California was the first to fall.

Lysander remembered exactly what he had been doing, even though he had been only four at the time. Such tragedy lingered in the mind. He had been drawing a chalk flower on the paved driveway leading up to the colonial two story that he lived in with his parents. The cherry tree drooped lazy branches overhead, giving him a modicum of shade on one of the hottest days of the summer, the hazy July heat settling into his young bones with a thick tang of humidity clouding his lungs. He thought he should have noticed a change in the atmosphere, some signal that things would never be the same, but no, the sun continued to bear down in oppressive waves and he continued to draw a looping pink daisy with his clumsy child fingers.

His father came rushing out of the house, the first sign that all was not well. Without so much as a word, his father scooped him up and rushed him into the house, the pink chalk falling from his fingers and cracking against the asphalt. He remembered crying at the loss, such a silly thing. His parents crowded him around the television and they all watched as flocks of people flooded out of what was left of California. The Spread--though it had not been called that in the early days; had not been called that until an intrepid journalist coined the term during a live broadcast of the damage spiraling out from the origin point--originated in San Francisco. Scientists there had thought they might have a solution to the growing energy crisis, something monumental, the media reported. No one really knew what happened or why, but the tests had gone immediately south. A wave of energy subsumed the city and began to spread quickly from there. The people in the city had all been killed in the initial wave, over a million people gone in one blink. The rest of the state panicked as it grew, seeming to demolish buildings and roads like so much garbage, turning them into ash and mutating plant and animal life into unrecognizable forms. It took a week before people farther out from the initial zone started to become ill and grow unsightly tumors.

Phoenix became the first city to suggest an attempted barrier against the Spread. Scientists and business leaders scrambled to come up with a way to halt the mysterious energy razing the land, and the initial designs for the Barriers came into being. Two months later, the first was built around the Arizona city, just as the Spread reached the edges of California. People flocked to the bastion of safety, but just five months later, Rifts started opening up worldwide, one of the first appearing directly in the center of Washington D.C. Lysander remembered coming home from school one afternoon to find his mother crying as images flew across the television screen of the destruction of the American government. Similar stories popped up from major cities across the world: from London to Hong Kong to Tokyo to Geneva to Cairo, tragedy upon tragedy. With the power vacuum left behind in the wake of the destruction, people turned to their state and local governments, who in turn sought out those with the money to make things happen. Construction began on the Barriers around every surviving major city immediately. The fear continued, though. No one knew if that would stop whatever force was ripping open the Rifts. Any city, anywhere really, could be next.

His parents lobbeyed as staunch public defenders for the inclusion of all major suburbs in the protection of their Barrier. They were killed just after his sixth birthday before they could see their movement bear fruit, and Joseph Campbell, long time friend of the Badeauxs, took in their orphaned son and championed their faction.

With his political sway and his business savvy as owner of the nation’s largest supermarket chain, he quickly became the most important man in Cleveland.

And so, that’s where things started to go very wrong, indeed.

Wednesday dawned similarly to Monday, Lysander throwing himself together at the last moment and catching the early train to work. Red hadn’t made her promised appearance the night before, instead making her excuses with a note he found slipped under his door after he got home from work. She wrote that she had a job to take care of that night, but that she would be available on the following night. Minorly worried that she had changed her mind, Lysander pushed it out of his mind to worry about later and continued on with his life. Miria once more fed him with an apple she had brought from home and a cup of strong black tea, and he worked until the very last possible moment of the day, looking up only to find Sam and Blair had left at some point. Riding the train home, he figured Miria had also left without telling him to get ready for her dinner with her father. He bypassed his regular stop in order to take the train further into town, having remembered that he needed to pick up his food vouchers.

With resources limited due to the lack of farmable land, everyone was on a strict restraint of what they could get at the grocery. Monthly reports were required from each household about how many people lived there; restaurants similarly had to turn in business reports showing how many people frequented there. Food was thus split in this way, vouchers given out based on barcode, one person from each household responsible for collecting them weekly. Lysander had heard of more extraneous buildings in the city being demolished to make more room for farm and ranch land and greenhouses. Given the time of year, it was nice to see some color leeching back onto the shelves of fresh produce to replace the landscape of tough greens that grew in the winter. Personal gardening had become extremely popular as a result of the shortages. He had even taken to having a small plot in his back garden for a few vegetables, though it had been mostly taken over by tomatoes and mint. Thankfully, fishing was still possible inside the barrier this close to the lake and several rivers, so he could still get a regular supply of pet food from his local supplier. Anything other than food--housing, utilities, paper goods, clothes, etc.--still cost credits, which had replaced the American dollar in the early days when money circulation had hit a standstill with every city separated by impossible distances.

After registering his name and barcode at the Resource Distribution Center and receiving his share of vouchers, he made his way to the local Campbell’s and got enough groceries to last him the week, passing over the paper vouchers to the cashier. After scanning him to make sure the numbers matched up with the vouchers and doing a careful inventory of what he had collected, the woman gave him the okay to take his purchases home. On his way out the door, the standard PSA warning poster that resided in every Campbell’s greeted him: a glossy picture of a little girl with long red hair being held by her mother, the girl’s face practically hidden behind her mother’s shoulder. Tall black letters covered the top and bottom of the poster, cautioning ‘Never Forget Alexandria Wells. Never Take What’s Not Yours’. Given that the event had happened when he himself had been a child, he couldn’t remember the exact details, but he knew that Alexandria and her mother had been used as a cautionary tale for all within the protection of the Barriers to never exceed the weekly allowance provided.

Lugging home the groceries, he wished he had taken the initiative to buy a bicycle to make these weekly trips easier, but he always lost the idea as the days passed, only to be reminded as he walked home bogged down by too many bags for him to feasibly carry on his own. After finally reaching his apartment, he let himself in and accepted the attention from the animals while carefully shuffling through them to reach the kitchen. Putting the bags on the counter, he let Bingley out and started unloading the groceries. He generally enjoyed cooking for himself, though the activity lost some of its luster without someone to share his creations with. He had spent much of his adolescence teaching himself in the Campbell’s oversized kitchen with Miria hovering over his shoulder watching him. She always rejoiced when he made something new, even if the recipe was an abject failure, claiming that his cooking exceeded their personal chef. Even if it was a lie, it was nice to have someone so supportive in his camp and he missed her vibrant presence questioning him as he added spices and herbs to whatever he had bubbling on the stove.

Bingley sidled up to him, then, begging for a taste of the carrot he was peeling. Sighing, he flicked a long strand of it onto the floor for the dog to crunch down. Bingley happily jumped onto the offering, wagging and panting after he was finished to show his desire for another strand.

“No, you greedy thing,” he said to the animal, giving him a pat on the head and continuing his task.

Just as he finished, he heard a knock on his front door. Wiping his hands on a towel, he lowered the stove temperature and made his way to the door. Peeking through the eyehole on the door, he saw a disfigured image of Red standing on the other side. She was extremely early, having set the meeting for ten that night. A glance at the nearest clock showed it was only just after seven thirty. Confused yet relieved that she had actually shown up, he registered a guest on the security system on his side of the door. The computer outside prompted her for her barcode and she dutifully presented it. The lock clicked open, and he opened the door for her, ushering her inside.

“I thought we were meeting later?” he asked, closing the door behind her and moving back to his waiting dinner on the stove.

She followed behind him, patting Bingley on the head as he jumped on her in excitement. “We weren’t supposed to, but I wasn’t busy, so I decided to head over earlier. Figured you’d be in,” she explained.

“What if I had been busy,” he groused, resenting her implication that he spent most of his time at home. She wasn’t wrong, but it still stung to be read so easily.

“Were you?”

“No, not really.”

“Then, what’s the problem, friend?”

Groaning, he ladled some of the soup he had made into a bowl before passing it to her. She took it instinctively but then looked up at him in confusion.

“I was just about to eat. You can have some too, if you’re hungry,” he explained. Feeding her would leave him without for one of his meals since he had planned to have the leftover soup for a few days, but he had already made plans to dine with Miria the following night so it should probably be fine.

She blinked at him, still holding the bowl in her hands, fingers tightening imperceptibly on the ceramic. “Oh, yeah, thanks,” she said.

“No problem,” he said, slipping a spoon into her bowl and turning to grab himself a serving. When that was finished, they retired to the living room and shared the sofa, using the coffee table as a dining table. Curling her legs under her and tucking them to the side on the sofa, Red adjusted so that she could face him while they ate and talked.

“Okay, so here’s what I know about our target so far,” she started, “He’s a workaholic, not unlike you. Spends most of his days holed up in his office at the top of your building. Then, he goes home and spends the rest of the night in that big house on the outskirts on the west side of town. From what I can tell, no one else seems to live there with him other than some staff. Does his daughter not live at home?”

“Oh, um, no, not anymore,” he said, “She moved out just after I did. Wanted the space.” Sharing the details of Miria’s private life felt like a violation, but he didn’t see a way around it given her relationship to the man he was plotting over.

Nodding, she continued, “Alright, that’s good for us. Means we’ll have an easier time setting something up at his house, especially cause you used to live there so you know it pretty well. Think you could draw me up a rough layout of the place?”

“Uh, sure! Let me just grab some paper and pens,” he said, setting down his soup and moving to stand.

“Oh, no! Not now! You can finish eating first!” She stopped him with a quick hand on his arm, slopping some broth over the rim of her bowl. The liquid quickly settled into the fabric of his couch, darkening the grey color. A beat of silence passed between them, Lysander hovering awkwardly above the sofa in a half-seated position, her hand laying like a vice on his forearm.

“Uuh,” he stammered. The sound jolted her back to herself and she removed her hand from him just as quickly as she had laid it on him.

“Sorry, friend. Just don’t want all your hard work to go to waste if you let your dinner get cold!” she said with a light laugh, her facade entirely recomposed.

“Thanks, that’s nice of you,” he replied as he lowered himself back down to the cushions.

“Yes, in all my magnanimity I will allow you to eat,” she chuckled with a small roll of her eyes.

“Heh, why how very kind you are, my lady,” he said with a tip of an imaginary fedora.

“Gross,” she deadpanned, spooning a bite of chicken noodle into her mouth.

Blushing, he also picked his own food back up to continue, “Uh, well, anyways, I’ll draw that for you right after we’re done eating then.”

“Neat,” she said, effectively ending that part of the conversation. They ate together, the only sounds coming from the clink of their spoons hitting the edges of the ceramic. As she neared the end of her meal, she tipped the bowl up to her mouth and spooned the dregs out into her mouth, surely getting a mouthful of herbs. He finished not long after, leaving the bowls on the table to deal with later and moving to his bedroom for a sheet of paper and pen from his small writing desk. Bingly huffed a grumpy snort at not receiving any of the scraps from their food before jumping up and taking Lysander’s place on the couch in retaliation. The cats had also crawled out of whatever hole they had been in to crowd around Red, fuzzy bodies rubbing against her legs and torso for attention. Glaring at his dog, Lysander took a seat on the floor on the other side of the coffee table, knowing a losing battle when he saw one. Red threaded her fingers into the fur on Bingley’s butt, seemingly content to simply have a handful of the animal’s fur.

Brushing off some dust and crumbs that had settled onto the table, Lysander laid out the paper he had grabbed from his room and started a basic outline of the Campbell estate.

“I doubt that Joseph has changed much since I lived there, and like you said, he’s kinda a creature of habit,” Lysander explained as he drew, feeling a twinge at the hypocrisy of the statement, “He spends most of his time in his room, his home office, and the dining hall.” He notated the locations of each of those rooms on the outline. “He almost never sets foot in the downstairs eastern corridor. That’s where Miria and my rooms were. I mean, maybe he does now? I don’t know. It’s been a couple years, he could have installed a home gym down there for all I know,” he babbled, feeling suddenly unsure of himself and his knowledge of his surrogate father.

“Chill, friend, I’m sure you’re probably not wrong. I mean, I’m gonna have to get in there and check it out with my own eyes before we do anything anyways. This is more for my reference for that,” she said.

Deflated, he said, “Oh, gotcha.” With a final flourish of the pen in his hand, he pushed the drawing over to Red. She snatched it up and ran her eyes over it before folding it and tucking it into her pocket, disturbing Portobello, who had curled up next to her hip.

“Cool, I’ll use this tomorrow and get a little lookie-loo at the old estate,” she said, a smirk curling her lip. He wanted to ask how she intended to go about such a thing, but he refrained, an overwhelming sense of not-really-wanting-to-know washing over him.

“Well, be careful,” he said instead. The smirk dropped from her lips momentarily, another blip on her visage. He furrowed his eyebrows at the response, but she spoke up before he could question her about it.

“Ah, don’t worry about me, friend. I’m a professional! I keep telling you,” she joked it away.

“Okay, if you say so,” he said a bit awkwardly. Remembering his earlier musings regarding the Spread and the world beyond the Barrier, Lysander couldn’t help but ask, “So, um, this is a bit random, but what is it like out there?”

The non-sequitur seemed to surprise her slightly, one of her eyebrows ticking up. “You mean in the Spread?”

“Yeah, how do you even live out there? I saw it when they closed off half the suburb. It’s barren out there,” he continued. He was quickly losing whatever nerve had possessed him when originally asking the question, but he was in too deep now to try to brush it off.

“Hm, it is kinda,” she mused, “And yet we do live out there.”

He stayed silent while she sorted through whatever memories she was living in.

With a sigh, she began again, “Alright, so, it’s kinda like this.” She picked up his empty bowl and drew his attention to the dregs that had collected on the bottom, bits of herb floating in a thin layer of broth. “How do you think you still have this stuff?”

“What, soup?” He felt silly asking it, but he was having trouble following her logic.

“No, not the soup, you goob, all the ingredients that go into the soup,” she said, thrusting the bowl into his hands.

“Oh, I dunno. I guess I just assumed it was being grown in some greenhouse around here?” That was genuinely what he had thought. With all the new land being made for farms and so on, he had thought that food and growing science had succeeded beyond what they had had before the Spread. Though now that he was confronted by his obvious misconception, he felt unbelievably naive.

“You’re the least curious person I’ve ever met,” she accused. “Whatever. It’s not just all of that though. Things like tea leaves and some tropical fruit and so on. Those things come from somewhere, you catchin’ my drift? So, how do they get here? Magic? Teleportation?”

He doubted those were the actual answers, so he continued to simply look at her, urging her on with his focus.

“Of course not. They come the old fashioned way, trucks and trains and what have you. But then how do they get here? People, of course, friend,” she said, holding his gaze.

His eyebrows bowed down into a furrow, confused. “But, people die out there. Nobody is gonna volunteer to go out there. It’s basically a death sentence, I thought.”

“I mean, I doubt with the way things are going here economically that they couldn’t get some poor schmuck to risk their life for their family, but you’re not wrong either. People like your friend Joseph Campbell don’t need the average citizen to head out into potential disaster. Think, Lysander, how old do you think I am?” she asked.

The question threw him. “Uh, I guess I assumed you were around my age?”

“Exactly. I’ve been Shifted since I was seven years old, Xander, and yet here I am, having a chat with you in your living room,” she said.

He blinked, “But...what?”

“Some people live, some people die, simple as that,” she finished.

“So, what? You can survive out there? Why? What?” He thought again about Skittles’ Shifted family members, how he had imagined Skittles getting black market goods from them, how they had been Shifted since his friend had been a child.

“Yup. Don’t know why, wish I did, but there we are,” she said before standing, Bingley immediately leaping off the sofa to follow her to the door, “I think that’s probably enough lessons for tonight, friend.”

“Oh, um, right, okay, sure,” he babbled as he stood and went to open the door for her. “Wait, so, does that mean the Corporations are hiring Shifted? To transport stuff out there?”

She gave him a long look, clearly frustrated with his gaps of knowledge. “Yes, Xander, that’s what it means. Do try to keep up.”

And with that, she was gone, pulling the door from his stiff fingers and shutting it behind her.

Ramon Martinez arrived home, taking the narrow staircase from the back alley up to his small two bedroom apartment above the bakery. As a child, the scents of chocolate and baking dough would drift up through the floorboards and he would wake with the taste of sugar already on his tongue. He closed the door behind him gently, trying to deafen his movements so as not to wake his aging parents.

“Ramon, mijo, you’re home late again,” his mother called from the kitchen. He winced, feeling like a delinquent teenager once more. Even as a twenty-six year old man, his mother knew how to cow him.

“Yeah, I know, mama,” he replied, moving through the apartment to find her at the kitchen counter folding dough together. “I had to work though, y’know?”

“I know, I know, mijo. You work hard,” she said, kissing his cheek as he joined her at the counter. He had to work hard, for her and papa. All the money he made went to paying the rent for the apartment and the bakery. Tonight’s adventure had also involved paying a cafe on the other side of town to order as much as they could from his parent’s struggling bakery. No customers meant no weekly vouchers for ingredients, and it would kill his parents to not have the structure of a work day, maybe literally.

“Well, welcome home, Skittles,” she said with an affectionate pat on the cheek, using his nickname since childhood when the neighborhood kids would tease him for his single minded love of the rainbow candies.

He squeezed her close, “Love you, ma,” he whispered into her hair, the thick black strands slowly being replaced by gray, before leaving her to her baking and retiring to his bedroom.