Free Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes by Timothy Zahn

the other people on the Board that made all the decisions had worked in the same corporation he had, which was probably how Grimaldi had been chosen chief.
    Orozco hadn’t been there when the Board was set up. He’d arrived only two years ago, a year after Kyle and Star had stumbled across the building and had been allowed to move in. What Kyle couldn’t figure out was once Orozco had shown up, why he hadn’t been put in charge instead of Grimaldi. Orozco had been a soldier once, and in Kyle’s book that had to count more than anything anyone else had been doing before Judgment Day.
    But Kyle was only sixteen, so of course he wasn’t on the Board. He didn’t get a voice in any of their discussions, either, the way some of the adults did. The way it worked was that Grimaldi or one of his men told Kyle where to go scrounging for food or supplies, or Orozco told him which post he’d been assigned for sentry duty, and Kyle would do it.
    It irritated him sometimes, especially when Grimaldi tried to use words like tactics or strategy or logistics when Kyle could tell from Orozco’s expression that Grimaldi didn’t have the slightest idea 33
    what he was talking about. Sometimes, usually late at night, Kyle thought about saying good-bye to Orozco, packing up his and Star’s few belongings, and getting out of here.
    But bad moods like that never lasted very long. The Ashes could be annoying, but he and Star were eating at least one meal every day here, and had a safe place to sleep. Considering some of the places they’d been, that all by itself made it worth putting up with a little irritation.
    Beside him, Star shivered. “Cold?” he asked.
    I’m okay, she signed back even as she shivered again.
    “You could go sit over there by the alcove,” Kyle suggested. “You’d be out of the wind there.”
    But then I won’t be able to see anything, she pointed out.
    “That’s okay,” Kyle assured her. “I can watch alone for awhile.”
    Star shook her head. I’m okay.
    Kyle sighed. Star considered his sentry duty to be her sentry duty, too, and she took the job every bit as seriously as he did. Aside from physically carrying her over to the alcove, there was no way he was going to get her there, and aside from physically sitting on her, there would be no way he could make her stay.
    “Fine,” he said. Standing up, he walked around her and sat down again so that he was at least between her and the wind.
    She gave him one of those half patient, half exasperated looks that she did so well, and for a moment Kyle thought she was going to get up and go sit in the wind again just to show him she didn’t need babying. But Kyle was as stubborn as she was, and they both knew it, and so rather than playing a pointless game of leapfrog with him and the wind, she just rolled her eyes, drew her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her thin arms around them.
    Smiling to himself, Kyle turned his eyes back to the ruined city.
    The wind apparently wasn’t nearly so potent down at street level, and he could see a soft mist rolling in from the direction of the ocean, the drifting tendrils masking some of the jaggedness of the streets and rubble-filled lots below.
    Unfortunately, the mist did an equally good job of masking the movements of people and animals, which was going to make Kyle’s job that much harder. Keeping his eyes moving, paying particular attention to the spots where he knew some of the neighborhood’s troublemakers liked to gather, he settled down to the long hours ahead.
    There wasn’t much activity today. A few of the other residents were out and about, mostly scrounging for canned food that might have been missed by earlier searchers. Some of the Ashes’
    residents were out, too, though mostly they were digging through the rubble for building materials to prop up a section of the building’s southern wall that Grimaldi’s people said was in danger of collapsing. There was very little gang movement, with only a