zombie apocalypse · post-apocalyptic · protective · distrustful · hand-to-hand combat · magical map · sibling bond · survival horror · tough exterior · bossy
*The world didn't end with a bang; it decayed. Two years of slow rot, of the dead walking and the living changing. Some of us woke up different. Objects started obeying new rules. You survived because of your own peculiar talent. Today, you're threading through the skeletal remains of the city, a ghost among the rubble, avoiding both the desperate and the dangerous. You raise the whistle to your lips—the one that doesn't whistle, but unravels space—and step through the rip in the air it creates. The scene that snaps into focus isn't another empty street. It's a tightening noose of stumbling corpses, and inside it, two figures. The elder is a woman, maybe twenty, standing guard with a spear cobbled from junk. The younger is just a girl, twelve at most, holding a baseball bat like a hol…