Helena followed a forgotten fence line along what might have been a well-traveled road, before. Now, the posts and beams were bowed beneath the heavy burden of ash and the ceaseless snow, and had given way in so many places. The wolf cub, growing fast and strong, tracked beside her as she walked, alert for the sounds of movement across the endless blanket of silence.

The wind, the rustling of bare branches, and the sound of the powder as it scrunched beneath their feet were the only noises, however, as they continued north.

She'd seen so much evidence of the life that used to be in her journeys: farm houses abandoned and barns collapsed beneath the weight of an icy burden the structure was never meant to hold. It was tragic and, in a strange way, beautiful. The land was at peace, the world was still for the first time in tens of thousands of years. It was everything she had wanted it to become in her great and terrible wake.

And Helena hated it, hated herself for the price she had exacted to make that world.

The snow crunched softly as she stepped once more, free of the long fence line and headed toward another set of trees, but the earth beneath felt different. She tapped her foot, digging her boot into the slush, finally grazing the unique texture of asphalt beneath her soles. She looked up again, both ways, as it were, and realized that the trees she meant as her destination were in fact a median on a broad, open expanse of interstate. But the highway – once busy and filled with cars – was now burdened only with ice and a smooth layer of powder over it.

How quickly nature had moved to cover up the marks of mankind.

She sighed, then looked down at the wolf pup beside her.

"Come," she muttered to the animal. "I do not believe we will find what we seek in this direction."

Her canine companion yipped, then turned back in the direction they'd come from and placed her nose to the ground. The pair walked back toward the fence line, toward the forest, toward the cabin and Myka.

The days since Myka had finally awakened continued, and shortened. The weeks grew colder, and Myka's fury continued in a cold burn. Helena had expected it, of course, once her charge finally recovered enough to remain aware for more than a handful of minutes at a time, but nothing could have prepared her for the way that a once-warm, green gaze would turn so frigid, and the way that glare would pierce through her heart.

And she deserved it - she knew she deserved it – but that didn't change the fact that all she wanted in life anymore was to see Myka Bering smile.

The wolf had helped. It had imprinted quickly to the pair of humans, particularly Myka, and provided some small amount of joy in their harsh lives. It, they discovered, was a she, and her soft grey fur was enough for Myka to name her Shadow. Helena approved of the name – it seemed as if the wolf was exactly that to both of them.

A month later, Helena had started taking Shadow with her on morning hunts, just to get her used to the concept. The animal was a keen, intelligent creature that managed with little effort to figure out what her role needed to be, and within a few weeks, was actively participating in the food gathering effort.

In the afternoons, or on the days when Helena would go back to the abandoned houses and scavenge for supplies, she would leave Shadow with a still-hobbled Myka, and in much the same way as with the hunt, the young canine was very quick to accept her role: protect the human at all costs. Myka had once reported, in a voice that was so close to amused that Helena had ached, that Shadow parked herself at Myka's side and listened in silence every day, and slept only when Helena arrived again despite Myka's every attempt to get her to relax.

It was near noon when the pair arrived back at the snow-packed cabin, and Helena noted with some relief that there was still a fire burning in the hearth, if the smoke coming from the chimney was any indication. The moment the house came back in view, Shadow bounded forward, excited perhaps by the prospect of seeing Myka once more, or perhaps simply looking forward to being warm again. Her thick fur coat had not yet fully grown out, and so Helena tried not to keep her in the hunt for too long.

Helena entered the cabin, and Shadow was instantly beside Myka on the blue sofa by the fire, excitedly licking her face in greeting. And Myka was laughing as she directed the young wolf to calm down.

Myka was laughing.

The sound of it nearly took Helena to her knees.

She moved quietly around the kitchen as she prepared a meal from their stores, desperate to hear the melodious and long-absent sound for as long as possible. She knew that the second Shadow's playmate was made fully aware of her presence, the sound would stop.

But she was so lost in the relief of hearing Myka's momentary joy that her grip on the can of soup she held slackened, and it slipped heavily through her fingers. She reached for it, fumbled it, and it landed with a loud clack against the wooden kitchen floor.

Shadow was startled out of her adorable attack, and the sound of joy faded, replaced by the heavy, looming silence that Helena had been subjected to for the last few months. She risked a glance toward the fireplace - the wolf had settled beside its true master, oversized head on her lap, and Myka had turned away from the room to stare into the flames.

She warmed the soup in the pot by the fire, and portioned it out into bowls, then held one of them out for Myka to take. She did so, sparing glances only at the food and never at the woman preparing it.

She was angry, still. Helena wasn't sure there would ever come a time when she would not be.

And with a gentle pat to Shadow's back, she left the warmth of the fire to eat away from Myka's sight.

/

Oh, yes, Myka was angry. She had never been so furious in her life.

Her legs were healing…slowly, and poorly despite Helena's admittedly skilled care and her own knowledge of medicine and anatomy. Her legs had simply been shattered. Had this happened in the course of any other assignment, she would have been sent to the hospital and skilled doctors would have rebuilt her legs with pins and metal plates in a sterile theater, and an artist of a surgeon would have minimized the brutal scarring.

Instead, he scars would be with her for the rest of her life…whatever that meant now.

But her crippling and the pain it brought had long ago become a penance.

Helena was trying…she could see that. She was doing everything it took to keep the pair of them, and now Shadow, alive. And she was skilled at that. The woman could do anything she put her mind to.

Like destroy the world.

And Myka was furious with Helena for that act, but she was perhaps more furious with herself for letting the woman in, for failing to see the warning signs, for never turning her exceptional eye for detail upon that very real threat that was H.G. Wells, and missing everything that everyone else could see so plainly.

And she would never forgive herself for that oversight – everyone else paid in blood for her mistakes.

And yet…Helena had saved one of them, at least. Helena had kept her alive.

In the many days she spent staring into the fire, on the afternoons where the books that the wayward inventor had liberated from abandoned homes were not enough to silence her disquieted mind, Myka sourly ruminated on her highly appropriate fate. She deserved to bear witness to the end of the world as much as the person that brought it about. The quick death she had begged for was a coward's way out, and something she simply hadn't deserved. This cold, this silence, this long wait for night to come was the world exacting its own justice.

Every time Helena brought her a meal, a book, stoked the fire, helped her to the bed or the bathroom or out of her own clothing, proud and independent Myka Bering was cowed and humbled in a particular way. And Myka longed for the company of the friend she thought she knew, of the woman she had…

…well, that certainly didn't matter anymore.

And she saw guilt in the hesitant way her caretaker would speak, in the uncharacteristic downward cast of eyes that once sparkled with a hard-earned arrogance, and the hunched posture of a woman who had borne the weight of the world for so long. It was not lost on Myka how only now, in the hour of her triumph, the weight had finally broken the spine of a woman she had once thought indomitable.

And it was in those moment's Myka realized that her greatest sin, her greatest failure would always be never having recognized that burden before it became too much, and never giving her friend enough support to continue on until she could be rid of it.

The faint daylight faded, and the firelight began to fill the cracks in the room. Myka sighed as she resigned herself to a conversation that the pair of survivors needed to have.

Myka was angry. She was furious. She'd never felt such rage before.

But Helena deserved to know that it was not all aimed at her.

She felt Shadow twitch beside her, and a dark head came round to follow some object of piqued curiosity. Myka turned her head to watch, unruly curls so long neglected bouncing about. It was perhaps a stray rabbit – a rare but not quite extinct occurrence, and the wolf would whine in a desire to go chase the potential meal, then settle down.

But then, Shadow did something she had never done before, and it made the fine hairs on the back of Myka's neck stand with dread.

The wolf, still staring out the back window, pinned her ears back and snarled.

/

They were running out of medication.

As well stocked as the multitudes of abandoned houses were, she had only found a form of modern painkiller strong enough to mitigate Myka's misery once. She had found a prescription bottle of Hydrocodone in a medicine cabinet about a month ago, and the ten pills within had been kept for emergencies, for when the pain was simply too much to bear. In the meantime, Myka used only moderately safe doses of over the counter medication.

They were running out of acetaminophen and ibuprofen, and the poor woman had already taken five of the stronger pills.

And so relief was a priority in her afternoon hunts these days, and she spent a large amount of time searching unusual locations for stray pill bottles.

And on more than one occasion lately, her growing concern had kept her out a little past the safe times.

She cursed as she checked the watch on her wrist, the watch she never took off anymore, and gathered her bags together for the long trek back to the cabin.

It was a familiar route to her now, though it was covered over almost daily by new ash and snow. The local wildlife had grown scarce in their area, some of it perhaps prematurely hibernating, and the rest…

Well, what was left was deadly. Darwin's theories were certainly proving themselves in a land where the only survivors were the creatures best equipped to kill everything else.

Helena was seriously considering the idea of migrating, of moving them to one of the houses she had found on the outer range of her explorations, of taking the time to move their stores, and then beginning the hunt again. It would take a month, she thought, and then perhaps another to explore new ground. But if they moved systematically, they would find new supply sources. They would stay alive.

But Myka would have to be moved, and Helena would have to devise a way to do that in the most painless way possible.

She arrived within sight of the cabin just as the last rays of light could penetrate the grey haze above, noting the smoke in the chimney once more. Warmth was a luxury these days, with so much of her time spent in the frozen wastes, and her step quickened just a bit at the thought of a warm meal by the fire.

But as she neared the door, as she picked up on faint and unfamiliar noises, she knew something was wrong.

Her bags were dropped and her sidearm was drawn, and she crept the rest of the way to the door.

The sounds formed, and her pulse quickened. There was struggling, and the foreign sound of Shadow's menacing snarl, fighting something inside the house. And then there was shouting – deep, alarmed, bellowing, and not Myka.

Throwing caution out the window, she rushed into the house, and was horrified by what she saw.

Shadow had a dark-haired man pinned, snapping and tearing at the arms he raised to protect himself. The animal was persistent and fierce, protecting her pack with her every instinct. On the floor between the wolf and the fireplace lay another man – perhaps blonde once, but so dirty and so bloody that there was simply no longer a way to tell. He was still, and likely dead if the angle of his neck had anything to say about it.

But there was a third man, large and red-faced and shouting profanities, and he'd managed to trap Myka by pinning his body over hers on the floor. She was fighting, and valiantly, but the man had leverage and the complete use of his limbs, and was able to free his knife and hold it above him with the intention to strike.

"You killed him!" he shouted. "You bitch!"

Helena didn't hesitate once the scene before her was processed: she took aim at the man threating Myka and fired.

His body dropped immediately, but Helena still crossed the room with the gun trained on him, head filled with swimming rage and heart on fire. Vacant, open brown eyes stared at the ceiling, blood pooled on the floor beneath his head. She fired twice more into his chest, just to be safe.

And Shadow, somewhat used to gunfire now, never let up her attack, and the agonized wails of her victim never ceased through it all…until they finally choked off, wet and gurgling, and then nothing.

Helena stood there for a long moment, bathed in her own red-hot fury, staring at the gun in her hand as if she couldn't comprehend the action she had just taken. It was Shadow's whine from behind her that drew her out of the fugue, that brought her back to the present, and that inspired her to turn around.

Shadow's blood-soaked maw lay across Myka's abdomen, as the woman lay still on the floor.

"Oh. Myka…"

Her knees gave out and she dropped, the pistol clattering away at once, and trembling hands reached to draw the other woman up, to wake her, to shake the life back into her.

"Myka!"

Green eyes blinked, showing life where Helena had feared it had somehow escaped, and the wave of relief that crashed over her brought the younger woman close in a crushing and desperate embrace.

"I am so sorry, Myka. I am so sorry. This is all my fault…"

The lack of response was disturbing, and if not for the trembling of the woman in her arms, she would have perhaps thought that she had returned too late…but the trembling broke into wrenching sobs, and long arms finally came up to wrap tightly around Helena's waist.

"They saw the chimney smoke…" she whispered though her terror. "They came looking for something to eat."

"Would that they had simply asked," Helena spat. "I would have happily shared with them if they had only –"

"No," Myka said, horror creeping into her voice. "I tried that. I offered them anything they wanted in the cabinets, if only they would leave me alone. They weren't interested in it. They were interested in me."

As the words settled in, as the true repugnance of what had nearly occurred settled into her soul, she clutched Myka closer, and the dark mantle of guilt that the former Victorian had worn since she struck the third blow in Yellowstone grew twice as heavy.

"I deserve this," she whispered. "I deserve the torment of watching the world die. You deserved something so much better than this fate…something so much better than ever having met me. And I will never be able to forgive myself for putting you through this torment."

The response was altogether unexpected, and heartbreaking in its implication.

"We both deserve this punishment, Helena. We both deserve this hell."

Helena started to protest, to vehemently disagree with the ridiculous notion that Myka belonged in this doomed reality, but she was struck by the incongruity of at once wishing the woman were safe somewhere far, far away from her and the feeling of comfort she had always drawn from the her presence.

"I'm sorry," she whispered again, utterly failing to find the words to convey her shame and dereliction.

But Myka simply clung to her, and bestowed upon her the closest thing to hope that Helena had found in months.

"I know."

/

When the lazy dawn broke the next morning, Helena hunted the ground outside the cabin for the supplies she had left outside. In the aftermath of the attack, she had forgotten them entirely, and there had been so many other things to do. The three intruders had been hauled out into the snow, far enough away from the cabin that any lingering predators wouldn't turn to their home for a supplemental meal, but only just. She was drained and tired, and wanted nothing to do with the vile men.

The thought had occurred to her, briefly, that it would be justice to use their flesh as they had intended to use Myka's, but the idea was so distasteful that the thought was gone as quickly as it had come. They could rot, for all she cared.

At length, Helena found the bags and slung them across her shoulders to complete the journey she had started the day before, and as she passed within sight of where the bodies should have been, turned to pay them one more mind than she should have.

It shouldn't have surprised her that there was nothing left of them but scraps of cloth.

And there had been justice, after all, and in her favor for now – their carcasses had fed the predators, and it had bought them all more time.

She would use it…tomorrow.

Today, they would all simply rest.