Or not a cliff. I’ve nearly stepped into a hole. Deep and maybe twenty meters across, semicircular, hidden by the foliage until you’re nearly in it. The sides of the hole are terraced, like stair steps, or the tiniest of mountain fields, a waterfall running from the rim and into a channel, dividing the hole neatly in half. And at the bottom, where the ground flattens, straddling the flow of the stream, stands half a stone tower. A spike snapped off in a pile of rubble. The land falls away beyond the tower, and when I look back the way I’ve come I can see the tops of trees, the blank space that is the lake, the hazy air beyond the wall. What was this place? Whatever it was, it’s just as abandoned as the rest of the Cursed City.
But there is something lying at the base of the tower. Something different, long and flat among the pieces of jagged stone. I climb down the terraced steps, careful in case they should break, but the closer I get, the faster I go. There’s carving. Words. I take the water channel in a leap, scale the fallen rubble. It’s a sign, like the ones that hang in my city. Broken, and with letters that remind me of the ancient map. But I can still piece together the meaning.
“I Am Made of My Memories.”
And these words, I think, are truer than any that hang in New Canaan. I am made of my memories. And I am made less by them. I wonder why the Council can’t see that. Why they wouldn’t want to stop living this way just as much as anyone else. I look up at the clear violet sky, thinking of those black specks, and the dust cloud across the plain. That hazy sky beyond the wall.
The hazy sky. My pulse jumps, skitters in my veins.
I climb the broken tower. Quick. The white stone was laid like an open net, with holds for my hands and feet, and soon I’m above the level of the trees, slowing as I near the top, in case the structure is weaker where it’s fallen. But I don’t need to go farther. The breeze is blowing, tangling my loose hair, the water falling behind me, my book hanging at my side, and in the distance, beyond the wall, is the swirl of thousands upon thousands of lacy wings. Dustmoths. Disturbed. Rising from the mountain pass between the hills. The same pass that brought me here.
The Council isn’t going to stop for sunsetting, and I don’t think they’re stopping at the wall. They’re coming into the Cursed City.
I think it must be very important to kill me.
When I open my eyes I’m lying on my side. It’s hard to breathe, dark except for one shaft of light beaming down through a mist of dust. I can’t think what’s happened.
And then pain hits me like a wave of granite, straight up from my left leg to push the air from my lungs. For exactly two seconds, the shock is bigger than the agony. The third second I’m yelling, whether I want to or not. The noise echoes, sudden and wrong in the silent space, and a dark spot appears in the hole letting in the shaft of light, way above my head. It’s the hole I’ve fallen through.
“Beck!”
The dark spot is Jill’s head.
“Beck, are you all right?”
I thought the tortured shouting might have clued her in to the fact that I am not, in any way, all right. I try to sit up, but only make it as far as an elbow. The slightest jiggling of my left leg makes me sick with pain, and when I look down I’m even sicker. My foot is not at an angle it should be. I let out a stream of cussing that makes me glad we’re out of communication.
“So … not dead,” Jill observes.
“I think … my ankle’s broken,” I reply between the foulness. “Maybe … my leg.”
Now it’s Jill’s turn to cuss, and she’s much better at it than I am. Always has been. I lay my head back carefully where it was, panting while she abuses me from on high. We’ve had medical training, of course, and mending a broken bone is not much of a problem, but this … The bone needs to be set, and even if we did know how to do that right, the medical kit is in Jill’s pack.
We weren’t supposed to be separated. We weren’t supposed to be in a position to need a medical kit. We’ve been in quite a few positions we were never supposed to be in on this trip. But planning for the scenario of being alone and hurt and out of communication, that would have seemed like planning for this planet’s sun to rise and set every single day. And it most definitely doesn’t. Jill’s voice comes again, down through the hole.
“Can you get to the rappelling gear?”
My pack is still on my back, and twisting or reaching around to get it is going to hurt. A lot. It hurts a lot when I don’t move. My fingers curl into a thick layer of soft dirt, dirt that must have been sifting in through the cracks of this room for season after season, which is probably what kept me from breaking more than I did. I bet there’s a stone floor underneath here, maybe decorated. I wonder what kind of mortar they used. And then my leg hurts and my brain recharges and starts running at full speed again. That rubble is not only too unstable to rappel from, it’s too unstable to be standing on.
“Jill,” I shout, “get off that pile of rocks!” The dark spot that is Jill’s head doesn’t move. “Get off before you come down here the hard way, okay?” Or before she starts the rockfall that kills me. “See if you can find another way in. There has to be an entrance.”
Jill hesitates, then her head disappears from the opening.
A coughing fit from the dust leaves me no choice but to yell again, and when I’m done my face is running with sweat. I drag an arm across my forehead, and the sleeve comes back red. Fantastic. This is all just fantastic. And what was that I saw, right before I fell, for just a second, when the lenses were zoomed as far as they could go? It almost seemed like a tiny figure, standing on the wall, but that can’t be right. The zoom hadn’t had time to focus. The eeriness of the place is making me paranoid.
I check the glasses. They’re still on my face and working, which is some kind of miracle. I fish around and find the earpiece, stick it back in my ear, but there’s no static, no connection to the base camp. I didn’t think there would be.
I make myself sit up, grunting while I grit my teeth, and when I’m propped on my hands I look at the analytical menu in the lenses, choosing and adjusting the settings, then stare at my dangling foot. An image comes into focus, a picture of the bones of my lower leg. The ankle is dislocated—I think I’m lucky the tibia didn’t come right through the skin—and there’s a crack in my fibula, and when I look close, two smaller fractures in my foot.