The clothing store was dark and smelled like dust and something synthetic and the racks were still full which struck Michael as quietly strange, all these clothes just sitting here in the middle of everything, completely untouched because nobody had needed clothes badly enough to come for them yet.
They settled in the back section away from the empty window front, sitting on the floor between two long racks with the pulse running and the fourteen signatures outside doing their slow directionless thing in the street.
Sera was closest to the front, watching the entrance with the axe across her knees. Maya had found a spot against the back wall with her legs stretched out. Shin sat beside Michael and Sera took the other side naturally without making anything of it.
Outside something shuffled past the entrance close enough that they all went still for a second and then it kept moving and the tension in the space came down a notch.
Michael checked the pulse. The restaurant cluster was drifting east the way he had predicted but slowly, the way everything in this city moved, like time had different rules for things that weren't alive anymore.
Twenty minutes at least.
He leaned back against the rack behind him and the clothes shifted slightly and Maya looked at the ceiling and said quietly "I used to spend like three hours in places like this."
"Shopping?" Shin asked.
"My mum would drag me every weekend." She said it with the particular tone people used when they were talking about something that felt like it belonged to someone else's life. "I hated it then."
Nobody said anything for a moment because there wasn't anything to say to that.
"What did you study?" Shin asked after a while, looking at Maya's university hoodie.
"Architecture." Maya looked down at the hoodie like she had forgotten she was wearing it. "Second year."
Michael looked at her. "Architecture."
"Yeah." She glanced at him sideways. "Why does that surprise you."
"It doesn't." He paused. "Actually it explains a few things."
"Like what."
"Like why you kept looking at the hospital layout on the watchtower and not just the hospital."
Maya was quiet for a second and then she smiled, a real one, not the quick ones she deployed when she was making a point but an actual smile that reached her eyes. "The east wing looks structurally compromised. Whatever happened to the upper floors on that side was not gentle."
"So we avoid the east wing."
"We definitely avoid the east wing."
Shin was looking at Maya with a quiet interest. "You noticed that from three blocks away."
"I like to observe buildings," Maya said simply, like it was just a fact about herself. "Always have."
Michael filed that away in the part of his brain that was always running a secondary calculation about what people were good at and how that mapped to what he was building.
An architecture student who noticed structural details from distance and read building layouts instinctively was not nothing. That was actually significant.
He looked at the pulse. The restaurant cluster had moved maybe a third of the way east. Still waiting.
"What about you," Maya said, looking at Shin. "Before."
Shin thought about it for a second. "I worked at a convenience store. Saving for university." She paused. "I was going to study nursing."
"Dr. Kang will love that," Maya said.
"She already knows." The corner of Shin's mouth moved. "She's been teaching me a few things. When you're all on the watchtower."
Michael looked at her. Shin met his eyes briefly and looked away.
"You should have said," he said.
"I didn't want to make a thing of it," she said, which was the most Shin sentence he'd heard her say yet.
Sera hadn't contributed to the conversation but she was listening, he could tell by the slight angle of her head even though her eyes stayed on the entrance.
"Sera," Maya said. "Personal trainer, we know. But before that."
"That was before that," Sera said.
"Before the personal trainer."
A short pause. "Competitive kickboxing. Amateur circuit." She said it the same way she said most things, in a flat and factual tone. "I stopped when I blew my knee and then retrained as a PT."
Maya stared at the back of her head. "You were a kickboxer."
"Amateur."
"Sera you have been underselling yourself this entire time."
"I've been accurate," Sera said.
Michael thought that how athletic she was made sense to him now. He'd watched her and thought she was just naturally like that. Apparently she had spent years becoming like that.
"What about you," Maya said, turning to Michael.
"Data entry," he said.
Silence.
"Data entry?" Maya repeated.
"For a logistics company."
More silence.
"Michael," Maya said carefully. "You have been building a fortress in the apocalypse with a system that materializes things from nothing and you all you studied wasdata entry."
"For a logistics company," he said again.
Maya looked at Shin and then she looked at Maya. Some kind of communication passed between them that he wasn't entirely party to.
"The system really did pick the most random person," Maya said, not unkindly, just with the specific wonder of someone doing math that kept coming out surprising.
"I think about that sometimes," Michael said honestly.
"And?"
He checked the pulse. The restaurant cluster had made it most of the way east and the street signatures were thinning toward the pattern he had been waiting for. They just had to wait for another five minutes maybe.
"And I think it probably didn't pick me for what I was," he said. "More for what it needed me to become."
The store was quiet for a moment after that, just the distant sounds of the city outside and the soft pulse of the tracker running in his vision.
"That's surprisingly deep for a data entry guy," Maya said.
"I have layers."
She laughed while Shin smiled at her knees. Even Sera's shoulders moved slightly in a way that wasn't quite a laugh but was adjacent to one.
Michael checked the pulse.
The street was clearing.
"Two more minutes," he said and the conversation folded itself away and everyone shifted back into the focused quiet of people who knew what came next and were ready for it.
He looked at the four of them in the dim light of the clothing store, sitting between racks of untouched jackets and folded shirts in the middle of a dead city, and thought that whatever the system had been building toward when it picked him it was starting to look like something worth the trouble.