I turn off the image, wishing I could turn off the pain just as easy. We have to get back into communication. I think of Dad’s field set, a piece of ultra low-tech gear he rigged up himself to use on sensitive sites, so his communications couldn’t be hacked. Mom thought it was weird, but we used to play with it all the time on the ship. I bet I could get a message out on that. If I’d brought it. Of course, if I’d brought it, the thing would probably be in a thousand pieces right now, like everything else in my pack. I breathe deep and slow, fighting for calm. Then I switch the lenses to the night function, looking through the darkness, beyond the beam of light and scatter of debris I’m sitting in.
The room is circular, like the city, the outer wall studded with decorated half columns, an inner ring of columns I can only hope are still strong, supporting a ceiling with a beautifully curved dome that has a brand-new hole in it. There are no windows, but shelves run along the back wall, empty and broken, and straight ahead is a partially open door, whether just propped up or still on its hinges I can’t tell. It looks like there’s another room beyond it, a big one, also interior, no windows. Except for the door, and a lack of bodies, and shelves too small for dead people, the place reminds me of a tomb. I don’t like that thought.
I lean my head back as far as I can without disturbing my leg, looking upside down and behind me, and then I see the words. Bigger than the ones outside, much bigger, still in place and taking up the entire curving back wall. The glasses show me the letters in shades of green and gray.
“Without Memories, They Are Nothing.”
I wait for Jill, pain like a parasite I can’t pull out, thinking about those words, and the sense of wrong they give me. Like the whole city. What happened to these people?
I should probably be wondering what’s going to happen to me.
I run up the terraced steps, deeper into the Cursed City. If the Council is moving as fast as I was, they’ll reach the walls in about one and one-third of a bell. I’m going to have to hide, elude them in the tangle of buildings and trees until they give up and go home. Until the dark days come. Or until we all Forget who we are.
I don’t Know if I’m going to live through this.
Tumbled buildings line either side of what is recognizably a street now, a broad lane, water still running in a leaf-and-stone-choked channel down the center. I move quick and silent, careful not to disturb the dustmoths. The trees are old here, with branches thicker than my waist, smaller, budding offshoots springing up everywhere to crumble the house stones. And the feeling comes again, of people gone away, and I realize that the quiet is wrong. Not the busy kind of silence, with wind and rustling leaves. This is an absence of sound. All the small creatures holding still.
I come fast around a corner, eyeing a dilapidated house, wondering if it or a tree would conceal me better, and then I stop so abruptly I nearly make myself fall. There is a person. About fifteen meters away, pulling down rocks from a mountainous pile of tree-clad rubble. And even though a human being is exactly what I jumped down from the wall hoping to find, the sight of this one is so shocking I just stand there, staring.
The figure is small, slight, and with the oddest color hair, bright yellow, almost silver, so short it sticks out. I’ve only seen hair that short on a baby. And this person is scrabbling, pulling down rocks, digging frantically with their fingers, trying to tunnel their way inside a rubble pile. Which seems insane.
A small slide of stones comes down, shaking me to my senses, and I dart behind a partial wall, peering through a hole that might have been a window. Broken pot crunches beneath my sandals, one shard snapping with a crack that shoots through the open space. I duck into the safety of the wall shadow as the person turns sharply, looking around in a quick arc.
It’s a girl. Her clothes are plain and shapeless, and she has a pack at her feet, not that different from mine. But her skin is so pale, paler even than Nita’s, and she looks … scared, unsure as she searches for the source of the noise. She doesn’t know this place. No more than I do. Then where does she come from?
I watch her work, pulling out chunks of stone, and then I see that she’s uncovered an opening, that she’s squeezing through it, yelling words I have difficulty understanding as she goes. But I catch enough to Know that she’s looking for something. Or someone. Someone she can’t find.
And then the beat inside my chest picks up again. This girl doesn’t know where she is, because this girl has Forgotten. I slip out of the ruined building and follow her.
It seems like forever, but I know it hasn’t really been that long before I see Jill through the night function of the glasses, dusty and with her face pinched, peering through the darkness beyond the half-open door. She pushes on it, just a little, and the door goes crashing to the floor with a puff of dust. I wince. We’ve been drilled most of our lives on how to observe, not disturb, historic sites. Yet somehow we’re managing to destroy this place piece by piece.
“I’m sorry,” Jill whispers, kneeling at my side.
I don’t know whether she means the door or me. She ought to mean the door, because my condition right now is 100 percent my own fault, not hers. I can see her not looking at the angle of my foot.
“Where else are you hurt?” she asks.
I shake my head. I can’t even tell. There’s no room in my mind for other kinds of pain, and it’s taking everything I’ve got not to yell. What she needs to do is get the medical kit out. Now.
Jill drops her pack to the ground, digging through the contents like she heard my thoughts. She comes up with an infuser in her hand.
“Tell me where to do it.”
The pain has centralized to a single torture in my ankle. Wherever she shoots, she needs to block all my nerve endings in one go. We’ve only got four infusers with us, and I’m going to have to get out of here. “Exactly where it looks broken,” I tell her, “and a little below.”
Jill sets the infuser back in the kit, moves down to my foot, and gingerly begins the process of unfastening my boot. She tries to take it off, and the shout I’ve been holding back echoes in the hollow places of the room.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” Jill says.
I’m unreasonably angry at her. Not because she hurt me, but because now she’s crying about it. “Can you get to the broken place without taking the whole thing off?”
She bites her lip, nods, and then the cool metal tip of the infuser is sitting just below the bulge of bone that should not be in the area of my ankle. I hear a whoosh, feel tiny stings as the air pushes the medicine deep through my skin. Numbness begins to creep down one side of my foot, spreading to my toes, then to the other side and up my leg. Bliss. I lay my head back on one arm, sighing with relief. Jill is still wiping her eyes.
“I’m going for help,” she begins. “We need the—”
“No.” I lift my head and see that Jill is beginning to frown through her tears. The “danger” expression. I ease my tone. “The first rule is to not split up.”
“The first rule is to not move forward unsupervised, Beck! And you were the one not so worried about that.”
I can’t really deny it.
“I don’t have to get all the way back to base camp,” she says. “Give me the glasses and I’ll go back through the canyon and up the mountain until I find communication. They can come on the air bikes, since there’s no one here. Fly you … ”