The morning brought no relief.
Anna woke on a horsehair sofa in the front parlor, her body a symphony of aches. The stitches between her legs pulled with every movement. Her breasts, swollen and tender, had soaked through the front of her shirt. Maeve was a warm, insistent weight against her chest, rooting with a blind, animal precision. Anna guided the baby to her nipple and winced as the latch took hold.
Kelsey had found candles in a kitchen drawer, long white tapers that had probably sat there for decades, waiting for a dinner party that never came. Their flames now guttered in glass jars, casting trembling pools of light on the faded floral wallpaper. The parlor was a museum of dust and disuse: a grandfather clock frozen at ten past two, a mantelpiece crowded with tarnished silver frames holding photographs of stern-faced strangers, a piano with keys yellowed like old teeth. The air smelled of mildew and something sharper, something medicinal, as if the house itself remembered what it had once been.
Kelsey emerged from the kitchen, her pink scrubs rumpled, her hair escaping its ponytail. “The water still runs,” she said. “Cold only. And the gas stove works if I light it with a match. I found a can of soup in the pantry. Cream of mushroom. It expired in 2019.”
“Heat it up,” Anna said. “We both need to eat.”
While Kelsey clattered in the kitchen, Anna stared at the ceiling. The plaster was cracked, mapped with water stains that spread like the tributaries of a dead river. She tried to piece together what she knew. The blackout was citywide, possibly regional. Cell towers were down. Emergency services were overwhelmed or nonexistent. She had stolen an ambulance, delivered her own child without medical assistance, and fled to a derelict house she had not visited in fifteen years. The last time she had stood in this parlor, she was twelve years old, and her mother’s ashes had just been interred in a cemetery on the other side of town. Her father, a man hollowed out by grief, had sold the house a month later and moved them to a one-bedroom apartment near the interstate. He had died when Anna was in nursing school, his liver finally surrendering to the vodka he had used to pickle his sorrow.
The Voss house had passed to Anna through a tangle of legal inertia. No one wanted it. The neighborhood, Vine Street, had been in decline long before the word “Rust Belt” entered the national vocabulary. Now it was a ghost limb of the city, its grand Victorians chopped into squalid apartments or simply abandoned, their porches sagging like the mouths of old men.
Maeve finished feeding and fell asleep, her tiny fists uncurling. Anna laid her in a drawer she had padded with a clean towel, a makeshift bassinet. She found a box of sanitary pads in the ambulance, a small mercy, and cleaned herself up as best she could. When Kelsey brought her a bowl of steaming soup, she ate it without tasting it, her body demanding fuel.
“What do we do now?” Kelsey asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Should we try to get to the hospital? St. Jude’s must have generators.”
“St. Jude’s will be a war zone,” Anna said, the words flat and certain. “I’ve worked enough mass casualty drills to know. The ER will be flooded. Trauma, cardiac events, people on ventilators whose home machines failed. They’ll be triaging patients in the parking lot. A postpartum mother and a healthy newborn are the last people they’ll prioritize.”
Kelsey absorbed this. “What about the police? The National Guard? Someone has to be doing something.”
“Maybe. But Dunbridge doesn’t have enough cops on a good night, let alone during a catastrophe. And the Guard needs orders. It takes time. Hours. Days.” Anna set the empty bowl aside. “We’re on our own for now. The best thing we can do is stay put, stay quiet, and wait for the lights to come back on.”
But the lights did not come back on.
By noon, the temperature inside the house had risen to an oppressive, sticky heat. The September sun, indifferent to the failures of human infrastructure, beat down on the roof. Anna opened windows, letting in a breeze that smelled of smoke and something foul, the scent of garbage rotting in unpowered refrigerators. The street outside was unnervingly still. Once, she heard a volley of gunshots, a sharp, flat cracking that echoed off the brick facades. Another time, a woman’s scream, abruptly cut off. Kelsey flinched at every sound, her eyes wide and white. Anna did not flinch. Her years in the ER had taught her a kind of brutal stillness, a capacity to wall off the part of herself that felt fear and focus on the next required action.
When Maeve slept, Anna explored the house. It was larger than she remembered, a labyrinth of rooms branching off a central staircase. The second floor held four bedrooms, their furniture shrouded in sheets like ghosts. The third floor was a single, long attic room, its ceiling sloping down to meet the walls. Dust motes danced in the shafts of light cutting through the dormer windows. Boxes were stacked against the walls, cardboard and old wood, their contents unknown.
In the corner of the attic, Anna found a steamer trunk, its leather cracked, its brass fittings green with oxidation. The lock was broken. She lifted the lid. Inside, wrapped in yellowed tissue paper, was a collection of medical instruments that made her breath catch. A set of forceps, their blades gracefully curved. A fetal stethoscope, its wooden bell polished smooth by decades of use. A glass syringe with a steel needle still attached, a bead of dried, black something crusted at its tip. And beneath these, a leather-bound book, its pages edged in faded gold leaf.
Anna lifted the book. The cover was embossed with a single word: “Helena.”
Her great-grandmother. Helena Voss, a name that had been spoken in the family only in whispers, if at all. Anna’s father had refused to discuss her. “The past is a grave,” he had said once, drunk, “and the dead should stay buried.” But Anna had done her own digging over the years, subtle inquiries into the family history. She knew that Helena had been a midwife in Dunbridge during the 1950s, that she had been accused of something terrible, that there had been a trial and a verdict of not guilty. The details had been scrubbed from the public record, or perhaps never entered into it, but the outline of the story was there, a dark shape moving beneath the surface of the family lore.
She opened the diary. The handwriting was precise, elegant, a cursive script that belonged to another century. The first entry was dated March 12, 1956.
*“I have been acquitted. The jury deliberated for less than three hours. Mrs. Abernathy, the forewoman, wept as she read the verdict. Not for the child, I think, but for me. She said she could not imagine the burden of such an accusation. I thanked her. I thanked them all. I did not tell them that the burden was not guilt, but knowledge. The child was malpositioned, the cord compressed. No skill could have saved him. But the mother, the mother I saved. She will not speak to me now, of course. They never do. They need someone to blame, and the midwife is the nearest target. I have learned not to take it personally. I have learned that mercy is often misunderstood.”*
Anna turned the pages, her fingers trembling slightly. The entries were irregular, sometimes months apart. They chronicled births, complications, deaths. A stillbirth here, a hemorrhage there. Always, in Helena’s telling, the fault lay elsewhere. A mother who did not push properly. A physician who arrived too late. A family that refused to pay. The tone was clinical, detached, occasionally contemptuous. But as the years progressed, something shifted. The entries became darker, more introspective. The word “power” began to appear.
*“October 3, 1959. Delivered the Kowalski twins this morning. Both breech. The doctor at St. Jude’s said it could not be done at home, that the risk was too great. But the mother begged me. She was terrified of the hospital, of the knives and the bright lights. I delivered the first twin, a girl, without difficulty. The second, a boy, was stubborn. I used the forceps. The mother screamed, but that is the nature of birth. When it was over, when both children lay alive and wailing on the bed, I felt a satisfaction deeper than any I have known. Not because I saved them. Because I had done what the doctors said I could not. Because in that room, I was the highest authority. Life and death knelt at my feet, and I chose life.”*
A chill crept down Anna’s spine. She had been trained to recognize pathological narcissism, the grandiosity of the clinical sociopath. Helena’s words dripped with it. But there was more. A few entries later, Anna found a passage that made her stomach clench.
*“June 15, 1962. A difficult case. The Henderson girl, only seventeen, unwed. The labor was prolonged, forty hours. When the child finally came, it was blue, limp. I could have resuscitated. The bag and mask were in my bag. But I thought of the father, a brute who had forced himself on the girl, who had threatened me when I asked for my fee. I thought of the child’s future, the misery that awaited it. And I made a decision. I pronounced the child stillborn. The mother wept, but she will heal. The world is cruel, and sometimes the kindest act is to prevent a life from beginning its long, slow death. I do not regret it. I will never regret it.”*
Anna closed the diary, her hands shaking. The air in the attic felt suddenly cold, despite the September heat. The house around her seemed to shift, the timbers creaking as if settling into a more comfortable position. She understood now why her father had called the past a grave. Helena Voss had not been a healer. She had been a killer, a quiet, methodical killer who dressed her murders in the language of mercy and practicality.
And her blood ran in Anna’s veins.
She descended the attic stairs in a daze, the diary clutched to her chest. In the parlor, Kelsey had fallen asleep on the sofa, her face slack with exhaustion. Maeve was still in her drawer, her tiny chest rising and falling. Anna sat in an armchair by the window and stared out at the empty street. The diary sat in her lap, a leaden weight.
She thought of her own life. The ER, the nights spent suturing wounds and pumping chests, the adrenaline and the exhaustion. She had been a good nurse, she thought. Competent, decisive, unflappable. But there had been moments, secret moments she had never shared, when she had felt something else. A flicker of contempt for the addict who had overdosed for the fourth time. A cold satisfaction in watching a violent patient struggle against restraints. A quiet, unspoken thought that some lives were worth more than others. She had dismissed these thoughts as stress, as burnout, as the inevitable cynicism of the front-line worker. But now, reading her great-grandmother’s words, she wondered if they were something else. Something inherited.
The afternoon passed in a haze. Anna napped in fits and starts, her dreams feverish and strange. She woke to the sound of shouting outside. Through the parlor window, she saw a group of men moving down Vine Street, their arms full of looted goods. One carried a flat-screen television, useless without power, a trophy of pure acquisitiveness. Another carried a case of bottled water, infinitely more valuable. They moved with a swaggering confidence, their laughter loud and brash.
Kelsey woke and joined her at the window. “They’re looting,” she whispered. “Why are they looting? The power’s only been out for a day.”
“Because they can,” Anna said. “Because the rules are gone.”
The men paused in front of the Voss house. Anna’s heart hammered. She had parked the ambulance in the alley, out of sight, but the house itself was visible, a dark, forbidding presence. The men looked at it, their faces unreadable. Then one of them, a man with a shaved head and a tattoo curling up his neck, spat on the sidewalk and moved on. The others followed. They were looking for easier prey.
“We can’t stay here forever,” Kelsey said, her voice small. “What if they come back?”
Anna did not answer. She was thinking of Helena’s diary, of the forceps and the syringe in the steamer trunk. Of the word “power,” written in elegant cursive. She was thinking that the world had changed overnight, that the old rules had vanished with the hum of the electric grid, and that the only people who would survive were the ones willing to make the hard choices. The cruel choices. The Voss choices.
As darkness fell, Anna lit the candles again. She fed Maeve, changed her, held her close. Kelsey ate another can of expired soup. They did not speak. Outside, the city was a void of silence broken only by occasional gunshots and the distant wail of sirens that never seemed to arrive.
At midnight, Anna made a decision. She climbed the attic stairs again, the candle in her hand casting long, writhing shadows on the walls. She opened the steamer trunk and lifted out the leather medical bag that sat beside the instruments. It was heavy, its contents intact. Bandages, glass vials, sutures, a scalpel handle with a pack of sterile blades. A bottle of morphine, the label faded but the liquid inside still clear. Tools of healing. Tools of harm.
She carried the bag down to the parlor and set it on the coffee table. Kelsey looked at it, then at Anna’s face, and something in her expression shifted. Fear, or perhaps recognition.
“Tomorrow,” Anna said, “we need to secure the house. Board the lower windows. Find anything that can be used as a weapon. And we need to start making a plan for what happens when the food runs out.”
“And after that?” Kelsey asked.
Anna looked at the medical bag, its leather dark as dried blood. She thought of her great-grandmother, standing in a dim bedroom sixty years ago, making a choice between life and death with the same calm deliberation another woman might use to plan a menu. She thought of the word “mercy,” and how easily it could be twisted into a justification for atrocity.
“After that,” Anna said, “we make sure no one takes what’s ours.”
The candle flickered, and in its trembling light, the Voss house seemed to lean closer, listening. The diary lay on the mantelpiece, its pages full of secrets, its lessons waiting to be learned. Anna had not finished reading it. She had stopped at the entry about the Henderson girl, unwilling or unable to go further. But she knew she would read more. She would read all of it. Because Helena’s words were not just a record of the past. They were a manual. A guidebook for the new world that was being born in the ashes of the old.
And Anna, whether she liked it or not, was Helena’s heir.
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