2. The Steel City Burial

The first man Miranda Barrett shot was not a monster.

He was a looter, probably in his early twenties, with a crowbar in one hand and a canvas bag full of stolen electronics in the other. He came through the shattered glass door of the district attorney's office on the seventh floor of the Justice Center at approximately 2:47 PM, forty-one minutes after the power died, and he did not see Miranda crouched behind the reception desk with her dead boss's service weapon clutched in both hands.

She had never fired a gun before. Her father had taken her to a range exactly once, when she was sixteen, a bonding exercise that had ended with her flinching at every report and Barrett staring at her with an expression she now recognized as relief. He had not wanted her to be good at it. He had wanted her to be afraid, because fear meant she would never seek out the places where guns were necessary, and that meant she would grow up to be someone like him, someone who encountered violence only in the abstract, mediated through case files and sentencing guidelines and the polished mahogany of a federal bench.

But Miranda had spent eight years as a prosecutor in the Moreland County District Attorney's Office, and in those eight years she had learned that her father's understanding of violence was incomplete. Violence was not merely the thing that happened in the Flats or the warehouse district or the prison tiers. Violence was also the thing that happened in conference rooms and plea negotiations and the quiet, carpeted chambers of the federal judiciary. It was just better dressed.

The looter with the crowbar was not better dressed. His jacket was a cheap nylon windbreaker, torn at the shoulder, and his shoes made a crunching sound on the broken glass as he moved through the reception area toward the hallway that led to the prosecutors' offices. He was breathing hard, either from exertion or adrenaline, and he was muttering to himself in a low, rhythmic cadence that Miranda could not quite make out.

She had two choices. She could stay behind the desk and let him pass, hope he took what he wanted and left, hope he did not find her, hope that the ten other people sheltering in the conference room at the end of the hall would have the sense to stay quiet. Or she could stop him.

The gun was a Glock 19, standard issue for the DA's investigative unit, and it belonged to Chief Investigator Raymond Carver, who was currently lying on the floor of his office with a myocardial infarction that had killed him approximately twelve minutes after the EMP hit. Miranda had watched him die. She had performed chest compressions until her arms burned and her blouse was soaked with sweat, and Carver had stared up at her with the bewildered expression of a man who had survived thirty years in law enforcement only to be taken down by his own arteries at the age of fifty-seven. His last words had been "Tell Lorraine," and then he had stopped being a person and started being a problem.

Miranda had taken his gun. She had no memory of the decision, only the sudden awareness of the checkered grip against her palm and the surprising heft of the weapon, heavier than it looked, a weight that seemed to pull her hands toward the floor. She had checked the magazine the way Carver had shown her once, years ago, during a late-night conversation about a death threat she had received from a cartel defendant. Seventeen rounds. One in the chamber. The safety was a trigger safety, which meant there was nothing between her finger and the discharge except her own discipline.

She had never been particularly disciplined. That was her father's gift, the ability to hold himself apart from the world, to weigh and measure and deliberate while the blood of other people's tragedies pooled around his feet. Miranda was not like that. She felt things too quickly and too deeply, and she had spent most of her adult life learning to hide it, to present a face of professional detachment that would make her acceptable to the men who ran the office, the judges, the defense attorneys, her father.

The looter was ten feet away now. He had stopped muttering. He had seen something—probably the open door of the conference room, probably the pale faces of the paralegals and secretaries huddled inside—and he was shifting the crowbar in his grip, and Miranda knew, with a certainty that felt more like instinct than reasoning, that he was about to do something irreparable.

She stood up.

The motion was fluid, almost mechanical, her body acting before her mind had finished processing the decision. The Glock came up in both hands, the way Carver had taught her, and she planted her feet shoulder-width apart, and she aimed at the center of the looter's chest, and she said, "Drop it."

Her voice was steady. That was the first surprise. She had expected it to shake, to betray her in the way that her face sometimes did when she was presenting to a jury and the evidence was not as strong as she wanted it to be. But the word came out flat and cold, the voice of someone who had been saying "drop it" for years, and the looter froze with the crowbar half-raised, his head swiveling toward her.

For a moment, no one moved. The looter looked at her, at the gun, at her face, and she saw the calculation happening behind his eyes. He was trying to decide if she would shoot. He was trying to read her the way he would read a mark or a rival or a cop, and Miranda understood, with a clarity that felt almost like vertigo, that everything depended on what he saw in her expression.

She let him see nothing. She let him see the barrel of the gun and the steadiness of her hands and the cold, flat emptiness behind her eyes, and after a long moment he lowered the crowbar.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, lady. No problem. I'm just leaving."

He was not just leaving. Miranda had prosecuted enough liars to know the way they moved when they were buying time, the way their eyes tracked toward exits and improvised weapons and the weak points in a room. He was going to wait for her to lower the gun, and then he was going to come at her with the crowbar, and she was going to have to make a decision that she did not want to make.

She shot him.

The sound was enormous, a concussive blast that seemed to swallow all the air in the room, and the looter staggered backward with a look of genuine astonishment on his face. The bullet had hit him in the shoulder, not the chest—her aim had drifted at the last moment, some vestigial reluctance pulling her hands off target—and he dropped the crowbar with a clatter and fell against the reception desk, clutching at the wound.

Blood was seeping between his fingers, dark and arterial, and Miranda knew immediately that she had hit something important. The subclavian artery, maybe, or the brachial. She had sat through enough forensic pathology testimony to know what a serious bleed looked like, and this was a serious bleed. The looter was going to die on the floor of the district attorney's office, and she had killed him, and she was still holding the gun in both hands with the barrel pointed at his chest.

"Jesus Christ." The voice came from behind her. One of the paralegals, a young woman named Tess who had been with the office for less than a year, was standing in the doorway of the conference room with her hands over her mouth. "Miranda, Jesus Christ, you shot him."

Miranda did not lower the gun. She approached the looter, stepping carefully around the blood that was spreading across the marble floor, and she kicked the crowbar out of his reach. He was trying to say something, his lips moving soundlessly, his eyes wide and white with shock. Miranda looked down at him, and she felt nothing.

That was the second surprise. She had expected to feel horror, or guilt, or at least the sickening rush of adrenaline that accompanied the realization of what she had done. But she felt nothing at all. Her pulse was steady. Her hands were dry. The gun in her grip felt like an extension of her arm, a tool she had been carrying her whole life without knowing it.

"Someone get me a first aid kit," she said, because that was what you were supposed to say when you had shot someone. "And someone check the stairwell. I want to know if there are more of them."

Tess was still staring at her, but one of the other paralegals, an older man named Gerald who had been with the office since before Miranda was born, had already disappeared into the back rooms. He returned a moment later with a white plastic case that had a red cross on the lid.

Miranda knelt beside the looter and opened the kit. She had no medical training—her father had always assumed she would become a lawyer, and she had never seriously considered anything else—but she had watched enough paramedics work on enough crime scenes to know the basics. She packed the wound with gauze and applied pressure, and the looter screamed through clenched teeth, and Miranda held the dressing in place until Gerald knelt down beside her and took over.

"Ms. Barrett." Gerald's voice was calm, the voice of a man who had survived the collapse of the steel industry and the crack epidemic and the 2008 recession without ever raising his voice. "Maybe you should check the stairwell yourself. I got this."

Miranda stood up. Her knees were wet with the looter's blood, and the fabric of her skirt clung to her legs as she walked to the emergency stairwell door. She pressed her ear against the cold metal and listened.

At first, she heard nothing. The building was silent in the way that dead buildings are silent, a silence that had texture and weight, that seemed to press against the eardrums like water at depth. But as she listened longer, she began to pick out other sounds: distant shouts, the crash of breaking glass, the occasional pop of gunfire from somewhere far away. The city of Blackforge was a city of four hundred and thirty thousand people, and all of them were discovering, in the same moment, that the rules had changed.

Miranda thought about her father. The federal courthouse was on the other side of the river, six miles away, a distance that might as well have been six hundred in a city without functioning vehicles or traffic signals or law enforcement. She had no way to reach him, no way to know if he was alive or dead, and the realization settled into her chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

She had spent most of her adult life trying to escape her father's shadow. The Barrett name was a weight in Moreland, a legacy of jurisprudence and rectitude that opened doors and closed conversations. Every judge in the district knew who her father was. Every defense attorney who saw her name on a charging document calculated whether Barrett's daughter would be easier or harder to deal with than the other prosecutors. She had never been Miranda Barrett, assistant district attorney. She had always been Judge Barrett's daughter, the second generation of legal royalty, the heir apparent to a dynasty she had never asked to join.

And yet, standing in the dark stairwell with a dead man's gun in her hand and a dying man's blood on her skirt, she understood for the first time that her father had not been wrong about everything. Violence was a kind of inheritance. It was passed down through families like eye color or a predisposition to heart disease, and it slept in the blood, and it waited.

The looter died at 3:21 PM. Gerald closed his eyes and covered his face with a jacket from the lost and found, and Tess cried in the corner of the conference room while the other paralegals pretended not to notice. Miranda stood at the shattered window and watched the smoke rise over the city, and she thought about the gun in her hand, and she thought about her father, and she thought about the thing that had stirred in her blood when she pulled the trigger.

It had felt like relief.

By nightfall, they had fortified the seventh floor. The stairwell doors were barricaded with desks and filing cabinets, and the elevators were dead, and the only way up was through a single staircase that they had rigged with an improvised alarm system—empty soda cans strung on a length of twine, something Gerald had learned from his grandfather who had fought in the Pacific. It was primitive and it was ugly and it was the first thing that had made Miranda feel safe since the power died.

She had gathered the survivors in the main conference room. There were twelve of them in total: four prosecutors, including Miranda; five paralegals and administrative staff; two investigators, both retired cops who had come back for the pension benefits; and a defendant who had been waiting in the holding cell when the EMP hit, a nineteen-year-old car thief named Deon who had been so terrified by the gunfire that he had not tried to run.

Miranda had made the decision to release him from the holding cell. It was not a legal decision—the law, as her father had always insisted, did not bend to circumstance—but the holding cell was a windowless concrete box that would become an oven if the building's ventilation system did not come back online, and Miranda had decided that she would rather face the bar association's censure than watch a teenager suffocate in the dark.

Deon had repaid her mercy by helping Gerald carry the filing cabinets to the stairwell door. He was a skinny kid with a face full of acne and a tattoo of a serpent on his forearm, and he moved with the furtive, watchful gait of someone who had spent his whole life waiting for the next blow to land. Miranda recognized something in him that she did not want to recognize.

"We can't stay here," said the senior prosecutor, a man named Howard Lassiter who had been with the office for thirty years and had spent most of that time finding reasons not to retire. "The building is defensible in the short term, but we have no food, no water, and no way to communicate with the outside world. If this is what we think it is—a coordinated attack on the entire grid—then we need to get out of the city before things get worse."

"And go where?" Miranda asked. The question was genuine, not rhetorical. She had spent her entire life within a hundred miles of Blackforge, and she could not think of a single place that would be safer than where they were.

Lassiter spread his hands. "The National Guard has bases in the mountains. If we can reach one, we can—"

"The National Guard," said one of the investigators, a former homicide detective named O'Rourke, "is going to be busy trying to keep the cities from burning down. They're not going to send a rescue team for twelve lawyers."

"Then we wait for help to arrive," said Tess, the paralegal who had been crying. She had stopped now, and her voice was steadier than Miranda had expected. "There must be someone out there. The government. The military. Someone."

Miranda looked out the window. The city was dark, a black expanse broken only by the orange glow of distant fires. Somewhere to the south, in the warehouse district that ran along the river, a structure was burning with the intensity of a foundry, sending up a column of smoke that blotted out the stars.

"Help isn't coming," Miranda said, and she was surprised by how certain she sounded. "Whatever this is, it's bigger than Blackforge. Bigger than the state. If it was just us, we would have heard something by now. Planes. Helicopters. Something."

She turned away from the window and faced the group. Twelve faces, pale in the emergency lantern light, watching her with expressions that ranged from fear to desperation to the blank, stunned emptiness of people who had not yet processed what had happened to them.

"We stay here for tonight," she said. "We secure the building. We inventory our supplies. And tomorrow, we start figuring out how to survive."

No one argued. No one offered an alternative. And Miranda realized, with a chill that had nothing to do with the January cold, that she had just given her first order as the person in charge.

She did not know when she had become the person in charge. She had not asked for it, had not wanted it, had not even noticed it happening until the moment was already past. But somewhere in the hours between the looter's death and the fall of night, the other survivors had begun to look at her differently. They had begun to wait for her to speak, to watch for her reactions, to align themselves around her decisions like iron filings around a magnet.

It was the gun, she told herself. It was the fact that she had shot a man in front of them, and the fact that she had not fallen apart afterward. They were deferring to her because she had proven herself capable of violence, and in a world without law, the capacity for violence was the only credential that mattered.

But that was not entirely true. There was something else at work, something older and deeper than the gun or the shooting or the blood on her skirt. It was the same thing that had stirred in her chest when she pulled the trigger, the same thing that had made the recoil feel less like a shock and more like a homecoming.

The Barrett blood. The family sickness. The thing that had skipped a generation and found her waiting.

She did not sleep that night. She sat in the window of her office, the Glock on the desk beside her, and watched the fires burn over the city, and tried to remember everything her father had ever told her about the law.

All she could remember was his voice, patient and measured, explaining that the law was not justice. The law was a substitute for justice, a mechanism for resolving disputes without resorting to the kind of violence that had characterized most of human history. It was a fragile construct, he had said, a thin membrane stretched over the abyss of human nature, and it required constant maintenance to keep from tearing.

She had not understood him then. She had thought he was being cynical, the way old men often were, the way that a lifetime of sentencing other people to prison could wear a person down until all they saw was the worst of humanity.

Now she understood. The membrane had torn. The law was gone. And somewhere in the darkness below, the abyss was stirring, and it had her father's face.

The radio came to life at 4:17 AM.

It was a hand-crank emergency radio that Gerald had found in the building's disaster preparedness kit, and it had been silent for the first twelve hours, broadcasting nothing but static across every frequency. But at 4:17 AM, a voice broke through, crackling and distorted but unmistakably human.

"This is the office of the Regional Governor of the Great Lakes Territory, broadcasting on emergency frequency 87.9. By executive order of Regional Governor Viktor Voss, martial law has been declared in the city of Blackforge and all surrounding municipalities. All citizens are ordered to remain in their residences. All firearms and ammunition must be surrendered to authorized agents of the Provisional Authority. Any person found in violation of this order will be subject to immediate detention. Repeat. This is the office of the Regional Governor of the Great Lakes Territory..."

The message repeated, over and over, a loop that played every forty-five seconds. Miranda listened to it six times before she reached out and switched off the radio.

"Who the hell is Viktor Voss?" O'Rourke asked.

Miranda did not answer. She was staring at the silent radio, and she was thinking about the voice on the broadcast, the way it had pronounced the words "Regional Governor" as though they meant something, the way it had claimed authority over a territory that had not existed forty-eight hours ago.

Someone had seized power in the chaos. Someone had understood, faster than anyone else, that the old structures had collapsed and that new structures would rise to replace them. And whoever that someone was, he had just declared himself the law.

Miranda picked up the Glock and checked the magazine. Fourteen rounds remaining, plus the one in the chamber. She would need more.

"Get some rest," she told the others. "We're going to have a long day tomorrow."

And in the dark, in the silence, in the cold January air that seeped through the shattered windows, she began to plan.