Sand Ridge Valley, USA. November 2, 2332. 1:25 AM.

“Did you see that?” Chase pointed out towards the Pyramid, the exact spot where Juliet had been looking just a moment before. She squeezed Alyx’s hand so hard she could feel her heartbeat in her fingers.

Raina jumped up and pulled Dez in front of her by the sides of his shirt. “What? What?” she asked frantically, standing on her tiptoes to see over his shoulder. She had always been the most jumpy of their little group.

“Ease up, will you?” Dez told her, untangling her fingers from his shirt. “You’re stretching out the fabric.” His tone of voice was calm, but his eyes flickered nervously back to the Pyramid.

Binks, who had finally succeeded in getting the Vodka, bent down and set the bottle on the ground next to the fire. “What’s wrong?” he asked as he stood up, wiping his hands on his thighs.

Juliet let go of Alyx’s hand and took a few tentative steps forward until her shoulder brushed against Chase’s arm. “I saw it too…” she said quietly, more to Chase than to the group at large.

“What? Saw what?” Raina squeaked from behind her Dez-shield.

Chase held a finger to his lips and narrowed his ice-blue eyes. Raina instantly fell silent and laced her fingers in Dez’s, her head slumping on his back so that her forehead rested between his shoulder blades.

Alyx went to stand next to Juliet. “What do you see?” he asked, his voice wavering slightly as he scanned the horizon.

Juliet shook her head and took a breath to respond, but was interrupted by Chase’s urgent command.

“We need to get out of here,” he almost whispered. He looked at everyone in the group in turn, the anxiousness on their faces reflected in his. “Now!”

Juliet saw something shift in a pile of trash across the clearing and heard a quiet curse. “No time,” she whispered.

“FREEZE!”

The shouted command was heard simultaneously with the launch of several LDHMs, all of which were directed towards the group in the clearing.

Juliet hit the ground and out of habit, put her hands behind her head, fingers locked. She felt Alyx fall down next to her, but couldn’t see him. From where she lay, the only things she could see were Binks’s shoes, he having dropped to the ground as well, and the undersides of Dez, Raina, and Chase’s boards. She didn’t blame them for leaving: She would have done the same if given a chance, a fact she didn’t like admitting, but was true nonetheless.

There was more shouting and the ground shook with blasts from the LDHMs. Juliet could feel dirt and bits of trash rain down on her back. She grimaced as a boot was rested heavily on her neck and her face was forced into the ground. She could feel tiny rocks digging into and cutting her face. She tried to squirm out from underneath the boot, but it only pressed down harder, all but cutting off her air supply.

“We got one!” a man’s voice from above her called out, almost gleefully, as if catching her made had his night.

One? Juliet couldn’t help but think. Binks and Alyx were right beside her. She could feel something wet and warm against her cheek: The Vodka. The bottle must have gotten overturned in the raid. The boot on her neck pressed down extra hard as the man it belonged to bent down closer to the back of Juliet’s head.

“Thought you could get away, huh?” He snickered.

“They don’t learn, do they?” one of his comrades answered, kicking Alyx firmly in the stomach. Juliet could feel the blow and winced as a gurgling sound came from deep in Alyx’s throat.

The men Juliet could not see began to laugh, but abruptly stopped. The clearing grew eerily silent once more. A new set of feet appeared in Juliet’s narrow line of vision. These feet, however, were bare.

“What the fuck!?”

The pressure on Juliet’s neck lifted, but she was still too scared to move. So she stayed, facedown in the dirt with her hands on her head and listened to the officers scream from somewhere above her. Juliet held her breath and tried to block out their shrieks of terror. Then the screaming abruptly stopped. Juliet heard a series of crunches, and the officers’ bodies landed about five feet away from where she lay. The only way she could tell that the tangle of bones and limbs were once human beings was because she could see pieces of armor that officers usually wore in the bloody mass.

Juliet gasped as tears fell from her eyes and ran across the bridge of her nose and down her cheek.

“You’re not one of them… Are you?” said a contemplative voice.

She swallowed and turned onto her side, so that she was leaning against Alyx’s back, and chanced a look up.

It was a woman. Tall, athletic build with short, choppy hair that looked blood red in the glow from the fire. Her hands were covered in the officers’ blood, and she flexed and relaxed them spastically. She had eyes that were gray and hard, like they were missing something. Life. The thought popped into Juliet’s mind like it had been whispered into her ear by a third party. Her eyes are lifeless.

From Juliet’s vantage point, she could see that the woman wore no clothes, save for a black, thigh-length coat, buttoned all the way up to her neck.

The woman bent down. “If you are one of them, I have to kill you.” Her lips twitched into what could have been mistaken as a smile, if not for the stoic expression that remained on the rest of her face.

“N-no,” Juliet managed to say. “I’m not. Please don’t hurt me!” She removed her hands from the back of her head and held them out to the woman, to show her she was unarmed.

The woman made a clicking noise in the back of her throat. “Very well. But you still have to come with me. Can you be trusted?” Her eyes scanned Juliet’s face.

“U-Uh-huh,” Juliet said as she nodded.

The woman took Juliet by the hand and pulled her up so forcefully that Juliet could have sworn she had been lifted into the air. “What about my friends?” She looked down at Alyx. He wasn’t moving.

Juliet, forgetting the woman for a moment, bent down and shook Alyx by the shoulder. “It’s okay, you can get up now. The officers are…” she glanced up at the woman, then back down at Alyx, “gone.” He didn’t respond.

“Alyx?” Juliet asked as she shook his shoulder once more. “Alyx? Get up. Stop messing around. Get up!” She pulled him over on his back.

“I think your friend is dead,” the woman said nonchalantly, regarding Alyx with mild curiosity.

Juliet shook her head as she stared at Alyx’s face. His eyes were open and the ghost of a smile remained on his lips. “No,” Juliet whispered. “No, no, no, no, no…” Her hands traveled from his shoulders, to his face, to his chest, where a gaping wound made by a LDHM had ripped his flesh to shreds. She let her shaking hands hover over him as fresh tears fell from her eyes and disappeared into the hole in his body. She touched her face lightly with her fingers. When she pulled them away, they were red and sticky with blood. Alyx’s blood. The wetness she had felt on her cheek when the officer had been holding her down wasn’t the Vodka as she had thought: It had been Alyx’s blood.

A sob wracked Juliet’s body. “You can’t die,” she told him as she pulled his head into her lap. “I won’t let you.” Juliet rocked him back and forth as she bent over him, her hair brushing his face. “You were going to save me…” she whispered in his ear.

A siren wailed in the distance and the woman’s head shot towards the direction from which it came. “We need to leave.”

Juliet looked up at her. “We can’t just leave.” Her eyes drifted past the woman to the ground where Bink’s crumpled body lay. In the flickering firelight, Juliet could see that half his head was missing, blood dripping from what remained of his face.

“I’m leaving. Either stay here or come with me.”

Juliet tore her eyes away from Binks and looked back up at the woman. She nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’ll go with you.” Juliet looked back down at Alyx. “There’s nothing for me here anymore.” She took Alyx’s hat off his head slowly and slipped it onto her own before standing. Something next to Alyx’s body caught her eyes and she bent down once more to pick it up.

It was a small cardboard box. Curious, Juliet opened it. Inside was a silver ID bracelet. When Juliet tilted the bracelet towards the light, she could see the words ‘I love you’ engraved into the silver plate in the middle of the bracelet. Juliet smiled sadly as she lifted the bracelet from the box and slipped it onto her wrist. In the bottom of the box, under where the bracelet had laid was a small square of paper. Juliet lifted that out of the box as well and unfolded it. On it were four words written in Alyx’s meticulous script.

“‘Will you marry me?’”