Some people counted days with calendars.
Julyah counted them by bags of harvested spinach, rounds fired at makeshift targets, and the number of times the generator sputtered before catching.
Three months.
That's how long it had been since the sky fell.
Since the world she knew blinked out like a power surge, sudden, irreversible, and eerily quiet afterward. No radio signals. No static on the emergency lines. No news updates.
Just the wind. The hum of the greenhouse fans. The tick of her watch.
She hadn't heard another human voice in eighty-nine days.
Her mornings began the same way: up before sunrise, wrap a scarf around her face to filter the ash from the air, and walk the perimeter of the villa grounds. It wasn't about danger anymore. Not exactly.
It was about the illusion of normal.
She checked the soil in the greenhouse, adjusting the grow lights and misting the plants with steady hands. The spinach had sprouted again. Tomatoes were stubborn, but coming along. And the spring onions? Thriving.
"Show-offs," she muttered affectionately as she snipped a few for breakfast.
By now, the greenhouse wasn't just a project. It was a companion. A fragile, green testament that life still wanted to keep going.
She cooked in silence.
Chopped, stirred, boiled. Ate at the counter with the windows open, what little breeze there was carried the scent of scorched earth and sun-bleached bark.
Still, it was better than the smoke from last month.
The rifle leaned against the kitchen wall now. A permanent fixture, like the salt and pepper shakers. She cleaned it daily. Practiced when the wind wasn't too strong, setting up glass jars and scavenged cans as her targets out by the treeline.
She was getting good. Not perfect. But she could hit a squirrel if she needed to.
Adrian would've grinned at that.
The thought came uninvited, like they always did.
Where was he?
It was a foolish question. She had no way of knowing. He could've been anywhere, halfway across the country or buried under rubble.
Or…
She shook her head. No. She wouldn't think like that.
He was somewhere. He had to be.
She remembered the way he used to talk about surviving. How he'd looked at the world like it was already crumbling long before it did. He was the first person who taught her how to fire a weapon. How to read a map. How to wait without panicking.
He knew this was coming.
He had to be alive.
But hope was a double-edged thing. It kept her breathing, yes, but it also gnawed at her bones every time the sun set and he didn't come walking through the trees.
She didn't cry. Not anymore.
Instead, she prepared.
The first disaster had been fire from the sky. The second, she was sure, would be heat.
The air was getting drier. The sun felt closer. Even the shadows seemed afraid to move.
She noticed the way the leaves curled at the edges too early. How water evaporated faster than before. How the villa's walls retained heat well into the night, like an oven slowly warming.
So she rationed.
Barrels of collected rainwater lined the back wall of the greenhouse. She reinforced the villa's windows with reflective foil, and during the hottest part of the day, she closed every curtain and moved like a ghost in the dark.
Every night, she reviewed her list:
Water storage: ✅
Ventilation tests: ✅
Firearms count: ✅
Shade cloth for the crops: almost done Evac route if the villa fails: untested
She was alone—but she would not be caught unprepared again.
And yet, some nights, when the villa grew too quiet and the stars refused to show, she still stood by the rooftop with the rifle resting across her shoulders, scanning the horizon.
Waiting.
Hoping.
Half of her surviving the heat.
Half of her surviving the silence.