Prolog

The last wild bees in the Loire valley were counted in a year no one remembers, and nobody thought much of it. Each change looked like an anomaly, then like everyday life, until one day the world was uninhabitable. A species gone here, a few crops there. Die-offs, failed harvests, famine, water that shrank a little more with every generation. Whole regions couldn't feed their people anymore, and the people left to look for somewhere new to live.

They found nothing.

That meant more graves, more burned towns, more people on the roads. The refugees ran up against those who could still live off what their land gave them, and when strangers started pushing in, the fences went up, and then the shooting started. Every region that emptied stopped working and dragged its neighbors down with it. Roads went unmaintained and cracked apart. News from the outside thinned out and stopped. After that the power grid went down, the taps ran dry, and the shelves emptied. The laws were still written down somewhere, but nobody enforced them, and the people who were supposed to protect everyone else set up roadblocks and took a cut of whatever passed through.

When the smoke from the last burning cities cleared, there was only ash, and the people who still refused to give up.

A few held out to the very end, and they were the ones most to blame for the state of the world, because they had taken the most and changed the least. Their cities stood as the last bastions while everything else fell. They were too big to change course, even if they had wanted to, and when nothing was left but these few giants, they began to eye each other hungrily. Sooner or later they started reaching for each other's water. That became the Last War.

Like the collapse, it had no starting date. It began with squabbles over land and resources and got steadily worse, until it was everyone against everyone and nobody could win. It ended no more cleanly than it had begun. The fight drained out of the combatants, and they pulled back to lick their wounds.

The ground had once been green. Now it was cracked and hard, and only thornbushes and succulents held on. Rusted wrecks of vehicles and war machines lay scattered across it where they had stopped, some still pointed toward cities that weren't there anymore. The roads that had connected nations ran empty across a ruined land. Days of killing heat gave way to nights of freezing cold, and in daylight nothing moved under the open sky. No birds. No animals. No people in sight. Everything had gone to ground and was waiting. Under the surface lay what was left of the old world: tunnels, abandoned installations, the pipes and cables that used to tie it all together. Footsteps carried a long way down there, and people kept their voices low over the sound of water seeping through stone. And there was life. Those who couldn't bear the sun or the ice hid in the dark. They ate what was left, talked about the world that had been, and waited for the nights to get longer.