June 30, 2092
Brahm Sosthene jolted awake out of a deep sleep, fearful, confused, and disoriented. The dream that had shaken him was always the same, always frightening and never understood. As minister of unity for President Aldrich and chief architect of the Human Homogenization Project, his life since The Event had been one of unremitting stress and controversy. And now that the official mandates were poised to take effect, he could think of little else—so much depended on its success.

But the stress of the HHP and his anxiety around the upcoming series of policy meetings were not the cause of the dream, for he had been having it for years, long before The Event brought the world to its knees and humanity to the brink of extinction.

It was still the small hours. Monday morning. Behind him, Sari, his young wife of not yet two years, stirred and rolled to her side, putting a hand on his shoulder. Perhaps she would ask to hear the dream again; she still did sometimes, even though it never changed. It was enough that she offered him comfort, for the dream always upset him. She was quiet, and Brahm could feel her drifting back to sleep.

Brahm pulled himself out of bed.

“Try to get some rest, my love,” she said, her voice heavy with sleep. “Your meeting, tomorrow…the Tower…”

Not tomorrow, he thought. Today. This morning.

He leaned down and kissed her shoulder, and by the time he straightened again, she was asleep. The bedroom was still as he grabbed his robe from the arm of the chair by the window. Only the lightest of night breezes brushed past the curtains. Padding down the hallway in the dark, he made his way to the bathroom and splashed water on his face.

He quietly shut the door, then switched on the light. The face that looked back at him from across the sink looked old, he thought, older than thirty-five. He had always been serious and taciturn, even as a young man, but now he seemed careworn and haunted. Everyone was, he supposed; there was too much trauma too close to the surface of every life. Too many memories. Too many ghosts. Even young people were impossibly old.

The next generation, he knew, would not understand. Survivors, to them, would seem broken and dim by comparison. Grim and resolute. He caught the faint scent of apricots from Sari’s soap, a small, round bar featuring pale petals and ground apricot pits. On the back of the door, a sky-blue blouse and a turquoise silk scarf.

He smiled and ran his fingers over the scarf, thanking whatever small mechanism of fate had brought Sari into his life. He couldn’t imagine his life without her. Not now. It would be beyond bearing.

Brahm often listened to Sari talk of the horrors that she endured following The Event. “It helps me cope,” she would say.

Rather than flee to the countryside, she chose to stay and hide out in her family home. She described to him with horror how she removed her parents’ and sisters’ lifeless bodies to the curbside so they could be transported to the central depot for the dead that had been haphazardly established. Once she had exhausted all her food stores, she resorted, like many others, to scurrying out at night like some feral rodent looking for food in abandoned stores and houses, then returning home to hide.

Brahm tiptoed into the kitchen to make himself a cup of chamomile tea, hoping maybe this time it would help him fall back to sleep. It never had in the past. As he sipped, now sitting in his home office staring aimlessly at the words on his computer screen, his mind drifted back to that fateful day when a bedraggled and barely communicative young woman interviewed for a job coordinating the children’s division of the Community Housing Co-op he was trying to get off the ground.

“Sari Aldira, that name sounds familiar. Any relation to Liv Aldira, the mayor of Bethel City? I believe my father knew her before The Event.”

Sari burst into tears.

“I see…I should have known better. I’m sorry.”

“She was my mother.” Sari whimpered. “My father and two sisters also died. I have no family left, not even cousins.”

More tears. Brahm waited a moment to allow Sari to compose herself.

“Can you tell me a little about yourself, Sari?” he asked, looking down at her handwritten resumé. “I see that you recently graduated with a master’s degree in social work.”

“Yes, I was planning to travel to France with my friends before finding a job when The Event broke out. I’m sorry that I don’t have any real work experience. I did a three-month school placement in an adolescent group home, The Stormont Centre, but I don’t think I can find any references.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Brahm responded. “Can you tell me why you want this position? You do understand that there is no pay, and you will be working for your room and board.”

“Yes, I know that. I don’t care about getting paid. I just know I have to do something. I can’t stay living in my family home anymore. I just can’t.”

There was an uncomfortable pause.

“I’m not doing this just for a place to live. I need to figure out a way to move forward with my life. We all do, and better we do it living and working and reconnecting together. I like that idea and think that I can help. That’s what the co-op is about, isn’t it?”

“I couldn’t have said it better,” Brahm said with a smile.

Brahm initially doubted that Sari could work effectively, let alone take care of herself. Unfortunately, he had no better option and offered her the position. He perceived a spark of resiliency in her brilliantly blue eyes that gave him hope for her recovery. Whether it was the distraction of her job or the irrepressible and contagious joy that children who are cared for naturally emit, Sari’s spirit began to re-emerge. Delving into work was like a tonic to her soul. She had found a reason to live while caring and supporting those who had lost everything and everyone.

As time went on, Sari grew stronger in her leadership. Brahm recognized the warmth and tenderness that permeated her every action. She brought to the children’s division a combination of structure, discipline, and affection that made her loved and cherished by the children, respected and valued by her co-workers, and universally appreciated.

Brahm relished Sari’s rebirth. He witnessed the revitalization of a beautiful, energetic, independent, and determined woman who passionately cared for the children under her charge. Brahm was inevitably drawn to this tall, slender woman with long black hair and penetrating blue eyes.

They fell in love, and when Brahm had been brought into the newly formed governing council as minister for unity that November, she donated her family home to the co-op and moved in with him.

She seemed to bring light, colour, and energy to the house on Suleiman Drive, transforming it into the home it had never been.

They were married on August 29, 2090, on the anniversary of their first meeting, in a ceremony that garnered a surprising amount of public attention, for Brahm was already a much-loved member of the fledgling government, and his marriage was seen as a happy chapter to a life that had been marked by tragedy that predated The Event.

Together, they managed to salvage as much love and happiness as one could possibly desire in the aftermath of such horrors. They were equally in love and similarly appreciative and blessed for the connection they had found in each other.

When Brahm shut off the hallway light and opened the bedroom door, he caught a faint hint of her perfume and felt a wave of gratitude wash over him in the night as he made his way to the pale shape of the bedroom curtains.

Brahm slid back into bed beside his young wife, knowing full well that he was likely not going to be able to fall back to sleep. Sari rolled over and wrapped him in a dreamy embrace without waking. As Brahm lay in Sari’s arms, listening to her slow, rhythmical breathing, he thought back to the time they first made love and warmly reminisced about how they lay in each other’s arms, irrepressibly weeping tears of sadness, joy, and love—when an unfamiliar sense of fear suddenly overtook him. He felt uncontrollably panicked as he struggled to slow his breathing and calm his nerves. He could not comprehend why, suddenly and uncharacteristically, he had become so terrified.

As he struggled to soothe his fear, he pondered the meaning of this newfound and frightening anxiety. Despite everything that had happened to him during The Event, irrespective of all the death and all his losses, for the first time in his life, Brahm suddenly and inexplicably became fearful of losing love.

—

The sun was up when Sari woke Monday morning. Brahm’s side of the bed was empty, and the sheets cool to the touch. She even half remembered him getting up at dawn after a fitful night. She stretched and gazed at the mottled shadows cast on the curtains by the boughs of the fig tree outside the bedroom window, delighting in the competing songs of warblers, goldcrests, and skylarks.

Her feet found her slippers as she sat on the side of the bed and picked up her brush from the bedside table. It had belonged to her mother and was one of the few artifacts from her old life she’d chosen to keep, for she remembered her mother brushing her hair with it as a child as they talked about their day.

As she got out of bed, she felt a wave of dizziness rush over her, and she sat back down until the wave passed.

What’s gotten into me? And what has gotten into Brahm? He seems like he is on another planet sometimes…And these dreams? Hopefully it is just all the stress of getting the Human Homogenization Project finally passed and up and running.

Shortly after they’d been married, Brahm had had a falling out with his closest friend over what was then only the rough outline of the Human Homogenization Project. That had been a terrible night. Brahm had been deeply hurt. He had known Jess for years, had gone to university with him, was the best man at his wedding, just as Jess and Mary had come to their wedding. The falling out left them estranged, and a small part of Brahm’s light had dimmed after that; not the light that shone for her and their life together, but a spark that had burned within him, a desire to make a difference. Idealism cooling to dogged determination.

She loved their home on Suleiman Drive and the garden out front, and this bedroom especially. She remembered the first time Brahm had invited her over. It would have been that first November, shortly after he’d been approached by President Sol Aldrich to be part of the governing council as minister of unity. Their relationship had still been so fresh. It felt strange to admit to love in the shadow of so much death. And of course, the city was still on its knees. There were no restaurants or theatres or music, simply reclaimed areas where people could meet and walk and sit.

As she showered and changed, she thought back to the first night she slept there. The night Brahm finally opened himself to her. They’d sat in Caryatid Park by the stilled fountain and talked until dusk, talked about the future and the possibility of a future together. When they stood, a tawny owl stirred and lifted silently from an olive tree and landed on one of the columns surrounding the fountain and sat there gazing down at them.

“You remember during your interview when I stuck my foot in my mouth when I told you my father knew your mother.”

She smiled. “Yes, how could I forget. I burst into tears. You were so sweet, apologizing and redirecting me.”

Brahm blushed and reached for Sari’s hand. “You are far too charitable. What I wanted to tell you is that my parents, who both died in The Event, were actually my uncle and aunt. They raised me and are the only real parents I can remember.”

Sari watched as Brahm swallowed uncomfortably.

“I rarely talk of my birth parents. They were killed when I was five years old. Kidnapped, held hostage, and murdered. This happened before you were born. It was huge news at the time. Jaff and Raya, my adopted parents, did their best to shelter me, but when I got older, they explained to me what happened.

“My father, Shammon, was a physician running the medical facilities of a New Bethelian refugee centre in Beqaa, just outside Bethel City. My mother, Naomi, had been a social worker assisting refugees in finding housing and employment. I have only vague memories of that time. I remember skipping stones in the lake with an older cousin, Davis, who was training to become a doctor. I know their faces, but I think only from pictures that I have seen.”

Sari touched his arm. “I think I may have heard something about this.”

“They were held hostage for four days and then shot. Their bodies were found washed up on the shore of Landfall Bay. It was all motivated by racial fear and hate. It was the Original Bethelian supremacists in Azure Dawn that killed them. There was so much animosity and violence between New and Original Bethelians back then, and my parents got caught in the middle. They paid for it with their lives.”

She whispered, “The Human Homogenization Project.”

“Exactly. My uncle, Jaff—I always called him Papi—left me a note before he died. I’ve read it a thousand times. He was an immunologist and had been doing research on the viruses that were stolen from his lab. Before The Event, he doubted my homogenization theories, but in his final words, he begged me, if I survived, to make them a reality. He also told me he knew exactly who had stolen and released the viruses but gave me no details.”

She leaned forward and kissed Brahm tenderly as she cupped his face in her hands.

Neither of them wanted the evening to end, so Brahm had invited her back to Suleiman Drive, a tree-lined street where he owned a modest bungalow near the university. Prior to The Event, he’d been a newly tenured professor. He’d only lived there for a handful of years as a bachelor, and his work at the university meant that he never really made the place his own.

The next morning, before they’d even gotten out of bed, Brahm, holding her in his arms, begged, “Sari, please move in here with me. I know it seems crazy, but really, I can’t think of anything that would make me happier. This was always just a house where I lived. I want it now to be our home.”

“I will,” she said without hesitation.

Brahm held her tightly in his arms as he loved her once again.

They moved in together, and 37 Suleiman Drive became an almost sacred space, a refuge in a landscape of quiet desolation. Brahm insisted that it had been waiting for her. When Sari signed over her family home in Broad Bay to the co-op, it felt like a weight had been lifted from her chest and she could finally move forward.

Sari dressed, still feeling unusually fatigued. She hoped she wasn’t coming down with something; she had a busy week and could not afford to get sick. She threw open the curtains, breathing in the summer scents of the garden. She could hear Brahm puttering about in the kitchen; she smelled the coffee brewing and could hear the sizzle of eggs cooking on the stove.

From the bedroom, she made her way down the hall to the living room. A small open-concept kitchen looked out on the space across the scuffed marble countertops. Herbs grew in a window box. A smaller room off the living room, perhaps originally intended as a second bedroom, had long served as Brahm’s office.

“Good morning, my sweet love. You slept in this morning. Everything okay?” Brahm looked exhausted. “I made us some eggs and toast, but we’re gonna have to hurry.”

“Thanks, Brahm. I’m fine, just struggling to wake up. You’re the one who looks ragged. Were you able to get back to sleep after your dream?”

“No, I tried, but it never happens. I made some tea, did some work, and then got started on breakfast.”

She glanced towards his office; the door was open, and she could see the flickering light from his computer. Because of his work with the governing council and the importance of the Human Homogenization Project, Brahm had been one of the few who’d been granted computer and internet access, although services were limited by frequent electrical outages. His shoulders were slightly slouched, and she could tell he was tired.

The final wording of the project protocols was about to be approved by the governing council and passed into law, and she hoped that some of the pressure would ease at that point and Brahm would be able to exhale.

Sari walked up behind him and touched his shoulder. He half-turned his head, and she leaned in and hugged him from behind, wrapping her arms around his waist and kissing him on the cheek.

“Will you be okay for your meeting?”

Brahm turned to her and smiled half-heartedly. “You know me, I’m always up for a good debate. We’ve done our homework and have enough support within the governing council. Everything should go smoothly enough. Let’s sit and eat, Sari, or else we’re going to be late.”

“No, I’ll be alright, my love. I haven’t much of an appetite this morning. You eat; I’ll just have coffee.”

Brahm held onto Sari’s arms and squeezed them gently.

There was, she thought, an unfamiliar tension in Brahm’s shoulders, an unease in his voice. Was he pulling away from her? No, surely that was her imagination. Still, an odd sense of foreboding welled up inside of her just then. An unseen shadow seemed to fall across the room. It was good he didn’t look back at her just then, for she felt certain he’d read it—whatever it was—in her face. And Brahm had enough on his mind.

—

It was coming up to nine, and Brahm stood in the front garden waiting on Sari. She said she needed to do something, but what was taking her so long? We’re going to be late!

They liked to leave the house together in the mornings, kissing beneath the fig tree and parting ways at the curb. Brahm would walk north on Suleiman as far as Gutenberg, which led to the Tower district and the government office complex known as Cypress Avenue. Sari would head south into Skyview by any number of residential streets, eventually finding her way to the co-op on Beacon Avenue.

He didn’t know what was keeping her this morning, but Brahm was content to soak up the morning sunlight. The garden, like so many aspects of his life, had been transformed by Sari, who’d overseen new plantings and pruning and the placement of a narrow raised bed for herbs. It was a small space, but she had brought it to life and even arranged for a man to come in to do maintenance twice a month.

He heard the door and turned to see Sari emerge in the morning light of the garden. Did she look a little pale? She caught his gaze, and her face broke into a broad, radiant smile. Almost artificially bright. Perhaps she was just trying to buoy his spirits. She locked the door, then came over and kissed him.

“I love you,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“I love you too.”

“Good luck today.”

And then she was off, heading south down Suleiman towards Skyview. It had been an odd exchange. Brahm turned north and could see the Tower reaching into a blue sky with not a cloud in sight.