Shards and Ashes

third is a drunk. Love’s a bad idea.” So Chris kept the words to himself and did his best to keep them both alive.

As usual with Chris, Harmony didn’t feel the need to distract either of them with unnecessary chatter. As he did that first night, he kept his arm around her as they walked. Silently, she checked that item off her mental list, too, and he didn’t comment on her insistence of replicating so many small details every night they went hunting. All he ever said was that it provided an excuse to keep their voices low as well as presenting a unified front against any watching devotees of the New Faith. Sometimes, in the thoughts she never shared, she thought of her fellow fighters as devotees of a faith, too. They were devoted to a god who hadn’t yet appeared, who maybe never would, but she believed he or she had to be out there in the universe. It was a quiet belief, with the sort of small rituals and whispered prayers that wouldn’t draw attention—or maybe it was a fantasy as much as Chastity’s dreams of a different future. Either way, it was better than the New Faith.

Most of the faithful were zealots, and like all zealots, they focused on some facts to the exclusion of all others. They had proof that their faith was true: their god was here on Earth. They didn’t want to discuss the fact that their god required human sacrifice, that he ate corpses, that a great destroyer wasn’t doing any favors to the civilization on Earth.

Within months after Nidhogg’s devotees revealed the presence of their corpse-eating god, all flights and ships from North America were refused docking or runway access across the globe. Any flights attempting access to foreign nations were summarily shot down; boats were sunk. Humans helped the Nidos—the reptilian creatures that had appeared and served Nidhogg—and the New Faith spread to South America within months. Within two years, most of North and South America was reduced to sporadic internet and telephone access with the outside world.

All of that had happened when she was still a kid. She’d never been outside the country, that she could remember. There were pictures of a trip to Europe when she was in elementary school, but by the time she was nine, everything had changed. There were vague memories of a life before the New Faith, but most of what she’d known was after Nidhogg. At seventeen, she’d lived half of her life under the pall of the New Religion. Sometimes, Harmony thought it was for the best: she didn’t want to remember a life that would never be again.

Since Nidos, despite their mostly human appearance, were—like Nidhogg itself—reptilian, they were unable to flourish in the upper reaches of North America. They could also be killed, and that was the chief victory of the resistance so far: they killed monster after monster. No one knew if it had any real impact. Killing the creatures, and the humans who supported them, had led to a few reclaimed towns—and the scant bit of useful intel that they had.

Despite some small victories, the exodus north had continued, but that was as far away from the corpse- eating new god that one could get. Although the access point between Alaska and Asia had not yet been breached by the Nidos, the fear of it was enough that humans weren’t allowed to cross into Asia either. People still tried, and stories circulated online of people claiming to have succeeded, but the truth was that anyone who tried to cross that barrier ended up dead for their efforts. The world that Harmony had been born into was long gone, and unless they could kill a god, it wouldn’t be returning to the relative safety they’d once known.

Chris finally asked, “Did you hear about Taylor?”

“He was a good guy. At least he got a clean death.” Harmony respected Taylor’s partner, Jess, a little bit more for putting the bullet in Taylor. Bullets attracted attention, but Jess had risked it to assure that he wasn’t thrown into one of the Nidos’ vats while still alive. Everyone who knew about the urns filled with decaying corpses was terrified of drowning in one.

When she’d first seen the photographs of the stew of dead bodies that the Nidos lived off of, she’d retched. That image was one of the ones that never stopped haunting her. She still woke from nightmare images of her mother’s face in the rot-filled water, from cold sweats in dreams that she was drowning in the decay of people she knew.

“I’d shoot you, you know,” Chris assured her; his words filled in the silence that had stretched out while horrors filled her mind. “I’d kill you before I’d let them throw you in one of those things.”

“I know.” She looked up at him, and he kissed her forehead. For one of those perfect quiet moments, she wondered what life would’ve been like if she’d been born only a decade earlier. “Is it weird to be comforted by promises to be killed?”

“Not if it’s a choice between quick death and something horrible,” Chris said.

“I’d kill you, too,” she added.

“I know.”

They lapsed back into silence then, and Harmony debated asking him about the differences in the world. He was three years older than her; it didn’t seem like a big difference now, but he’d known a world she could only try to imagine, been old enough to truly see the change. For as long as she remembered, this was the only world.

Chastity leaned against the wall. Her knees were bent, and she looked shakier than Harmony had ever seen her.

“You’re lucky,” she whispered. “If we hadn’t seen you . . .”

“You did.” Harmony listened to the sound of yelling outside their room. Their father had thrown something. Since Mom died, he was drunk more days than not. After what Harmony had seen tonight, she’d thought about stealing one of his bottles of vodka. Bodies floated in various stages of decomposition, arms and legs tangled together, eyes wide open and staring lifelessly. She’d stood silently looking into the giant cistern of corpses, too disgusted to even scream.

“You can’t go back there, Harm,” Chastity warned.

“I needed to know. . . . I just wanted . . .”

“Mom’s not in there, and anyone that is in there is beyond our help.” Chastity reached out, winced, and glanced at her arm. Her sleeve was wet with blood, but she kept her arm outstretched. “Come here.”

Instead of accepting the hug her sister offered, Harmony grabbed the first-aid box on Chastity’s dresser. Once, they’d both had jewelry boxes sitting there. Harmony’s was pink; Chastity had a matching red one. Now, the things that littered the surface of Chastity’s dresser included knives, bandages, and bottles of antiseptic.

Their mother had taught both girls to sew, and every time they did this, Harmony thought of her. Of course, she’d intended for them to sew skirts, not skin. Harmony cleaned her sister’s wound, and then she threaded the needle with the deep-blue fiber that she would have to snip and tug out later. Not getting the disintegrating thread meant going to the hospital, and hospitals were like grocery stores to the Nidos. It wasn’t openly acknowledged, but there had been enough reports of disappearances that anyone who paid attention realized that the claim of “only taking freely offered corpses” was a lie. As the population dwindled, the natural- death rate wasn’t high enough to satisfy Nidhogg’s appetites.

“Promise me, Harmony.” Chastity lifted her gaze from the needle that Harmony held ready. “I want you to be safe. Once we’re able, we’re going to get out of here. We’ll go north, start over somewhere else. You, me, Christian, and Daddy. It’ll be better.”

Harmony bit down on her lip, pinched the sides of her sister’s knife wound closed, and tried to keep her stitches straight and tight.

“Everything will be different when we get out of here. It’ll be better,” Chastity promised.

Neither of them commented on their father’s drunken ranting on the other side of the barred bedroom door. They were all coping with her mother’s death differently. Chastity fought; their father drank; and Harmony tried to ignore the increased number of missing neighbors, the way her sister insisted she stay in after dark, and the stench of her father’s almost nightly descents into oblivion.

Things never got better for Chastity or their father, and none of them believed that they were going to improve. Chastity was wrapped in a sheet and set aflame on a bier to prevent the corpse eaters from consuming her. Their father was rarely sober, and Harmony had no expectation of living too many years longer. Chastity’s hopes for another life had been a fantasy; this was reality.

Would it be worse to think you had a future and lose it?

Harmony had been eight when the new god arrived. She’d never really known a world where there was any