They had been hiking through the ruins all day, carefully picking their way between concrete husks and rusty thickets. Progress had been slow, and with the sun beginning to burnish the western horizon, they were still amongst the fields of rubble. They had to find shelter for the night. It would be bad enough to spend the hours of darkness in the ruined city; it would be worse if they could not find somewhere to hide from the predators that stalked the night.

"How about there?" Lara - the younger of the two women by a good twenty years - pointed towards a glass and concrete monolith. From the outside at least, it seemed to have weathered the decades of neglect better than its neighbours.

Karen carefully pushed her her taped glasses up her nose and squinted through them. "Perhaps," she said, then added, "There's only one way to find out."

It wasn't hard to break into the ancient building. All it took was an act of targeted vandalism to break open an emergency door and squeeze in. Then they began to explore the building, making their way up the gloomy stairwell and searching each floor. Ten flights up, they found what they were looking for - an apartment that was still watertight, its furnishings somehow still intact. It had a view across the remains of the city and -

"What's this?" Lara asked. She was fascinated by the body of an old baby grand piano, its veneer faded and peeling.

Karen opened the instrument's lid. The frame was metal; the strings still intact. "It's a piano. People used to play music on it."

"Play music on it? It's too big. How could anyone have carried it with them?"

"Oh, no." Karen shook her head. "You got that one wrong. If you had one of these, people would come to hear you play it. Of course, you had to learn how to play it." She thought back to her childhood lessons, almost an eternity ago. "I used to play one a bit like this."

"Did people come to hear you play?"

Karen laughed. "Sweet child! No they did not. If anything, they would have run a mile rather than listen to me."

Lara picked up the piano stool and set it upright. "Play for me. Please."

"Ha." Karen dusted off the stained upholstery of the stool. "Alright. But I'm not promising anything." She ran her fingers along the black and white keyboard, feeling it respond. The keys were spongy and the notes were off. But: "This piece is one of the first tunes I learnt to play by heart."

And she played as the moon rose above the ruins.