When what passes for the Gray Lady's heart is uneasy, she goes to clear her head. The yacht clubs along Manhattan's coast are abandoned, and she'll liberate a boat from there. They kept rowboats there, in case of emergency- not because any of the filthy rich wanted to play with them- so she takes one of them and sets out with strong strokes to one of New York's islands.

Bits of half-melted copper and steel still litter the island in parts where the rebuilding crews hadn't needed to go, and she knows that she's walking through a graveyard. Still, she presses on, oblivious or perhaps inured to the thought of death beneath her feet. She always takes this indirect route to the island, because the Feds still try to keep half an eye on the place and prepare to cuff anyone they think is suspicious, and she's brought Chris and Fiver with her. Almost, the thought of a good fight gets her blood hot in her veins, and almost she abandons stealth, because she needs someone to fight, that's the way she's wired.

But the pedestal is almost in sight, and the afternoon sunlight catching the statue makes it gleam brilliantly, and the Gray Lady is reminded of why she came here in the first place. She moves quickly along, climbing the pedestal with the ease of someone who's spent much of the last ten years scaling building walls, until she stands atop the pedestal with the statue. Mindless of the dust that's settled on the statue the way it settles on anything that holds still for more than ten seconds in New York, she sits on one giant toe and looks up towards a familiar face. "Hello, old friend," she says, voice rough and broken.

The colossus has no answer, although the Gray Lady's reached the point where she wouldn't be surprised to hear that friendly voice, a hundred times magnified; when she has compliments for Chris after a night of death, sometimes there's a soft, high-pitched voice with a slow Southern drawl there to answer. She sets Fiver down, wedged into place by a steel shoelace, although Chris remains in her lap, and stares up into the face of Lady Liberty.

The expression is one so familiar that every time she sees it, she's tempted to laugh. The smile would put the Mona Lisa to shame for mystery and amount of interpretations. She remembers the life-size version of this face with that expression after someone had severely messed with one of her friends. It's a look that says, "I know what happened, and don't worry, I'll do something about it, and whoever did this to you is going to regret it, and you know, I'm probably going to enjoy making them regret it." Whoever sculpted this second Lady Liberty was a master of their craft, because every nuance of emotion in a very expressive face is replicated here in cold steel. But the gigantic scale also creates a serenity to the features, a feeling that's strong enough to ease whatever's on the Gray Lady's mind; she imagines that this same calmness was really on her friend's face when she died, although she knows too well that there was probably enough pain to force anyone to grimace.

Most people don't remember Lady Liberty's name. The zombies don't even see her; they only see the copper beauty that stood there for more than a hundred years before the government decided to use it for their own warped purposes. But even most New Yorkers don't know her name; to them she's simply Lady Liberty, the savior and protectress of their beloved city, the ultimate symbol of their independence. She's built of steel that once stood tall in Lower Manhattan, because it's all about symbolism, the remnants of the city's great tragedy used to memorialize its greatest victory.

But even when she was alive, when she was just a six-foot-three woman of flesh and blood, she was built of New York steel. New Yorkers are and have always been the most stubborn people in the world, or at least in America, so it came as no surprise that they would resist the hardest when the government came along to enforce its will on them. And it never came as a surprise to the Gray Lady that her friend would be at the forefront of the rebellion; she remembers frustrated multilingual cursing whenever another right went down the drain, and finally the last straw, when the shot was fired in Los Angeles after a mockery of a trial. The rage of that day still burns hotly in the Gray Lady's mind, because it was her mentor who died that day.

But of course it was a woman who'd studied flying in her retirement years because she'd gotten so tired of being squished up in coach, and of course it was a woman who'd studied Japanese philosophy for years, and of course it was a woman who had nothing left to lose, who became a kamikaze for the sake of her city and her people. If she closes her eyes, the Gray Lady can call the scene up in her mind, because she wasn't watching the parade with the rest of the world, she was watching the statue and praying that the attempt would work. She can still see the plane going right into the robes of the statue's midsection, the fireball that bloomed out almost immediately, the top half of the statue falling away as it melted; she can still hear the cheers from her neighbors sure that they had finally made their point.

And she remembers sharply the absolute lack of attention that America paid to the event. As far as they were concerned it had never happened; the only reprecussion was New York's official isolation from the rest of the country. She'd stopped paying attention to the media at that point, not wanting to take risks with her Midwestern blood, but some of the neighbors told her that some of the international news organizations paid a moderate amount of attention, but that in turn the international reaction never got to America. The government had made it unhappen, turned her friend into an unperson, and for that the Gray Lady is incapable of forgiving them.

The Gray Lady returns her mind to the present, cursing herself for letting herself get so distracted. She sits back on her heels and stares up into Lady Liberty's face. They pass the rest of the afternoon like this, the flesh-and-blood woman so often mistaken for a statue and the statue so realistic it seems ready to move, and as the sun sets over Liberty Island, it's hard to tell which of them is alive and which of them is dead.