They rode up the valley like a line stitched into white cloth, horses breathing steam, rifles carried easy the way long survivors carried anything loose, ready, never far from the hand. Michael watched from the overlook with the others strung along the parapet: Kyle sighting down his iron, Alice with her cleaver hooked through her belt, the Fireflies crouched tight behind sandbags, Lena easing the younger ones back with a palm that said not yet, not yet.
"Organized," Kyle muttered. "Not raiders."
"Hold," Michael said, and the word smoothed the air.
The column spread at the base of the dam good spacing, interlocking lanes, nobody bunched enough to die easy. A man at the front pushed back his hood. Gray cut through his beard. Lines carved years into his face. He tipped his chin up, and his eyes found Michael like a compass finding north.
"...Michael?"
The name hit like a door kicked open. The wind seemed to stop moving. Michael felt old voices, old porches, a town before the ash.
"Tommy."
Weapons twitched but didn't sing. Snow whispered over the concrete lip. Alice slid a half-step closer. "You know him?"
Michael didn't answer. The past was walking toward him in a man's shape.
Tommy took one careful step into the open, empty hands showing. "Last I saw you," he called, voice rough with winter and years, "was that night town on fire, sirens, people running then you were gone. Both of you." He swallowed, eyes lifting past Michael. "I thought you were dead."
"Uncle Tommy?"
The voice was small but it carried, because the canyon made a cathedral of sound and some names are bells.
Lena's hand closed on air; Sarah had already stepped out from the shadow of the tower, chin lifted, eyes enormous with hope and fear.
Tommy staggered like somebody had cut a rope inside him. His hands rose and shook and fell. "Sarah?" The word cracked and kept going. "God almighty... Sarah, it's really you?"
She gripped the railing until her knuckles blanched. "It's me."
Steel loosened all at once. Rifles sank a fraction. Breath released from a hundred chests as if the air had been held on one count for twenty years.
Michael started down the outer stairs, boots ringing against metal. He reached the valley floor at the same time Tommy stepped up from it, and they stopped ten paces apart like men who'd met at crossroads before. Up close, time showed itself white at the temple, lines like hairline fractures, the set of mouths that had learned bad news by taste.
"Well I'll be damned," Tommy said, and softly: "You made it."
"Somehow," Michael answered. "We did."
He didn't have to turn to feel Sarah above them, a sun at his back. He didn't have to say stay; she did anyway.
Tommy's gaze tugged past Michael to the railing again and gentled in a way that made the years between then and now snap like old wire. "I lost you in that chaos," he said to Sarah, not caring that he had to pitch his voice up to clear the wind. "I've been carrying a funeral in my head since. Today I get to put it down."
Sarah pressed a fist against her mouth and nodded, one sharp, disbelieving, grateful movement.
"Inside," Michael said. "Warmth beats shouting across snow."
Tommy glanced back at his people and lifted two fingers. "No one touches a trigger under their roof," he said, and meant it.
They went in together, footsteps echoing up into the ribs of the hall. Lanterns swung from hooks, throwing yellow over steel and shadow; a burn barrel hummed with thin warmth. The turbines loomed like sleeping giants, the river's voice threading the concrete through seam and bolt.
Michael's people kept to one curve of the circle, the newcomers to the other. Close enough to read faces, far enough to be honest about the distance. Sarah stood at the edge of the light, a small figure with a spine like a spear.
Tommy held his hands to the barrel and let heat try its luck at the cold in his bones. When he spoke, his voice came steady. "After that night, I ran with my brother a while." His eye ticked toward Sarah. "Joel. We did what we had to. I won't lie and call it good; it was survival, and it stained. I couldn't keep doing it. I left. Found the Fireflies for a spell, learned hope ain't the same as a plan. Left them, too. Then I met Maria on a winter road that should've killed us both. She had a way of talking about a town like it could be real. Jackson." He gestured vaguely downriver. "It was bones back then. We put walls around it. Put people in it. Now it's breathing. Barely. But it is."
He lifted his chin to the turbines. "This dam is the difference between breathing and living. Lights. Pumps. Heat. We've been working ourselves raw to get here. I didn't know I was riding straight into my past."
Sarah's voice came out small but clear. "My dad Joel he's alive?"
Tommy crouched without thinking, bringing his face level with hers, and the room leaned in because something human was happening and everyone was starving for it.
"He is," Tommy said. "Last I saw him, he was in Boston. Harder man than he used to be. We all are. But he's still standing. Still Joel." He swallowed. "He never stopped loving you. That night broke him. If he hears you're alive, it's going to put something back in him the world took."
Sarah pressed her palms flat against her thighs, like she was keeping herself from floating away. "So I could… see him."
"Yeah," Tommy said, and smiled with his whole face for the first time in the room. "You could."
Silence ran around the circle like a soft animal testing feet. It left warmth behind.
Alice cut through it, practical as a wrench. "Jackson. What's it like?"
"Hungry," Tommy said. "Tired. Stubborn. We've got greenhouses half-built, root cellars full of decisions, a nurse who can work miracles with sewing kits and vinegar. Kids run in the street when nobody's shooting. It's a place, not a camp. It could be a home."
Kyle scratched at his beard, counting. "And you've got hands."
"Hands, tools, people who remember which end of a wrench to threaten a bolt with," Tommy said. "But not enough to do this alone. That's why we came. We were ready to take this place back from infected and raiders. Didn't know you'd already done the hard part."
Michael's mouth twitched. "It wasn't soft."
"I can read blood like a trail," Tommy said, looking past him to the patched walls, the new barricades, the way the dam had learned their shape. "I see the work here."
He let the sentence hang. The old world would have filled that space with paper and terms. The new world had less interest in paper and more in surviving the next storm.
"We're not going to do the dance," Michael said. "Not today." He looked around at his people: Alice with grease ground into her fingerprints, Kyle who slept with his boots on, Lena whose suspicion was a kind of love sharpened to a point. Then at the Fireflies whose faces still held smoke. Then back to Sarah, who stood like a held breath turned person. "They're ours," he said, meaning his own. "And now" He looked at Tommy. "so are yours."
Tommy let out a breath like a man taking off a pack. "Then we're us again."
"Together," Sarah said, and it sounded like a verdict and a vow.
The change wasn't loud. It didn't have to be. You could feel it move the room a degree toward spring. Weapons slipped into slings. Shoulders came down. The fire seemed to gain a little courage.
"Tomorrow morning," Tommy said, easing up. "We bring electricians, linesmen, anyone who can speak fluent turbine. You've got muscle and this," he gestured at the defenses, "and that will let them work. We'll run cable down to the first junction, see if we can give Jackson a pulse. In return we haul food up, kits for your wounded, fresh boots. We'll get a patrol schedule on both sides so nobody's guessing when a friendly's on the catwalk."
Alice nodded despite herself. "We've got intake grates still choked with dead brush," she said. "Manual winches are stiff. Bearings are dry. If your folks bring proper grease and a prayer, we can get one runner spinning without cooking her."
Tommy grinned crooked. "We got grease. Prayers too, though ours mostly sound like cussing."
Lena's eyes cut to Sarah, then to Michael. "We'll need to show Jackson our choke points," she said reluctantly, like it scraped. "If we're a group, they should know where not to die."
"We'll walk them," Michael said. "Together."
Frank, the Firefly with a new bandage and an old fatigue, cleared his throat. "There's a cache west at a utility outstation," he said. "Med kits, ammo, a couple boxes of parts. We left in a hurry; it might still be there." His gaze slid to Tommy's people, steady. "We can get it together."
Tommy didn't even blink at the Firefly patch. "If it keeps kids breathing, I don't care whose flag it sat under," he said. "We'll send four with six of yours. Light. Fast."
Plans started to leap like sparks guard shifts, trail markers, whistle codes, who had hands steady enough to splice cable by lantern light. The talk felt like work you could hold.
Sarah shifted closer to the burn barrel and then, as if remembering something she hadn't let herself own for years, looked up at Michael. "If the power comes on," she said, "can we… I mean, can we make the radio reach further?"
Michael saw where she was going and didn't make her ask. "We'll try. We'll send his name up the wire every hour on the hour."
Tommy swallowed. "I know at least one frequency he used to use," he offered quietly. "Back then. I'll write it down."
"Do it," Michael said. His voice didn't change, but something under it did.
They ate together, thin stew from two pots poured into too few cups. It tasted like salt and smoke and the idea of enough. Tommy's riders traded stories with Michael's crew quiet ones about tool caches and frozen rivers, louder ones about a moose that refused to acknowledge bullets. Laughter stumbled, then learned its footing again. It was rusty, but it worked.
Later, when the hall had cooled and people had found corners to sleep in, Michael stood at the catwalk rail looking down at the black bulks of the turbines like beached whales waiting for tide. Sarah came up beside him, a ghost of old winter in the set of her shoulders, new fire in the pupils of her eyes.
"He's alive," she whispered, tasting the word like sugar. "After all this. He's out there."
"We'll find him," Michael said. It wasn't bravado. It was a tasking order to the universe.
She nodded and leaned her forearms on the rail beside his. For a while they just listened to the river talk to the dam through the seams.
Morning began as a paler shade of dark and then accepted its job. Jackson arrived with the sun: a crew of six wearing tool belts like bandoliers, a woman with copper hair rolling her sleeves to the elbow as if she'd fight the turbine with bare hands if it came to that. Tommy walked them in, boots leaving wet marks that evaporated into the cold.
"Grid wizard," he said, thumbing at the copper-haired woman. "Name's Beth. If anyone can bully a runner back from the dead, it's her."
Beth looked at the intake panel like it had owed her money for years. "Grease, cable, patience, and no one shooting near my ears," she said. "I can get you glow."
"Deal," Alice said, already hauling a crate. "You cuss like we do. You'll fit."
They set to it. Winches squealed, then caught a rhythm. Brush clotted in the grates came up in dripping, rotten islands. Bearings drank grease and sighed. Cables came off rusted spools like uncooperative snakes. Michael and Tommy worked shoulder to shoulder without remark, passing tools, anchoring ropes, hauling together until their breaths found a shared cadence.
By noon, Beth had her hands in a panel's guts, whispering to it like a stubborn animal. "Alright, sweetheart," she said, throwing a breaker with a gentle authority. "Tell me you missed me."
The runner turned slow, then truer, then found itself. A hum moved through the bones of the dam and into the boots of everyone on the catwalk. Light popped in a single cage bulb and held, a teardrop of gold in the industrial night.
Someone whooped and then tried to be ashamed of it; no one let them.
That evening, down in Jackson, a string of bulbs winked on across a muddy street and a kid shrieked with the kind of joy that makes adults flinch because it's been too long. Up at the dam, a heater coughed awake in the clinic room and Lena put her palms to the grate and closed her eyes like she was praying without words.
Sarah stood at the overlook and watched the valley take a breath. She didn't cry. She'd done enough of that for one winter. She just let warmth touch her cheeks and said, quiet as a vow:
"Dad, if you're listening… we're here."
Behind her, Michael scribbled frequencies into the margin of the maintenance log, drew a crude schedule that said CALL JOEL in block letters every hour that wore a hand on a clock. Tommy leaned on the rail across from him, reading the dam with a man's whole face.
"You know," Tommy said, not looking up, "twenty years ago I would've laughed in your face if you told me we'd end up building together."
"Twenty years ago I wouldn't have had the words," Michael said.
They didn't shake again. They didn't need to. The turbine sang quiet and low, and the town below answered with a hundred small lights.
For the first time since the world broke, the valley looked like it had decided to live.