July 9, 2057 – 2:41 a.m.
Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans
The house stands on stilts like it's still waiting for the water to come back and finish the job.
Hurricane Katrina took the bottom floor in 2005; Elijah's mom never rebuilt it. The top floor is reachable only by a rickety external staircase that groans under forty-five small feet and six exhausted adults.
Inside, moonlight filters through plywood windows. The air smells of mildew, old gumbo spices, and the Mississippi lurking two blocks away.
Elijah hasn't been home in ten years.
His mother meets them at the door in a faded Saints T-shirt, hair in rollers, shotgun lowered but not away. She takes one look at her son—older, thinner, eyes like burnt-out streetlights—and the gun clatters to the floor.
She pulls him into a hug that smells like cocoa butter and worry. "My heart," she whispers, voice cracking on the words she hasn't said aloud in ten years. "You brought the whole storm with you."
The kids spread out like spilled marbles: some on sleeping bags, some on the sagging couch, Amara already asleep on the kitchen table with Mr. Raffi as a pillow.
Maya finds the old record player, puts on some quiet zydeco. The music fills the house like warm air after rain.
Aisha and Jonah raid the kitchen—canned beans, rice, anything that doesn't need power. Kenji and Kayden sit on the back porch, staring at the dark water. Neither has spoken more than ten words to the other since the highway.
Elijah's mom—Miss Delphine to everyone else—moves among the children like she's done this before. She checks foreheads, tucks blankets, hums lullabies in Creole that make even the most scared ones close their eyes.
Later, when the house is quiet, she pulls Elijah into what used to be Marcus's room.
The walls are still the same: faded posters of Trombone Shorty, a cracked basketball hoop nailed to the door.
Delphine sits on the edge of the bed. "Marcus's hoodie still in the closet?"
Elijah nods.
She doesn't cry. Just reaches out and touches the bloodstain on his side. "You bleedin' again, baby."
"It's old."
"No such thing."
Silence stretches, thick as humidity.
"You can't keep them all," she says finally. "Not forever."
"I know."
"But you'll try anyway."
He doesn't answer.
Outside, thunder rumbles over the Gulf—summer storm coming, or something worse.
Delphine stands. "I got roux in the freezer. Gonna feed these babies proper tomorrow. Red beans and rice. Make 'em feel like somebody's home."
She pauses at the door. "The water didn't kill this house, Elijah. And it won't kill you either. But you gotta stop livin' underwater."
She leaves him alone with Marcus's ghosts.
Elijah opens the closet. The hoodie is there—Marcus's old one, Saints colors faded, number 23 cracked.
He pulls it on over his own bloodstained one.
Two layers of dead brother.
He sits on the floor, back against the wall, and for the first time since the Packard Plant rooftop, lets himself cry without sound.
Downstairs, forty-five kids dream.
Upstairs, six fugitives pretend they still know what tomorrow looks like.
And somewhere out in the bayou, something big moves through the water—slow, patient, watching the house on stilts that refuses to drown.