I didn't intend to stay. As soon as it became clear to me after the Cataclysm that things in Gotham were going from bad to worse, I was making plans. Most of my friends, people that had lived with me here in Gotham since we were children, had left. They had packed up with their families as soon as the sickness came and had set up in Metropolis, Bludhaven, anywhere they could find.

My own mother had left Gotham years ago, leaving me with my aunt who was only a few years older than me, barely out of college. She said she couldn't take this city anymore. She likened it to a cancer, eating her from the inside out.

When the sickness came, she had called me.

"You and Lanie need to get out of Gotham." I could hear her flicking on her cigarette lighter. "Come to Bludhaven. I have an apartment, and it'll do just fine for now. We can get a house later, just the three of us."

"I don't feel like it's any better there than here, Mom." I was at the store, stock piling cans of food so that Lanie and I could hole up in the tiny house we shared, ancient and strong. It was a brownstone, covered in ivy that my grandmother had planted before either of her daughters were born. Neither of us

wanted to be sick.

"Then we'll go to Metropolis. All you have to do is get OUT!" she was frantic. "Baby, things are not going to get better there. Do you not see that?"

"I can't leave yet, Mom. Lanie's work at the hospital... My work at the shelter. They need us here more than ever." I switched my cell phone to my other year and cleared out almost the whole shelf of tomato soup, a special favorite of ours.

She was silent, and I could hear her puffing on the cigarette.

"I can't change your mind."

"No,"

"I'll tell you this one more time. You and Lanie need to get out." she sighed. "You're a grown woman." she hung up without another word. I ignored her warnings, as I so often did. What did she know, she wasn't here.

But the night of the Cataclysm, when Lanie and I lay together on the floor, hearing the screams, the breaking glass, smelling the heat from the fires around us, I began to suspect that there might have been something to what she told me. I remember shivering violently, and Lanie reaching to take my hand.

"Andromeda," she whispered, and I could hear her through the raging violence around me and inside of me. "Andromeda, I promise that I will never let anything happen to you. Haven't I kept you safe all these years? Don't worry." she squeezed my hand.

"We'll get through it."

At the time I believed her. There was no reason not to. But then the reports came in, and suddenly we realized that no one was going to save Gotham. They were blowing up the bridges. If we didn't leave now, we never could.

But my mother's phone seemed to be off, and none of my friends could find a place for the both of us. I wouldn't leave Lanie alone. I couldn't. She encouraged me, begged me to go without her. But I wouldn't, I couldn't. With you or not at all, I told her, as we slept together on the floor of our living room, terrified to be separated for even a moment.

The night they blew up the bridges, we lay together in our dark, still house. We had boarded up the windows, conserved our candles and the kerosene lamps that Grandma had bought so many years ago in case of emergency. Lanie said she had laughed at her mother then but now... Well...

The hospital closed. The shelter closed. Our work was in the streets now, Lanie said dryly. But neither of us could quite bring ourselves to be that brave. We knew the risks of trying that. We knew the things that could happen to us.

"Is this forever?" I asked her one night, under our mountains of blankets.

"No. Eventually the world will come to its senses, and then they'll come and build the bridges." she pushed my hair out of my eyes.

"Will we be alive then?" she froze and looked at me. It was getting colder. Food supplies were running low. I can't even begin to explain the things I would do just to be able to eat an apple, crisp and bright and sweet.

"I sure hope so." Lanie whispered, pulling the blankets up around me. "I'm going to do my best. I promise."

Somehow it didn't make me feel better.