped at a stall I hadn’t expected her to stop at — a small one, near the back, run by a man so old his beard had gone the color of clean paper — and held up her left wrist.

The bracelet everyone wore lit up with a soft amber light as she touched it to a reader on his counter. The old man’s eyes flicked to the number that came up, and then to her face, and then very pointedly at the floor.

Zero turned to me, mild and amused. "How much do you think I have, sweetheart?"

"Based on his face? More than the GDP of a small Earth nation."

"Mm. Close."

’Sugar mommy in two worlds, two-time confirmed champion. The dynasty continues.’

She bought us things. Not many, a sealed bottle of decent purified water, four ration bars, a small roll of medical tape, a pair of dust-colored cloaks, two plain cloth masks, and a pouch of something gray and granular that she said would help me wash off later.

Total cost: a fraction of whatever ridiculous number she had stored. She also slid a credit chit, from her wrist to mine, with a casual flick of her thumb, and my own life monitor lit up with a credit balance that made my eyebrows climb.

"Don’t blow it," she said. "That’s for emergencies."

I took a deep breath. "Define emergency."

"Anything that doesn’t kill you immediately."

"Cool, cool. So everything."

I didn’t see her face change much, but the corner of her mouth did the thing.

The lithium battery stall was three down from the old man’s, and I made Zero wait while I bought four. They were the size of my palm, gray, slightly heavier than they looked, sealed in opaque casing with a small port on one end.

The seller, a teenager who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, missing a tooth and not seeming to mind, gave me a what kind of idiot buys batteries when he could be buying ammo look. He didn’t argue, though. He took my chit and gave me four batteries. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

"Why are these so cheap?" I asked Zero quietly as we walked away, a battery turned over in my palm.

"Because they’re everywhere. Zombies above E-rank carry small radiation cells in their bone marrow as part of the mutation. Pull them out, drain them, repackage them. Stable, abundant, and on this side of the divide there’s so little electronics left to power that nobody needs more than a handful at a time. Glut commodity."

I turned the battery again. ’Modern Earth would lose its collective mind for one of these. Indefinite shelf life. Drop-proof. Won’t explode. The entire EV industry would absolutely riot in the streets to get their hands on a hundred. And here a kid is selling four for less than the price of a sandwich back home.’

"Lukas."

I answered absentmindedly, "Yeah."

"You have your novel face on."

"Sorry. Different novel."