Nora tightened her coat. Her boots crunched through glass and dried mud. The town looked smaller up close; the barricade across the overpass looked bigger. Bodies of cars made a cathedral of twisted metal. A wind chime — bell and key and broken fork — swung at the entrance and laughed a thin, dry laugh whenever the wind remembered how to move.

They reached the door. It was a simple hinge, a knob with a rusted star. The outside felt wrong at first — the cold bit in a different way. Then the river rushed past, and everything else was the old map come alive.

The robot chirped a sequence Nora had heard once before — the pattern it made when it had been fed a song from an old radio. It wasn't a laugh, not really, but it was close enough that Eli's mouth curved. To Nora, that small tilt was victory enough.

They ran, feet slapping on ice and metal. Behind them, shouts rose like wolves. The Ferrymen were faster than rumor, but the bridge was a bottleneck; it would be hard to hold, but easier to cross. NSP F projected a soft red beam from its eye, aligning into the skeleton of the overpass. "Caution: structural stress. Suggest route: left girder. Avoid center span."