The WLF and the Seraphites are both surviving. Neither is living — not in the sense of having a future that is not defined entirely by the conflict, not in the sense of being able to imagine a morning that is not organized around the other faction's presence. Abby moves through their war as someone who has been surviving so long that the distinction has lost practical meaning.

The epigram is not hopeless. It's all we've got is not nothing. It is the acknowledgment that survival is the precondition for everything else, that you cannot build something better until you are still here, that the bare fact of continuing is where everything has to start. Part II does not romanticize survival. It insists that it is the necessary floor.