The ration siren wailed at 0500 hours, same as it did every morning in Sector 47.
Edward was already awake. Had been for an hour, lying on the thin mat he shared with Rehema, listening to her breathe in the darkness. Twenty-three years old and she still breathed the way she had as a child, soft and steady, like the world wasn’t ending slowly around them.
He eased himself up carefully, joints protesting. Fifty-six years old in Year 11901 might as well be eighty in the old world, the world before the Great Fracture, before the sectors, before the Emperor’s Unified Governance divided what remained of humanity into useful and useless.