Chapter 7: Mira's Omen in the Philadelphia Ruins

The fires of Philadelphia never went out.

That was the first thing you noticed, approaching from the north along what had been Route 1 before Route 1 became a suggestion — a ghost of asphalt surfacing and submerging through the marsh-creep that had eaten the median and most of the shoulders. You saw the glow forty minutes before you saw anything else: orange and sickly yellow pulsing against the low clouds, the sky above the city lit like the inside of a lantern with a cracked chimney. Not lightning. Not the clean catastrophic flash of divine weather. Just fire, steady and procedural, the kind of fire that has learned to sustain itself without enthusiasm.

Mira walked faster as soon as she saw it.