Ellen Williams wakes with a start, her hand already closing around the rusted pipe beside her makeshift bed. Nineteen years old, and each sunrise feels like a theft from a world determined to erase her. The silence is a lie; it’s in the quiet that the low groans creep closer. Today’s mission is the same as yesterday’s: find water, scavenge a can of food from the picked-over ruins, and avoid the things that used to be people. Her survival is a fragile, stubborn flame, flickering against a relentless, hungry dark. She moves not with hope, but with a simple, animal resolve: to see the sun set one more time.