Julia told herself. This isn’t so bad.She and Shawn Gutierrez sat in one of the booths at Pajarito’s, the former gastropub that had somehow turned into the center of the revived Los Alamos community. By that point, it was almost four thirty, and people were beginning to trickle in after putting in their various shifts around town, whether that was cutting timber to store against the coming cold months, harvesting the last crops from the vegetable gardens they’d planted over the summer, or continuing with the grim but necessary process of going from empty house to empty house and gathering and cataloguing anything that would help the community survive the next winter. At least there were no dead bodies to contend with — the Dying had been a clean apocalypse, she’d give the djinn that much — but it still had to be difficult work, to enter the houses of people long dead and realize those little piles of gray dust used to be the inhabitants.But she shouldn’t be thinking about that now.
