Those things are…
I squeeze my eyes shut. My brain doesn’t seem to work. My thoughts feel clogged, my head feels…muddy is the word that seems right. I can’t put the pieces together. I don’t want to put them together.
As a group, the others step out around me. No one says a word.
Yong turns right, walks to the first pile of bumpy things. He reaches down and picks something up. Dust tumbles from it, tiny waterfalls of curling motes that hang in the air.
He’s holding a bone.
Long, white, with bits of dark material clinging to it—scraps of dried meat. It looks like he is holding a nightmarish club.
“It’s a femur,” Spingate says, her words a shocked sigh. “A human femur.”
Yong drops it. He looks down, slowly turns in place. He is surrounded by skeletons, by bones—piles and piles of them.
This hallway is full of dead people.
Hands on my arm: Bello, clinging to me.
“Em, this isn’t right,” she says. “Let’s leave this place.”
A great idea, if only I knew where to go.
Yong reaches for a round bump near his feet. His hands brush away the gray, then come up holding a human skull covered in tightly dried skin. There is no jawbone. Two empty eye sockets stare out.
He looks at it, adjusts it in his hands. As he does, the stiff flesh along the jaw cracks and crumbles, becomes a puff of descending dust.
And then I understand. The dust…it’s skin. Skin and muscle, eyes and brains and guts that have become nothing more than floating powder. Powder that was in my mouth, down my throat, powder that is all around me, coating everything.
What I thought was a sea of dust is an ocean of death.
Yong drops the skull, then runs back to us, to the safety of the group.
Bello cries silently. O’Malley puts his arm around her.
Everyone is looking at me again, waiting for me to tell them what to do. Even Yong. But I don’t know what to do. Who would? I have to think, have to figure out what makes sense.
The hallway really seems to go on forever in both directions. All along it are more archway doors that look like the one we just walked out of. Some of these doors are slightly open; dark spaces with who knows what inside. Others are still sealed shut, the stone gouged and chipped.
Now that I’ve seen the bones, I can’t un-see them. Up and down the hall, lumps in the dust.
Bones are everywhere.
Some are full skeletons. Some bones lie by themselves: cracked, broken, splintered. A few of them are blackened, charred—they were burned.
Bello’s silent cry shifts to a quiet sob. Something about her tears suggests weakness (crying doesn’t fix anything), makes me want to scream at her to shut up, to stop it already. But I know she can’t help it.
“Where are we?” she says through the tears. “What happened here?”
O’Malley still has his arm around her. If I was the one crying, would he put his arm around me?
He lets go of Bello and walks a few steps to Aramovsky, whispers something in the taller boy’s ear. Aramovsky moves to Bello. He puts his arm around her, pulls her in close. Bello rests her head against his white-shirted shoulder.
O’Malley walks to the skull. He picks it up, brushes off what little dust remains. A few crispy flakes of skin crumble away. He turns it in his hands, holds it toward us so we can see the top.
There is a jagged, roughly triangular hole in the curved white bone.
“Someone killed this person,” he says. “Hit him, or her, with something heavy. Maybe there was a battle.” He squints at it, then at us, at our heads, as if he is comparing the size. “I think these people were grownups. Grownups who slaughtered each other.”
How many dead people lie in this hallway? Maybe a hundred? It’s hard to tell with the parts scattered all over.
One of the dusty skeletons has something sticking out of it. Is that a handle? I walk to what was once a person, grab the handle and pull it free.
I stare at a flat, pointed piece of metal: I’m holding a knife.
If I put the bottom of the metal handle in the crook of my elbow, the knifepoint would reach to the tip of my middle finger. Where the blade joins the handle, two pieces of thin, strong metal stick out the sides. They are etched with tiny carvings of stepped pyramids and suns. At the very end of the handle, below where my hand holds the grip, is a flat, round disc ringed by tiny red gemstones, with another circle of the same stones inside it.
The circle-in-a-circle symbol: exactly like the one on Aramovsky’s forehead.
I’m holding the tool in one hand, the knife in the other.
Bello’s nose wrinkles. “Em, is that a sword?”
“Swords are bigger,” Yong says. “I think. No, they’re bigger.”