Chapter 20 Silent Bonds

• It had been eight days since Lucy last saw the foxes. Eight long, brittle days where the cold deepened and the city around her slipped further into silence. The snow now lay in thick, unbroken sheets across Talawan’s streets, swallowing the remnants of abandoned homes, toppled signs, and lifeless cars. The air was sharp enough to cut skin, the temperature sinking to terrifying lows — colder than any winter on record before the Freeze began. Lucy could feel it in her bones, in every breath that burned in her lungs.
• Since that fleeting moment with the foxes, a strange ache had settled in her chest, a hollow longing she couldn’t quite name. She clung to that memory — the way they had appeared like ghosts from her dreams, how one of them had limped yet still stood proud, how for the first time in months something other than loneliness had reached out to her.
• But days passed, and they didn’t return.