Chapter?20?(Anna’s?POV)

  My lungs still burned from the sprint that had carried me away, but curiosity dragged me back like a fish on a barbed hook. I doubled around the block in a looping arc, keeping hedges and half?collapsed garages between me and the cottage until I reached a vantage where I could watch unseen. No sign of the biker?helmet stranger now. Just the sagging porch and, absurdly, a little offering laid on the top step beside the bicycle: a sealed bottle of water, a tightly rolled bandage, and what looked like a vacuum?packed MRE. A scrap of plywood, scrawled in blunt carpenter’s pencil, weighted down by a rust?flecked horseshoe.

  I squinted. Even from thirty paces, the first line jumped out:

  Anna—safe inside… –J

  A chill slid under my ribs. I knew one “J” who might leave supplies instead of bullets. Joshua? But he’d dissolved into fractals, vanished like a bad dream. Yet the neat pack of items looked like something he’d fuss over—trying too hard to be helpful. My pulse thumped in my ears.

  Steel pipe clenched in white knuckles, I crept from the hedge. Each step on the overgrown path sounded thunderous to my nerves, but no curtain twitched. The porch boards groaned under my weight; a family of startled beetles scattered from a flowerpot long gone to seed. I paused at the top step, scanned the street—empty—and crouched to read the note.

  Anna—safe inside. Supplies here if you need them. Key works on front door, latch unhooked. No traps. –J

  My throat tightened. Joshua. No doubt now. Either he was inside or someone was using his name. I eyed the door: wood scarred by age, latch dangling loose. A battered dresser blocked half the frame from within, visible through the crack. Classic amateur barricade. I slid the bandage and water into my pack, tucked the MRE under my arm, and wrapped fingers around the doorknob.

  Breath hitched. If it’s not him, be ready. I eased the latch, heart slamming, then pushed. The door resisted against the weight of the dresser. I braced, shoved harder; wood scraped floorboards with a scream that set my teeth on edge. Gap widened. Musty air breathed out, carrying dust and the faintest ghost of soap—someone had tried to clean.

  I slipped through sideways, pipe raised. Inside, sunlight knifed through boarded windows in slanted beams, illuminating motes of dust. Furniture fragments had been stacked into rough barricades. A candle guttered on a crate, throwing jittery light across the floor. And there—center of the living room—loomed a massive copper door, its burnished surface engraved with a cityscape in ruin. My pulse stuttered at the sight; it matched the basement portal I’d found beneath the outpost, but here it stood free like a monolith.

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  Directly in front of that door stood Joshua.

  He looked leaner, grime?streaked, eyes shadowed by exhaustion, but unmistakably the same man who’d vanished from the plaza. He wore a scuffed leather jacket and biker helmet—visor now lifted—revealing a face etched with equal parts relief and terror. In his left hand he held an antique skeleton key that seemed to hum with faint copper light. In his right, the haft of a war?hammer—broad, medieval, its head dark with dried something—hovered half?raised, ready to fall.

  For a heartbeat we stared, neither breathing. My grip tightened on the pipe; his knuckles whitened on the hammer. Two feral animals in a trap.

  Then his voice cracked the silence, soft, ragged: “Anna?”

  The hammer dipped an inch. My throat worked, words snagged behind disbelief. The cottage, the door, the supplies—him. All real.

  I lowered the pipe a fraction, muscles trembling from adrenaline. “Joshua,” I managed, the name tasting strange after so much time surviving on curses. “You… you’re alive.”

  The hammer clattered to the floorboards as his shoulders sagged. He laughed once—a broken, half?sobbing sound—and stepped forward. Instinct flared; I shifted back, pipe rising. He halted, hands spread, key still glinting between fingers.

  “No traps,” he repeated from the note, voice barely above a whisper. “No tricks. Just… needed to see you were real.”

  I swallowed, senses spinning: the copper door hummed behind him like a heartbeat; the candle threw wild shadows across his face. Outside, wind rattled the boarded windows, reminding us both that the city still watched, hungry.

  “I’m real,” I said, pulse finally slowing. The pipe lowered to my side. “And I’m not here to hurt you. But we need to talk fast—before something else shows up.”

  He nodded, eyes bright with relief—or maybe fear. The key’s faint glow flickered against the copper door as he gestured me deeper inside. I stepped fully across the threshold, closing the battered door behind me, and for the first time since the world ended I felt something almost like safety slip through the cracks of panic.

  Almost.