By 2500 humanity had learned to leave the solar system. By 2600 most of humanity lived on the fleet.
Earth did not empty cleanly. Some stayed for God. Some stayed because the dirt was all they had ever owned. Airtek built the ships and then began taking what the ships would need: farmland first, then water, then the herds. At the beginning it looked like contracts. Then the shelves in the stores went thin. Then a generational farmer watched armed men walk his fields under a piece of paper that said the land was no longer his.
The riots started at a supply outpost and spread. A resistance formed. Airtek put shoot-on-sight guards on every gate. Hundreds died reaching for food that had been theirs a year earlier. Years later the resistance was gone. The people who remained either boarded, died, went mad, or founded the settlements that still clung to the old world like ticks.
Thomas Hayes was born in one of those settlements, in the broken country that used to be called the Rocky Mountains. He had only ever seen the peaks in photographs. If I'd been born then, he thought, and then he went back to scavenging, because thinking about mountains did not fill a pack.
The outlands around the settlement were full of dead houses and dead shops. Raiders hunted there. Worse than raiders were blood raiders—men who had eaten enough human meat that the hunger never left them. Once a man crossed that line there was no coming back. Hayes knew the risk. He went anyway. Something in him kept looking.
He found an old ham radio in a collapsed basement and carried it to Odis.
Odis was a tall man with a scar cut across his forehead. The settlement called him the fixer because if a thing could be made to work again, he would find the way. Hayes held the radio up.
"Old man. See if you can wake this up."
"I'll see," Odis said.
Hayes took the dirt path toward the center of the settlement. Small footsteps followed him. He knew those steps. He pretended he didn't. A single flower grew at the edge of the path. He stopped to look at it.
"BOO!"
He jumped. Lilith grinned up at him, furious that it hadn't worked.
"I was quiet! I stayed back!"
"You didn't match my steps. I heard you from the first turn. Come on. Let's see what Mrs. Ingrid baked."
Hayes had learned to move without being seen because being seen outside the walls meant dying. He used that skill to stay alive and to bring back copper, wire, tools—anything the settlement would trade. There was no money. Only goods for goods. Everyone contributed. That rule was older than Hayes's memory.
At the center he handed Lilith a bundle of copper.
"You want anything?"
She took it and ran for Mrs. Ingrid's stall. Hayes followed.
"What's today?" Lilith asked.
Mrs. Ingrid put a loaf in one of the girl's hands and a honey-white in the other.
"Take that to your father," Hayes said. "He'll be glad it's not soup."
Lilith beamed. "He'll fix your radio. I know he will."
She left. Hayes went to Ecuador.
Ecuador was short, thick through the chest, and in Hayes's eyes he could make anything. The craftsman turned and grinned.
"Finished."
He held up a four-pronged hook with paracord spliced to the base.
"Be careful out there. They won't show mercy if they catch you."
Hayes handed over the rest of the haul.
"That's the trick," he said. "If they find me."
He took the long way home. Dark had come down by the time he reached the cabin. He did not like the cabin. It still smelled like his mother. Tuberculosis had taken her three months earlier. People were not supposed to die of that anymore. Scarcity decided otherwise.
The only way we save her is if I find the right antibiotics, Doctor Johann had said.
Hayes had searched for weeks. He stayed out for days. Each time he came back empty, she was worse. He still felt the failure like a stone in his chest. He slept because there was nothing else to do with it.
He woke before sunrise, took the hook, and left for the outlands.
The trail was a narrow lie of forks and dead ends. Only one path opened on the wreckage beyond the mountain wall. His mother had shown him that path when the world still felt like something you could walk into and come back from.
The outlands were quiet. No raiders in the open. Hayes let himself grin.
"Easier than I thought."
He moved faster. The air smelled of rust. He knew that smell. He still scanned the ground before he stepped into the open, then threw the hook. It caught on the first try.
From the top of the wall he saw the whole outpost.
Blood raiders had made camp. Last night's meal was still on a long table. Tents ringed a longhouse in the center. That was wrong. Blood raiders did not stay. They were too far gone to organize.
A whistle cut the morning.
"COME HERE, BOYS."
An eight-foot man stood in the longhouse doorway. Pale. Built like a wall. His smile showed teeth filed to points.
Men crawled out of the tents—different sizes, same feral look—and knelt.
"TONIGHT WE FEAST ON THE SETTLEMENT."
Hayes's stomach turned to rock. He slid the rope, hit the ground running, and did not look back. Howls rose behind him.
At the same hour, in the fixer shed, Lilith shoved her father's hands off the radio.
"You wired the transceiver wrong."
Odis watched her work. He had taught her everything he knew. He had not noticed the day she passed him.
"Got it!"
She bounced on her toes.
"I can't wait to show Hayes."
Hayes ran the trail like a rat in a maze.
Warn them. We leave now.
The settlement came into view. People were already gathered in the center, talking, laughing. He hit the square shouting.
"Blood raiders! Tonight! We have to leave!"
Faces turned. The look was the same one they gave a boy who cried wolf.
A man tapped the pistol on his hip. "Leave? Go where? I'm not running because a few of those animals think they can find the gate."
Laughter moved through the crowd.
"They have a leader," Hayes said. "Thirty of them. Weapons. They're not the usual pack."
He looked at Ecuador. The craftsman shook his head.
"This is home. We don't run."
Hayes did not see Odis or Lilith in the square. He left them to their certainty and ran for the fixer house.
The front door slammed open on empty rooms. Workshop.
He found them in the shed, frozen over the radio.
Warning to all intelligent life on Earth. You have one week to join humanity on the fleet. The fleet will be discontinuing its last outpost on the west coast. Again: one week. This broadcast will update daily with the remaining time before departure.
Hayes told them what he had seen on the wall.
Odis's face went grim. "We leave."
"What about everyone else?" Lilith asked.
"No one wants to go," Hayes said.
"Then we show them this," Odis said. "It might change their minds."
It did not change the man with the pistol.
"This doesn't change anything."
Part of the crowd broke into panic.
"First the raiders and now there's no way off?"
"We have to get out!"
The other half dug in.
"Let them come. We've got rifles enough for meat-eaters." The pistol man spat. "And good riddance to the fleet. We never needed them."
The sound that ended the argument was not a voice.
It was something hitting the mountain wall hard enough to shake the ground under their feet.
They were here