They came up into the gray light before the morning drill, six of them and a woman in a borrowed jacket who walked into the door frame.
The training yard was whole again.
Whatever had eaten the ground under it had put the surface back.
Soren stood on the grass they ran on every morning and did not tell anyone what was underneath it.
He had Mona by the elbow because she could not see and would not stop trying to walk toward the brightest thing, which up here was the sky, which she had never met.
She kept tilting the sunglasses up to look at it and making the unhappy noise and Soren kept tilting them back down.
"Augh," said Mona, mournful, at the sun.
"I know," Soren said. "It stays up there. You stay under that hood."
◆◆◆◆
The room was the same size it had always been.
That was the first real problem and it arrived before any of the bigger ones.
Z-class housing was a shared box with two narrow beds and a window that didn't open all the way.
Soren and Selah split it.
