On Thursday morning, Quentin woke up with the winter sun in his eyes, shivering from the chilly stone bench underneath him. He’d fallen asleep huddled in on himself in the deserted square, waiting for someone to come find him. No one had.

A joke.

He should have known the invitation was too good to be genuine. How gullible did he have to be to believe “let us worry about the codes”? He was lucky it hadn’t been anything more sinister than a prankster making a fool out of him.

His chest wound had closed — the result of an entire night of recharging, cold notwithstanding — but the skin hadn’t healed properly, had closed itself into a twisted, raised scar he could feel with the tips of his fingers even wearing his hoodie. An attempt to redirect the nanites to correct it yielded nothing. One more thing Quentin didn’t know how to fix.

Then he took in his surroundings and forgot about everything else for a moment. The landscape in front of his eyes was breathtaking in the light of day, making him itch for the camera he no longer carried. This very square had been the centre of Xeygh’s attack, buildings left intact as people dissolved where they stood. It must have been horrifying, but that had been seventy years before.

These days vegetation and construction had found a startling way to coexist: the softness of leaves that resisted winter with the sternness of concrete; the bareness of tree branches with the shine of glass that had never stopped self-cleaning. Shapes and textures intermingled, looking less like they were encroaching in one another’s space and more like the embrace of a lover.

And the colours... His photography was black and white, but that didn’t mean colours took a back seat. On the contrary, they shone through in contrast, pared down to their bare essence. Here? Colours filled every corner of his vision, vibrant and larger than life against the pale blue of the cloudless sky. Even winter had taken a backseat to allow Quentin to witness this splendour. If this was how the tech district looked like now, Quentin would have paid all the credits still on Ian’s traceless card to come back in spring, armed with his camera.

That dream fizzled out into nothingness as soon as it came. He’d be deep underground by spring, if all went according to plan. Most likely dead if even a single thing didn’t. The world would have changed, possibly as much as the scenario in front of his eyes, by the time he managed to resurface.

The winter sun did nothing to ward off the icy hopelessness that settled in his core. Left with no other option, Quentin gathered his will to survive like a cloak and started walking, unsure of which direction he’d come the night before.

“Sean of Lyz,” a cheerful voice behind him intruded, making him turn on the spot. “Looking good there!”