Alexandria

Chapter Fourteen





They walk for days. The sun and moon chase each other around in circles, light and dark in a seemingly endless rotation, and as the firmament spins around them it begins to seem as if they are passing through the eye of a slow motion cosmic hurricane. In the light, they make ground. They pick fruits and berries, and fish the streams and ponds. In the dark, they sit wearily by their campfire and tremble at horrible shrieks of nocturnal slaughter, as delicate woodland creatures meet their end in the jaws of skilled night predators.



They traverse the changing landscape. They pass through regions where the shoreline is serrated from vast wedges of land that have fallen into the ocean, where small archipelagos dot the coast, all with man-made rubble on them. Little islands of ruin. They pass hill country with natural orchards scattered throughout like an enormous marketplace, and traverse graceful stretches of carnage and decay that still bear the mark of a civilization more advanced than their own. On and on they walk, through the serenely dangerous daylight and the howling, raucous nights.

With their map stolen, they lose all sense of perspective, all sense of where they might stand in the midst of this enormous landscape, and over every crest they half expect to see the great city rising from the earth. Time after time it does not appear, but as they ascend each new incline that lingering hope bites at them anew and fills them with the expectation that it must lay just ahead, around the next bend, just over the next hillside, so tantalizingly close it seems if they concentrate deeply enough it will appear of its own volition like some desert mirage made real.

A placid river leads them to a cleft between hillsides and they come upon a broad, olden pathway that follows along the V-shaped groove. Jack holds Lia’s hand as they trek through the sharp ravine, and they emerge at the crest of a grand valley. A splendor of wreckage is spread before them, angular and withering, laid out like a sweeping maze that looks to entrap all who enter.

“Remember this on the map?”

“Umm… sort of.”

Jack slumps down on a fallen tree trunk and peels off his boots. Fine, white layers of skin are fraying off his red and blistered heels. Lia sits next to him and they rub their tired feet and give their bones a chance to settle. He eyeballs the sun and calculates their remaining allotment of daylight. However fast they hike, he figures, nightfall will catch them somewhere near the middle of the monstrous labyrinth.

“Maybe over those next hills.”

Lia gazes off dreamily. “I’m not sure this place wants to be found. What if we passed it already and didn’t know?”

“No, it’s ahead,” he says automatically. “We just haven’t gone far enough.”

They lace their ragged boots and tread down into the valley. The languishing suburbia sprawls for miles in every direction, dead neighborhoods, dilapidated buildings with floors collapsed and layered together like geological strata, and in like kind every layer has some lost story hidden within. Pressed between them like autumn leaves are the skeletons and livelihoods of the masses that once inhabited these communities, reduced eventually to parchment fossils and mineral deposits.

They bounce down the way, gravity doing its part to pull them into the confusion below. The entire valley is so overlaid with craggy trees and crooked, slithering vines it looks like a tremendous grotto.

Lia squints around. “Do you feel like… someone’s watching us?”

“No. I don’t think so.” As soon as the words cross his lips he scolds himself for lying.

They pick a spot on the distant ridge for their landmark should they lose their way down in the low-lying areas, where the old roadways slice through the ruins like sunken chasms.

“These people were crazy.”

Jack laughs. “What are you talking about?”

“How come they all had to live right here?” She spins in a wobbly circle with her arms outstretched. “They could live anywhere. There’s so much space. And look at these places, all shoved together.”

“They must have really like each other.”

“They better have,” she says, and gets right up in his face, “cause they lived this close.” She widens her eyes like saucers and leers at him. “Come on, Jack. You’re so quiet today.”

“Sorry, I just—”

“Have a bad feeling?”

“Sort of bad.”

“I knew it. I can always tell. And you don’t want to worry me?”

“I guess.”

“Then stop it. If you’re worried, I want to be worried too.”

Jack smiles tightly.

She flickers her eyebrows and leers at him again, grinning slyly. “Should I worry?”

“Still think someone’s watching us?”

“Kind of.”

“So do I.”

They veer off the broad freeway, favoring concealment over speed, and pick their way through the cramped side streets. Jack chops idly with his machete at the sedge and bracken, and Lia withdraws from her gown a deep green bundle, a huge alocasia leaf packaged and bound with root fibers, filled to bursting with the fruit they’ve picked. She rations Jack out a handful of dark purple berries and palms the rest for herself.

She sneaks little glances at him between bites and he has that far-off distant look about him again—the look that makes her crazy.

She flings a berry and it hits him in the face.

Jack turns his head and raises an eyebrow.

“Well…?” she says demurely. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He scrunches up his face. “So… we’ve been walking five days since they found us. Since they took everything. Five days. If Cirune rode fast enough, he could make it back to the Temple in two and a half days, maybe less. If he even made it there at all—and we have to think he did, right? If they turned right around and went out looking for us again on horses, they could be back on us by tomorrow or day after, I figure. Then I thought, maybe they didn’t wait for anybody to come back. Maybe they just sent out more searchers. And if that’s what they did…”

“Then they could be anywhere.”

“Yes. Anywhere.”

“That’s what you’ve been thinking about all day?”

“Mmm,” he says. “Worried now?”

“Yes.”

They walk down the middle of a long residential avenue, surrounded by straight rows of papery old trees, many with dead trunks rotted out, and their younger offspring are sprouting haphazardly across the open spaces. They pass an unkempt field with a pallid brick building standing at the center. Broken letters on its facade spell El ment ry chool. On a grassed-over blacktop there stands a solitary upright pole. They forage around in the overgrown field and come up with just enough to clear their heads and stop their stomachs from growling.

Thick sunlight beats down on them from a pale sky, guiding them along as they shamble through more neighborhoods. Past a wilted office building that looks to be slowly imploding, they come to a wide intersection. The narrow cross street angles into a long, flat boulevard that stretches far across the valley. An old, rusted track runs the length of it, and the metal undercarriages of the railcars have become a pleasant flowerbed for sprays of yellow violets and purple lupine. Lia stops and picks a few stems and twists them together absently as they walk.

Scores of field rabbits dart away quick as light and Jack briefly contemplates the length of time it would take to stop and trap a couple of them. Maybe toward dusk, he figures, when they settle down for the night and make camp. He is deep in such ruminations when Lia places the yellow and purple crown upon his head.

“King Jack.”

“I don’t want to be king.”

“But you’d make a good one. And it looks pretty on you.”

He fights the urge to yank it off his head, and instead laces his fingers through hers and declares her his Queen, to which she consents, and they bound down the vast boulevard, hands clasped between them like lovers on honeymoon. They carry on with the same comfort and ease they once found in their old home village. They make conjectures about the customs and ways of the long-ago people, the unknown lives that were once lived on these very same streets, and now lay buried beneath ever-compounding layers of topsoil. There are two worlds surrounding them in tandem, they see. One world which deconstructs steadily back into the fine particles that once formed its constituents, and another which takes those fine particles and rebuilds itself one minuscule piece at a time until it blooms abundant. In the trees and wildflowers rest the bodies of the folk who once traversed these paths in olden times. Growth and decay everywhere, melted together so seamlessly they look inseparable.

Shapes in the hazy distance catch Jack’s eye and he turns. Several dirty gray wolves carouse down the middle of the road. They dig their muzzles into the earth and sniff around fastidiously, then jog ahead with such grace they are almost prancing. Their advance is unhurried, but deliberate.

Jack grabs Lia and pulls her flush against a leaning half-wall. They crouch down and watch the wolves.

“Are they from the Temple?” Lia asks through a clenched jaw. “Are they already here?”

Jack flicks his eyes across the roadway behind the wolves. Empty.

“They look wild,” he says. The pack is several blocks off now and gaining. “Come on.”

He hops up onto the low wall and Lia hitches her leg up and climbs on after. They jump down the other side and work their way across an uneven rectangle of toppled posts and weeds and concrete. The far wall has collapsed outward and they stumble across it toward the next street over. As they turn the corner, one of the shabby wolves leaps atop the wall and watches them dash away. It slinks down and sniffs cautiously over the ground they just trod. The rest of the pack soon joins in, stealing out onto the street and sneaking down the way.

Jack leans out and spies them.

“Are they coming?”

“Yes.”

The wolves pick up speed as they weave and lope down the street, matching their pace precisely. He grabs Lia’s arm and races away.

“They’re hunting us.”

He stops in the middle of the street and roars at them and brandishes his blade. They slow down and skulk along the edges of the gutter, watching him dumbly with cocked heads. Lia screams and yells alongside him. The wolves sit motionless and wait for the exhibition to end. Jack advances on them and they retreat a few paces, but as soon as he turns and walks back they rise and follow him.

“All right,” he says, “that’s not working.”

They veer into a narrow channel that runs between rickety storefronts then sprint away as fast as they can. The wolves creep out onto the road and follow at a distance.

Jack pounces on Lia and drags her suddenly to the ground. He lies on top of her, panting and swiveling his head around.

“Jack!”

“Shhh. I thought I saw someone. A man.”

They slide back into a nest of foliage and look around wildly. The coast ahead is clear, and behind them they see only the steadily approaching wolf pack.

“Where did you see him?”

“Over there, I thought.”

Lia shakes her head, eyes widened with primitive fear. “I don’t see anything.”

“Okay,” he says, heaving himself back to his feet, “let’s see if we can lose them.”

They run ahead and the wolves pursue. The pack plagues them for blocks, pressing the two forward with their relentless advance.

“They’re trying to tire us out,” says Jack through hitching breaths.

“It’s working.”

“We should try to climb someplace they can’t get us, one of those trees maybe.”

“And then what?”

“Wait.”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

“There’s nothing else to do. They’ll kill us.”

They break for another corner, hoping to find good cover or a high place to hide. Sitting at the end of the short alley is another wolf. It scrabbles up onto all fours when it sees the two. Jack looks into its eyes and freezes. He hears a clapping sound from down around the corner and the wolf shoots off out of sight.

They shy away from the alley and keep on the main avenue. The confident wolves are loping ahead and closing the span between them. They run past shaggy palm trees with layers of dried husks hanging from the slender trunks and they make for a stately old oak that grows up through an enclosure of rubble. Lia scales the mound of detritus with quick agility and Jack clambers up and over behind her and they nearly throw themselves at the lowest hanging branch of the oak and start to pull themselves up.

A low roar sounds from the street, too deep to belong to any wolf, and Lia whisks her head around to face Jack.

“What is that?”

“Just keep climbing.”

“There it is again.”

Beneath the baying of a solitary wolf rises the throaty growl of some enormous creature. Jack pushes with his legs and hooks onto a higher limb. From this height they can see out onto the street. It is desolate of wolves. The barking has stopped. Jack bends his neck around and moves a well-plumed branch out of his sightline and looks off the other way. Nothing.

“Where’d they all go?”

“Down there,” says Lia.

A great, brown bear trundles down the roadway toward their hideout. It yawns its mouth wide and sways dumpily as it walks.

“Bears climb, don’t they? Don't they?”

“Yes…”

Here is where panic sets in. Jack fumbles his way across the high branches frantically, electric shocks bolting through his guts, searching for a course that will give them some headway.

“Lily!” a man’s voice calls out.

Jack grips the bark and Lia seizes his arm. The voice sounds again, low and gravelly.

The bear pauses and looks around.

Footsteps shuffle nearby, and soon enough a man comes into view. He is clad in buckskin from head to toe—rough trousers, sewn together with crudely dimpled seams, and a dark leather mantle around his shoulders, covered in tears and stains and trimmed with fox fur. He looks into the branches of the oak and smiles at the boy and girl that cower there.

“They’re gone,” he says. He is deep-creased and bearded, with hair colored the same dingy gray as the wolves’ and skin as tanned as the various hides he sports. “You can come on down, it’s safe.”

Jack and Lia sit still and look at him.

“B… bear…” Lia manages.

“She won’t bite you. Least I don’t think. Of course you’d be in the jaws of those wolves right now if not for her. You could say thank you.”

Jack watches in awe as the old man walks right up to the bear and ruffles her light brown fur and throws his arm around her neck. She sways her head around and nuzzles against him and the simple action nearly knocks him to the ground. Jack swings down a few branches to get a cleaner view. The stray wolf is there, too—the one he had seen alone in the alleyway. It looks up at the old man like an obedient servant and the man reaches in his satchel and draws out a length of dried meat and slips it into the wolf’s mouth.

“It’s all right, young man. They’re civilized.” He looks not to have washed in years. The bear seems cleanest of them all.

Jack hops off the lowest limb and climbs atop the rubble pile and looks down at the odd collection of wanderers. The bear watches without a flicker of emotion in her small eyes and the wolf regards him with only slightly more interest. The old man gazes back with a troubling sense of familiarity.

“Have you been following us?” asks Jack, realizing stupidly that he still wears a wreath of flowers on his head.

“I’ve watched your passage,” the man says curiously. “This is dangerous land for young one’s like yourselves. I thought you might be lost, or out of your minds altogether. Which is it? Lost? Or crazy?”

“Neither,” says Jack, pitching his crown into the bushes. “We’re just passing through.”

“Oh. I see. You have a name?”

“Jack.”

“Jack. That’s a fine old name. Never known a Jack. And your friend, there?”

“I’m Lia.”

“Lia, pleased to know you.”

“What’s your name?” she asks, hopping off the tree limb and sidling up next to Jack.

“Called Miles,” he says crisply.

“You walk around with them?” asks Jack, nodding toward the animals.

“Only friends I’ve got.” Miles waves them down off the mound. “She’s Lilith, and here’s Ruck. Come here, let ‘em know you’re friendly. That is, if you are friendly.” He angles his hand toward the machete that hangs at Jack’s hip and looks at him expectantly.

“Stay here,” Jack whispers, then ventures down into the street and takes a few steps toward them.

Miles leads the wolf forward and lets him poke his muzzle around Jack’s boots. He tentatively reaches a hand down and Ruck drags his warm tongue across it and looks up pleadingly.

“That’s enough, Ruck. Sit down.”

The wolf sits. The bear rises from her haunches and walks a half circle around Jack, then stretches her neck out and touches her pointed snout lightly to his elbow. He turns to wave Lia down and finds her already standing behind him. The bear scopes her out in similar fashion then sulks off behind Miles and looks dully around the neighborhood.

“So…” begins Miles, “passing through, you said? Where you headed?”

“Nowhere really. Just wandering.”

“Ahh, struck by wanderlust. Kindred spirits.”

“Are you headed somewhere?”

“I’ve destinations in mind, but not of the definite sort,” Miles replies. Jack squints at the unfamiliar lingo he employs. “Say, those are some well-made shoes you’re wearing. Haven’t ever seen any like that. Where are you two from?”

Jack inhales but makes no comment, recalling how their boots almost got them killed. He looks at Lia and finds her just as speechless.

“Don’t care to talk about it? Just as well,” agrees Miles. “None of my business where you’re from or where you’re going. Just making conversation.”

“Do you live here?”

“I live everywhere.”

“How long have you wandered?”

“A long time, Lia.”

“And they go with you?”

“For several years now. Raised them since cub and pup.” He scratches his fingers through his straggly beard and looks up at the sky. “I’d come upon a terrible sight, three dead wolves, ripped to pieces, and a lone pup curled up next to them. Then I saw the bear, crying and bleeding out. They’d killed each other protecting their young, you see. I found the little bear cub not far off, crawling around scared and I couldn’t bring myself to leave her, so I took the babes and raised them as my own.”

“I’ve seen tame wolves,” says Jack, “but never a bear. How do you know she won’t kill you?”

“I don’t.”

Their conversation lulls and each party merely stands and drinks in the strangeness of the other. Boy and girl, bruised and bloodied, facing the old man with beasts for companions.

“Gonna be dark soon,” says Miles. “I’ve got some fish strung up at a little spot not far from here. It’s not much, but I’ll share it.”

“Thanks… but we should probably keep moving.”

“Now I suspect you’re crazy again. You’re already beat to hell, both of you. I don’t care to think what’ll happen to you out here alone at night. There’s more than wolf packs in these parts, you know.”

“How do we know you won’t steal from us?” Lia asks.

Miles laughs, a hoarse cackle. “What would I steal? Shoes that won’t fit me? A sword I have no use for? I offer you a hot meal and a safe night’s sleep. All I ask in exchange is a little company. Take it or leave it.”

They confer softly and decide that if the old man wanted them dead, he could have simply let the wolves kill them and saved himself the trouble.

“Okay,” says Lia. “We’ll go.”

Miles nods an affirmation. “Follow me.”

They set out through the labyrinthine ruins, conversing about all manner of things relative to their separate journeys, and the bear and the wolf walk easily down the avenue alongside them.





Arana paces across his parlor, cold sober and obsessed with the discrepancy he sees in front of him. The buckhide map has been pulled from the wall and spread out flat on the dark-stained dining table with a ring of candles around it, and it shows new markings over a far-off southern desert region, unknown to the Temple, culled forth from the bloodied Renning while young Phoebe cried and cloaked her face against his chest. A smaller map lay crumpled on top of the larger one, returned to the Temple by Cirune, with a hastily scribbled star drawn in along the southern coast. The markings on the separate maps do not match. Arana revolves around the table, observing the plots from every angle as if some minor overlooked detail will resolve the disparity.

Thin vertical shafts of light track across the chamber as the sun wheels toward the ocean, and when the thin orange crescent sinks beneath the surface, the pale light darkens and disappears with the dawning of night and the parlor illuminates with dirty hearth fire.

It begins at sunset.

Arana leaves the maps behind and stills himself before the flames. He sits on his lounge as unmoving as a stoneworked bust of himself, and he does not stir even when the terrified screams float through with the night breeze and become general on the grounds. There is no use risking an escape by doing it softly, he reminds himself. Their methods are becoming more effective by the day.





The swollen moon shines down through a dwindling aperture in the overcast sky. Whorls of cloudmist bleed over it until only a vague luster shows through, then finally it is gone and the entire valley seems to disappear under the darkling stratus. Miles breaks off a young branch from a nearby tree then rifles around in his satchel and comes out with a small bundle. He looses out a length of soaked linen from the bundle and fixes it to the stick and strikes it ablaze.

There are scratchings in the darkness and a quavering growl rumbles from Ruck’s throat, his shiny teeth bared to the gumline. The bear’s eyes look diabolical in the fire. Jack’s pulse quickens as she edges up next to him and rubs her hide against him like an over-sized cat. Miles swishes the torch around and guides them across an open lot with a stagnant fountain situated in the middle, the muddy water covered with green foam. There is a quick, burbling splash as they pass.

“How far up was it?” asks Miles.

“Two or three days,” says Lia.

“I think I know the place. Old tourist town. The fellow that chased you, was he a big man?”

“Yeah, he was.”

“Bald and bearded?”

“I think so.”

“That’s Collins, if memory serves. They’re good folks. They tame wolves up there. Breed them and tame them. I ought to make my way back there one of these days.”

“You know them?”

“Not well, but yes. I’ve met a lot of people.”

Jack tells him about the mansion and the old matriarch, and about Sajiress and his people.

Miles shakes his head. “No, I don’t believe I ever came across any of them. Don’t sound familiar. Were they friendly?”

“They were nice.”

“Some of them were a little too nice,” says Lia. “Where all have you wandered?”

Miles rattles out a heavy sigh. “Been up and down the coast. Spent some time up in old Canada. That’s a hell of a long ways north. As beautiful as ever up that way. Nearly settled there, but other destinies called to me. That was all a very long time ago. Went down south for a while. Too hot down there. There’s people that make it work, but I don’t know how. I’d planned on walking the course all the way down to a different land, but I turned and came back. Just didn’t suit me.”

“Is there anything down south?” Jack asks. “Anything… strange?”

“I saw nothing but strangeness. What do you mean, exactly?”

“Like a new city, or something?”

“There’s cities along the way, but none new. There’s a few new towns scattered about, though. Some of them have things pretty well figured out, and some of them… well, there’s a lot of misery out there yet.” Miles looks at him with a shine in his eye. “Does that answer your question, Jack?”

“Yeah…”

The wolf marches beside a line of brush that clings to the outer facades. Along the way, he rummages in the weeds and digs his paws into the earth, and a couple times comes out with something alive. He sleeks his forepaws low on the ground with his hind end curved up into the air, and carefully parses the creatures apart with his fangs and gobbles them, then bounds down the avenue to catch up.

After a few more corners are turned they reach the camp. Two leaning walls enclose it, the rest of the building is scattered across the intersection. Firewood is already stacked in the center of the clearing and Miles lights the tinder, then nestles the torch in a pile of stones. He hustles around, quick for an old man, and clears the weeds and debris off a broad ledge.

“Here, sit down, rest yourselves. I’ll start the fish cooking.”

Ruck and Lily prowl opposite ends of the neighborhood. They venture down the street a ways, snarling occasionally at the shadows that move through the undergrowth. The smell of cooking fish brings them back. The sit on the outer bounds and watch Miles officiate over the fire as if he’s performing some arcane ritual with the gutted fish as offerings.

“That’s one thing that’s earned my keep with them,” he says, leaning forward and turning their dinner over the flames, “they’ve got a taste for cooked meat.”

Ruck stares at the shrivel-eyed fish with saliva dripping from the slack corners of his mouth. Lily paces. Miles settles back and lets everything brown over the flames.

“Have you ever been to the east?” asks Jack. “We’ve heard it’s bad out there.”

“It’s a hard trip to make. Long stretches where there’s not much to live on. I’ll bet if you could get far enough east, things would get better. But that’s only a guess. I’ve never made it that far and I probably won’t ever try to again. Ah, here.” Miles pulls out the translucent skeletons and pitches several fish out into the street in varied directions. The animals chase after their respective shares and hunker down protectively to eat. He carries the rest over toward Jack and Lia and sits down to join them. “I’d urge you to eat quick.”

They comply, and when they’ve finished Miles cleans up and carries their skins and heads away. Ruck leaps on him, forepaws planted on his shoulders, and licks his neck with a greasy tongue, then lopes over the rubble and runs a circle around the fire and jumps on the ledge where Jack and Lia sit. Lia giggles as Ruck bumbles into her and licks her and burrows his head into her side. He hops on Jack and straddles him across the ground, snorting and yapping, and they roll around like brother pups playing on a den floor.

Lia watches Miles tangle with the bear. Lily drags him to the ground and plants a leg across his chest and seems to almost ravage him, his old legs flying up in the air as the huge bear spins him around and clobbers him. As they wrestle, Lia feels certain that the man will be mauled, that the bear will rise above him with fresh blood on her fur and the old man’s entrails dangling from her vicious maw. But she doesn’t. Miles gets up laughing and dusts himself off. The bear sits forward like an enormous toddler and glances around at the others.

Miles stumbles back, winded, and plops down in front of the fire. He passes a leather flask around and they drink. After a few moments of idle conversation, Jack poses another question.

“When’s the last time you went up north?”

Miles cackles again. “You’ve asked about every direction except west. Don’t feel like swimming?” He settles back coyly on his elbows and levels on them. “Why are you two out here? Did you run away from your parents?”

“No.”

“Well, you’ve run from something.”

“We’re looking for something,” says Lia. “A place, maybe you know of it—it’s called Alexandria.”

Miles scratches at the wiry hairs on his chest. He shakes his head. “Don’t know it. Where is it?”

“That way,” says Jack, pointing.

“I don’t like to disappoint you, but there’s no such place over there, or anywhere around here, unless I’ve missed it all these years. How did you come to know of it?”

“We met someone who came from there,” says Lia.

“Have you considered that you’ve been taken for fools?”

“We’re not fools,” she says, and holds his gaze after she says it.

“I’ll take you at your word. Why do you seek this place? What do they have that you should risk your lives to find it?”

“Answers.”

“To what questions?”

“It’s supposed to know things.”

“What does it know?”

“Not really sure.”

“What do you want it to know?”

“What happened to the world.”

“If you want to know what happened to the world, just take a look around. It’s written everywhere.”

“We want to know why it ended.”

“What’s the use of knowing what broke it? It’s already broken. Why should there be cities to burn down in the first place? Why should there be glass and steel and men to put them together? Why should there be anything? Where did it all come from?” He stops talking and stares at them, waiting for an answer.

“Um… the Beyond?” Jack offers timidly.

“Mmm. Maybe. Maybe not. What about that? Can this place you seek answer that?”

“I don’t know,” says Jack. The thought had never occurred to him.

“Well, you have to start asking the right questions if you want the right answers,” says Miles. “Of course, it’s not really the end of the world, or we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it. The world won’t end for a very long while yet, trillions of years in truth, but that’s not much comfort. As for what happened to civilization, you could know all the aspects of it and still be left to speculation. They argued for thousands of years about the fall of Rome and that was small compared to this.”

“What’s Rome?” asks Lia.

“An empire from the ancient times. And the funny part is, their monuments will probably outlast our own. Long after we’ve turned to dirt, there will stand the Parthenon on the Acropolis, laughing down at our crypts. But in due course, time will take that, too, and there will be nothing left of any of this, not even a memory. Not even a graveyard or a ghost to haunt it.” He hitches himself onto one knee and declares to the night. “The gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, and all which it inherit, shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.” He settles his eyes on Lia.

“What does that mean?”

“Not my words.”

“Whose words are they?”

“An old poet’s. But not his anymore, either.”

“Whose are they now?”

“Time’s. She gets everything in the end. That’s what it means—all that you will ever have shall be taken away, in some manner or another. That I can assure you.”

His words leave them despondent and they sit quietly and avoid looking at each other. Miles watches them with a peculiar expression on his face.

“Of course,” he continues, “the end is not the end…” He kneels by the fire and rustles around in the brush for a stick. “They had a theory, centuries back. A theory that binds the forces and describes everything in the known and unknown world, numbers and letters and symbols that summed everything up very nicely.” He scribbles the equation on the ground with the bent stick, rapt with concentration for a long moment as he delineates the strange figures in the dirt. It looks like hieroglyphics when he’s finished and Jack and Lia scowl at it.

“What does it say?”

“It is… a cycle. Round and round, you see?” He swirls his finger in the air. “The simple to the complex and back again for a length of something that is not Time, in which all things that can ever be shall happen… even this,” he says. “Even this.”

Miles looks at them intently, smiling.

Jack and Lia stare at the equation.

Miles dusts it away. He flickers his eyebrows impishly and stirs the fire with the stick he used to inscribe the theory. Wood sparks dance in an eddy of cool air and fly upwards.

“But what it says, I do not know.”

“Is that what made everything? Some cycle?”

“Didn’t make us. Allowed for us. Wherefrom came the cycle? That’s the real mystery.”

“Do you know?”

“It wouldn’t be a mystery if I knew. I suspect maybe that’s the point. I’m not sure even the mystery itself knows. It may be conjecturing the same questions about its origins as we are, lost in some cosmic ocean of creation wondering why it should be so. Over the Ages, they believed every different thing you can imagine and then some. They all perished away just the same in the end.”

Jack and Lia wear confused faces. Miles uses so many old words they’ve never heard before that they struggle to decrypt his meaning.

“So they all just died?” Lia asks, pulling on a thread at the hem of her gown.

“Mmm. Billions of them.”

“But why? Why did they have to die?”

“They didn’t—not in that way, at least.”

“They wanted to die?”

“No. Quite the opposite. They wanted to live forever. They’d doctored themselves in such a way that death was denied its natural course. Over a century and a half, some lived. No one’s meant to live that long. They betrayed the cycle.”

“What?”

“Their covenant. To die. To go back into the dirt and be reborn. They fought against it—and they lost. They thought themselves masters of the land, and the land taught them otherwise. Her lessons are strict—I can see by the scars you wear that you know I’m true.”

Jack thinks back on The Solstice of Fire. They have known of cycles before, civilizations coming together and falling apart, death and rebirth, these notions were not hidden from them.

“So that’s it? They broke the cycle and they died?”

“No. Of course not,” Miles bristles. “I told you, you can see this from every angle and still not make any sense of it. Of course there’s more. But what do you want me to tell you? Do you want to hear about bombs going off and children burning? Families dying of plague and starvation? About how they longed so dear for a hero and none came? I won’t talk about it. There’s no use in it. Those things are small. Massacre. Famine. Disease. They all happened. For thousands of years they happened… and civilization carried on. It was something inside them… something deeper. Destruction like this has happened before… and it will happen again, many times over, and not just here, but in exotic places so remote we could never touch or see them, worlds apart from our own.”

The fire dwindles low and Miles starts toward a pile of scrap wood to replenish it.

“I’ll get it,” says Jack.

“Thank you.”

Lia sits back with her palm resting on her cheek and watches Jack tend to the fire. An uncomfortable thought itches her mind.

“If it’s all going away someday,” she says softly, “if we lose everything and we can’t ever get it back… then what’s the point?”

Miles nods slowly. “That’s better. Much better. You’re a clever girl.” He inscribes a circle on the ground with the stick. “For death is only part of it, you see. Just as you have an obligation to die… so, too, do you have an obligation to live. To avoid either is to break the cycle. There is no need to ask how civilizations come to an end, Jack. Time will see to that. The question you should be asking… is how do they begin?”

Jack crouches by the fire. The bear and the wolf slumber next to him on the ground. He looks at the old nomad’s face. He imagines him clean-shaven with slicked-back hair. He imagines him decades younger and less worn. He wonders why he didn’t see it sooner.

“You’re the prophet.”

“I’m prophet of nothing.”

“You’re Thomas.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Miles says blithely.

Jack sees something in his eyes and wonders if it is the shame of deceit. “Then tell me how you know all this.”

“I know nothing. Everything I’ve told you could just as well be false.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Leave where?”

“The Temple. Did you leave because they started killing people?”

“What?”

“Jack?”

“Did you blame yourself? Why do you live out here with animals? Is it because you don’t trust yourself around people anymore?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“My mother is dead,” Jack bursts. “And her parents are dead, and our home is gone. It was burned to the ground. Burned by a man named Arana Nezra, and you knew him. You knew him when he was just a child. He has blue eyes. And you knew his father. You were there when it started. And all I want to know is why? Why?” he fires, red-faced and trembling. “You have so many answers, can you tell me that? Can you tell me why my mother is dead? Is it part of your cycle?”

Miles is stricken. Ruck jumps up on all fours and skitters to his master’s feet and glares at Jack, a low growl working in the back of his throat. Miles sinks to his knees and soothes the wolf, smoothing back his fur and whispering in his ears. He looks back to Jack.

“Sit down,” he says softly.

Jack remains standing. Lia watches the confrontation with dark, wet eyes.

“I am he,” says Miles. “Please. Sit down.”





Eriem’s side of the bed is cold. He left for the night watch before sundown. Jeneth sets her bare feet on the floor of their tiny, two-room cottage. Muffled cries have awoken her and she rubs sleep out of her bleary eyes, then shambles across the room to gather Mariset in her arms and rock her back to sleep.

The crib is empty.

As the fog of sleep clears, she realizes that the cries had not come from inside their cabin, but from the hillside and grounds. In a frenzy of panic she moves to the sideboard and lights a candle and flashes it around the room. All of Mariset’s clothes and toys are gone. Her hand flies to her gaping mouth. She feels like she’s been struck in the chest.

She treads cautiously toward the door, toward the screaming. As she reaches for the lever, the door bursts inward and two men move slickly through it and grab her by the arms. Thoughts of spies and far-away armies flash through her mind, until she catches a glimpse and recognizes them as friends of Eriem. They have sat at dinner together in the Temple Hall and talked and laughed and got along well. They force her to the ground and bind her hands behind her back, then haul her back to her feet by the elbows. She flails and fights against them.

“Settle down, Jeneth. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“She’s safe.”

“Where is she?”

Jeneth screams through clenched teeth and tries again to pull away. They jerk her roughly though the door and march her down the path toward the Temple.

The grounds are chaos. They are being carried away, all of them—all who were not born here. People who have been at the Temple longer than Jeneth are being escorted from their cottages with their hands tied behind their backs, pulled screaming from their children and carted away as prisoners.

Strands of Jeneth’s fine hair adhere themselves to her tear-wet cheeks, flushed with an anger more profound than any she’s ever known, stronger yet than the anger she felt years ago when they first stole her away from her own parents. The only image that burns in her mind is of her daughter’s face. She turns her head and bares her teeth and bites at her captors.

Someone calls her name from the dark entrance by the amphitheatre and she looks up to see Elise being dragged toward the Temple as well. They hand her off to sentries and she is whisked away—an assembly line of forced bondage, swift and efficient. Jeneth goes limp and contorts her face in fathomless anguish. My daughter, she thinks, my baby.

They cart them through the sanctum at the heart of the Temple, with panoramic frescoes of fire ensconcing the fevered prisoners as they are led to their confinement. Lines of young children are led down from the dormitories and set along the same path until a sizable crowd stands gathered at the mouth of the secluded staircase.

Jeneth looks around for her friends and sees Haylen down the hall, bound with ropes and sobbing. She sees Aiden and Creston far behind, just making their way down. At the head of the stairs, wearing an oddly calm expression, is William. One of the men holding him is Eriem. She would gouge his eyes out now if loosed. She calls his name and she knows that he hears it. His head flinches slightly, but he will not face her.

The slow crush carries her toward the keep. The sounds from below make her knees go weak. Clenched and sobbing, she descends the staircase that leads to her internment, feeling less and less human with each step she takes.





The man once called Thomas sits stoically and absorbs the last of their tale. He pitches more wood on the fire. Wolves howl in the distance and Ruck stirs at his feet apprehensively. Jack and Lia sit on the ledge, bundled together under a warm fur, exhausted from yet another telling of their story.

“Dead?” Thomas asks.

“Most likely.”

He hangs his head. “I knew Ethan. He was a boy when I left.”

“It’s real, then? You’ve been there?”

“Yes. It’s real. I was born there. I lived my childhood there.”

“What is it?” asks Lia.

Thomas pauses and thinks for a spell. “It knows things, yes, that’s true. Ways and thoughts passed down from the days before. But, it is something far more… They are… humanitarians.” He reads the confusion on their faces and explains to them the meaning of humanitarian. “You see, that’s what Ethan and Renning were doing. Helping people cope with a long, hard winter. And it’s carried on for centuries, generation after generation, all the way back to the time of the downfall.”

Jack and Lia are transfixed. A surge of relief floods them as they realize that their journey has not been in vain.

“Why did you leave?”

“I was impatient. No,” he corrects himself, “I was reckless. I wanted to be part of something greater and I didn’t want to wait for it. So I left. I left when I was just a little older than you two are now. I left that home with a head full of pride and knowledge, and I roamed for years looking for a place to put it to use. I wanted to build great things. I was inspired by the palaces of old—thought people needed an anchor, something to unite them. I was humanity’s great hope, so I thought.” He rubs his eyes with crooked fingers. “In the summer of my eighteenth year, I made my way up the coast. I saw so many things along the way. There was devastation, yes… tired groups of wanderers living only to survive, barely a generation removed from the caves that hid them during the long storm. But I also saw a world on the move, a beautiful, growing world, full of possibility. That’s what I sought—a new life. A life with possibility. And there, on the central coast, I thought I’d found it. It was just a small settlement back then, but it was alive. It was glowing. I could see from afar that life for them was much more than just simple survival. I ventured to approach them and was met by a man named Arana Nezra. Said the name was of old, noble blood. He was as warm and kind a man as you could ever hope to meet. He’d led his people down from the frozen north, a hard journey that lasted years, and along the way they picked up more followers who shared the same vision that he had—the vision of a beautiful life together. That was all. It was so simple, really. I had no idea how wrong things would go.

“We became friends. We’d talk long into the night about the world and all that had happened to it, and about the situation we found ourselves in. I told him many things he had never known before. When he asked how I knew so much, I lied. Told him I came from a city to the north, that I’d picked everything else up on my travels. He believed me. He trusted me pretty deep at that point, I think, and he had good reason—my true home was the only thing I ever kept from him. Everyone took to me very kind because of how close of friends I was with him. He’d led them through every kind of hardship imaginable to get there, and they loved him more than their own families, some did. Those people would have followed him into the ocean to drown if that’s what he wanted of them. Of course, I never worried that he would misguide them in such a way. Though he did have a love for women, I tended to turn a blind eye to all the fathering he’d done. He was so selfless with them, otherwise. He truly cared, this I believe. Cared about each and every one of them. Always talked about the life he wanted to give them. He had these grand visions, these beautiful dreams, and I told him I could help make them so. We rebuilt the settlement from the ground up, carved out planting fields, set irrigation ditches, built a medical lodge where I’d see to people. We transformed the landscape, and when we stepped back and looked at what we’d done, it nearly burst our hearts. It was perfect. It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in my life.

“From that point it was set. They started to revere me as they did him. Some offered up that I was a prophet of some sort, and the notion held. Arana and I had plans to build something grand, something permanent. We scouted out a quarry to the north with good sandstone, and we started to figure ways to get that stone back to our little haven on the cliff. We were idolized. With more food from the fields, our numbers grew. I had favor with nearly everyone. Nearly.

“There was one, in particular, who never took a liking to me. A man named Keslin. He joined in with Arana early on, and he was a broken man when they found him. He had cleared out from a dead settlement in one of the blighted regions. One by one, he’d lost his family and been left with nothing. Arana took him under his care, and Keslin stayed right by his side during most of the long journey, second in charge, so to speak. He was jealous, I think, that I’d moved in and taken his place. Thought that I was complicating things with all my ideas. And he thought we were blind to the dangers in the world. I guess, in some ways, he was right.

“We had a few wonderful years there… beautiful, peaceful years. And then, one night, the worst happened. It was a small band of people, they numbered far less than us, but we were unprepared for what was coming. And it was so pointless, too, because if these people had only approached Arana, I know he would have taken them in as his own, fed them and clothed them. But they didn’t. They’d eyed our tools and our food stores. They’d seen how good we had it and they wanted it for themselves. It happened while we were all sleeping, and it wasn’t simple thievery.

“You have to understand, Arana’s people weren’t soft. Far from it. They’d endured some of the worst suffering that nature can meet out. But they weren’t vicious and brutal, not like this group that besieged us. They laid to waste everything we’d fought so hard for. They ravaged our fields, set fire to the homes we’d built, took everything that wasn’t set into the ground. It was horrible. I’ll never forget that night for the rest of my life. We lost so many children. It was death and confusion everywhere. And it was over as quick as it started, and us left there stunned on that cliff with our homes burning around us. I don’t need to speak further on it.

“That night marked a turn. Keslin felt confirmed of his earlier suspicions—that we were defenseless, a target for thieves. He’d lost his family all over again, lost them all in the fire, and it haunted him. Arana went back to seeking his council, which was just as well—I’d had about enough of being worshipped, anyway.

“It wasn’t long after that night when the child was born.

“In the old days, there was a greater variety of people, you see. Different colors, different traits. The world was well on its way toward melting them all together when the downfall happened, but afterwards, after so many had been lost, some traits all but vanished. These traits weren’t gone, mind you—they were sort of hiding inside us. And when that child was born, he possessed one of these hidden traits. The boy’s eyes shone clearest blue, and that little bundle mesmerized every man, woman and child left under Arana’s care. He’d fathered the child, most likely. Took credit for it, certainly, and the boy took his namesake. Arana Nezra the Second, he was called. Soon enough, Arana started telling people the boy was a sign of something greater. Some divine protection cast down upon his people, and, oh, how they longed to believe it.

“All this while, the change was happening. They began producing more weapons than tools. The grand vision was put on hold. Despite their child savior, these good people started to see everyone in close range of the settlement as an enemy to be bested. Troubled wanderers no longer found a home with Arana. They were chased away or, at worst, killed on sight. What I saw around me were the makings of something terrible. For the second time in my life, I left the place I’d called home and ventured out on my own. I left in the middle of the night, fearing they would have killed me if they’d known I was leaving.

“I went south for a while, but it wasn’t to my liking. I spent long decades out there alone, and finally ended not far from where I started. My foolishness has caused a lot of death, Jack. You were right—I don’t very much trust myself around people anymore. When I saw you two out wandering on your own, I knew—at least a part of me knew—that you’d run away from them as I had.” His hard face cracks with tears. Thin rivulets run down his cheeks and leave tracks of clarity on his begrimed skin. “I am so sorry… for everything that has happened to you. None of it ever should have happened. None of it.”

Ruck leaps up and dutifully licks his tired face. He pats the wolf down and settles him back on the ground, then looks at Jack and Lia with eyes that seek neither forgiveness nor consolation. They sit bundled under their fur, trying to untangle the strands of Thomas’s story. It does little to soothe their grief.

“I still don’t understand how they could’ve done what they did,” says Lia. “We lost everything, too, and we didn’t turn out like them.”

“Mmm,” says Thomas. “You don’t want to hurt them back? You don’t want to take from them? Show them how they’ve hurt you?”

Lia starts to say no, then stops herself. “Yes. But they did hurt us. If they’d hunted the people that burned them, that would be different. We didn’t burn their homes down. They burned ours.”

“Yes, I see. But suppose you settle down somewhere again, some nice little place that you’re happy to call home. Suppose you’re settled there, all nice and cozy—maybe you’ll have a couple young ones of your own—and then one night, long about the middle of the night, you hear strangers out in the darkness. Strangers with unknown intentions. You might feel differently, then. You might feel threatened and strike out blindly, to protect your own. It’s a short step from there to much darker tendencies. A trauma like what you went through, it changes a person. It’s changed you, I’d wager, in ways that your young minds can’t yet fully understand. And it’s not the thinking part of your mind that’s been affected, but a much older part, an ancient part. It’s hard work to stay civilized. It’s hard work because it’s not natural.”

“So were going to end up like them?”

“No. I just mean you have to try at it. Take Ruck and Lily for example. Consider the two possibilities. One in which the bear and the wolf are raised separately in the wild, each by their own kind, and in that way they would surely be hateful enemies. Each would fear the other and like to kill them. Or, consider they are raised by me, in which case they become friends. Same bear. Same wolf. A difference only of what they are taught and how. And of these two possibilities, I tell you, young man, young lady, it is this one,” he says, gesturing to Ruck and Lily sleeping cozily by the fire, “that is the unnatural of the two.”

“Unnatural?”

“Mmm. I think some part of them cares about me as they would their own kind. Then there’s another part that, if they’re provoked in such a way, could revert back to the rawest wild. But the same could be true of me. And you. There are savage ways in all of us.”

Jack flinches. “We’re not savages.”

“Are you so sure? There’s a thin line in here,” he crooks an elbow and points to his cranium, “that separates the higher from the lower, and at this thin line there are monsters, brutal monsters, rattling their cages, deep within the earliest forebears of our minds, fighting to break through. Always been there, even long before the downfall. Always. While they busied themselves in steel towers, there were some hidden workings buried deep, then and still, violent remains from an earlier Age when our ancient kin lived and died by the sharpness of their teeth and the quickness of their retreat—these workings written inside a body in such a way that it could spell a creature’s fate before it’s ever birthed from its mother’s womb. And it takes a lot of work to overcome that. For if you feed the monsters, the monsters will grow. And if they grow strong enough, they escape into the higher reaches and run wild and chase anything civilized clean away.”

“It’s wicked.”

“It’s not wickedness, not outright. It’s the drive to live. It’s what kept you alive out here in the wild, I reckon. It’s what tore civilization to the ground, and it’s also what gave them the will to build it up in the first place. Fierce protection of yourself and others like you. All creatures have it. But, lo, it rattles those cages. Doesn’t know when enough is enough. Yes, Jack, there are monsters in you, and even you, Lia. But it’s your choice whether or not you feed them.”

The fire has burned down to embers and Thomas pokes at it with the stick.

“Is that what happened to Arana? He fed them?”

“Partly. He’s a different case, altogether. He’d not been born, yet, when the fires happened. Before I left, he’d shown sparks of being a bright young boy. Had a gentle way about him. It’s discouraging to hear that he’s crowned himself King. Absurd. If he’s King, then I’m Emperor of the Universe.”

“So what’s wrong with him?”

“He was brought up with all that rot his father taught him, and I guess he believed it.”

“So… he has no powers?”

“Only the power to make people think he has.”

Jack nods, remembering all the times he feared some force would overtake him. “Will the people at Alexandria know how to stop him?”

“Doubtful. Not if they’re as strong as you say. Arana wants to find this place very badly, doesn’t he?”

“He’s searched for years.”

“Then he’ll someday find it. This map that Ethan gave you, what did it show?”

“It was a drawing of the land and the rivers, all down the coast, and there was a star at the bottom where he told us to go.”

“Can you draw it?”

“Sure.”

Jack takes the stick and works from memory, drawing a rough depiction of the shoreline. He fills in a few remembered details, then finishes it off with a little star.

“Ah,” says Thomas, with a touch of relief, “I see. Ethan was smart. This is not Alexandria.”

“It’s not?”

“No. It’s an outpost. Finding the outpost could lead them to the right spot, though. They don’t seek it for the beauty or the sciences. They’re not interested in the finer crafts. If they’re as I remember, as you say they are, then they’ll seek the knowledge to make war machines. It would be disastrous if they ever found it.”

Jack and Lia stare glumly at the little star for which they’ve risked their lives. Thomas reads their disappointment and smiles.

“You desire to reach this place?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll help you.” He places his finger on the star. “These people can take you there. You’re on the right track, and it’s not far off. Not far at all if you cross the wetlands.”

“The wetlands?”

“It would take days to go around, tough climbing, or one day to pass through. The choice is yours. Get some rest. I’ll lead you there tomorrow.”

They situate themselves in various nests and fall asleep by the dying glow of the campfire cinders.

They stir in the dead of night. Jack looks up groggily and sees Ruck in the center of the intersection with his head turned skyward, crying out in the moonlight. His woebegone howl is answered back in kind. Ruck and his nameless counterpart tarry back and forth until Thomas grumbles for him to shut up. The little camp quiets itself and they drift back to sleep.

Come morning light, Jack stumbles off the ledge and walks out into the street. Thomas is rolling with the bear again. He shouts a brief salutation to Jack even as Lily’s enormous brown mass descends upon him and pins him to the ground. She flips him over with her snout and closes her jaw playfully around his arm and shoulder. He extricates himself, buckskin jacket tousled, his wild hair sticking up in spikes, and as he is rising from the ground Lily rams him and sends him staggering forward. Thomas grabs her by the jowls and whispers to her.

“Nice day for walking,” he says, turning to Jack.

“How far is it?”

“Just over those hills. We’ll make it by nightfall.” He swivels and shouts down the street. “Ruck!”

The wolf jumps from some disheveled interior and trots back toward their camp with something bloody in his mouth. He edges up to Jack and sets the catch at his feet. It is too mangled to even discern what creature it might have been.

“Brought you a little present, Jack. Say thank you.”

Jack bends and pets the wolf and scratches at his ears. Ruck licks him with his bloodstained tongue, then fetches his kill and meanders away.

“Is your friend awake?”

“I’m here,” says Lia. She stands by the toppled wall and scratches her head and yawns.

They waste little time gathering their things, and as the full, round sun is liberated from the horizon they set out toward a notch in the southern hills. Ruck bustles along at his master’s feet, and the stench between man and animal is indecipherable. Jack and Lia fall in close together, nervous butterflies twitching in their bellies. Lily rumbles along behind them, serenely oblivious to such matters as those that worry her human companions. She is thinking dimly of fish.

“Not a bad escort,” Thomas tells them, with the air of a man profoundly at home in his element. His nimble old limbs traverse the treacherous ground easily, and he quotes the old poets and sings old songs with meanings lost entirely on his small audience. Jack and Lia watch him with confounded expressions as he carries on in his odd manner. Ruck wears a face of endearing bafflement, as though he were charged with taming Thomas instead of the other way around, and looking like he finds himself utterly failing at the task.

They amble on merrily through the morning, and by the day’s high point they find themselves scaling the pass that cuts through the hills. Thomas takes to quizzing them about the world.

“The earth and sun—which goes round the other?”

“Earth goes round,” says Lia.

“Mmm. Good,” affirms Thomas. “What is it that keeps your feet on the ground?”

“What?” Jack asks.

“Our shoes?” says Lia.

“Hmm…” says Thomas, pulling at his beard and grinning. “If you throw something up in the air, why does it fall back down?”

“Because it’s heavy.”

“Wouldn’t a feather fall, too?” Thomas poses.

“Oh, yeah…”

They confess to being stumped, and Thomas expounds lengthily on the concept of gravity and the interactions between the forces. “Strange what people passed along and what they didn’t,” he concludes. He sweeps his arms across the broad landscape. “Wherefrom came the mountains?”

“Haven’t they always been there?” asks Lia.

“Not hardly. The whole earth’s not always been here, how could the mountains?”

“Oh,” she says. “I don’t know.”

Thomas explains to them the movement of the plates beneath their feet, he talks of swirling rock piles in space that look like autumn leaves spinning downstream in a circular current, he talks of distant planets like their own, he tells of travels that were made into the mysterious blackness and how there are human skeletons in the void, their empty sockets looking down at the earth from crypt-like space stations. Jack and Lia listen attentively to the words they understand, and they stop him with their own questions when he uses words they don’t. Beyond a certain point, his meaning becomes too abstract for their thinking and they simply nod along politely.

Up the hill they climb, Thomas lecturing all the while. As they near the top, he grows quiet and watches their faces drop open.

A broken city lay before them, a saw-toothed and sinister heap of skyline, rising above the lush terrain with tendrils of ruin leaking out from the heart of it. The great bulk of the earth has pulled most of the sleek buildings to the ground, and the colossal beams and pillars remaining upright have settled against one another, pyre-like, forming new structures that bear little resemblance to the old. Grim cathedrals of wreckage with steeples of emaciated gridiron.

The entire basin is washed over with wetlands, and the avenues that crisscross the massive swamp are little more than muddy waterways, gilded with a lime-green veneer and stippled with reeds and rushes. Everywhere there are embankments of mangrove and palm trees, and the creeping vines that scale the towers seem to be almost holding the structures together rather than rending them apart.

It looks wholly unpassable. They walk toward it, human and beast alike, pilgrims in a forsaken land. The broad route runs alongside a tremendous mound and the terrain begins to change around them.

“Here lays a mass grave of millions,” says Thomas, throwing his arm nonchalantly toward the mound. “Dead from fallout and biological plague.”

“Bio-logical,” says Lia, the word new on her tongue.

Beneath their feet, millions of mortal husks have disintegrated and fed the land. The vegetation is lush here. It grows dense and jungle-like and they fight against it. Jack chops them a narrow path and they worm their way through slowly. The animals become mischievous. Lily takes to sitting down right in front of their path and Thomas repeatedly coaxes her to move, murmuring to her like a child.

They reach a clear vista and Jack surveys the swamp from a closer vantage. It is encircled by rough, densely overgrown hillsides, and it would be a slow and torturous hike to cross around.

“How are we supposed to get across it?”

“There’s a way. If it’s not been stolen. We ought to stop along here and set up for the night before it gets dark. You’ll want to cross in the daylight. And you’ll want to stay on the main channel.”

They heed his words and settle themselves. They dine on scant pickings and a couple of rodents by the light of a small fire, then lie down wearily to sleep. Jack and Lia toss and turn and the night feels much longer than usual.

When light finally breaks, Thomas leads them to a rank waterway that feeds the swamp, and he is less profuse in conversation as they near the head of it. They pad along the muddy ground on the eastern bank and Lily wades out into the water. As she lumbers along in the current, Ruck watches keenly from the bank, with one forepaw raised daintily as if waiting for it to be kissed.

Thomas comes to a full stop and looks around at the trees, seeming to almost count them. He steps away from the bank and takes giant steps through a confused web of flora, pulling branches aside and scouting around.

“Come here and give me a hand.”

Jack swings the machete down and hacks his way through to the spot where Thomas stands. He pulls the leafage away, and tucked down underneath is a little rowboat made of lashed-together reeds and wooden crosspieces.

“Where did you get this?”

“Found it,” says Thomas.

“Whose is it? Are there people here?”

“None that I’ve seen, other than passing wanderers.” Thomas pulls at the prow of the little skiff and dislodges it. “This looked to have been forgotten. So I took her out. I’ve explored only through parts of this, and I know it’s crossable, but, listen,” he says heavily, “keep on the main course. Don’t stray. Easy to get turned around in there.”

Jack nods and helps him drag the skiff back to the muddy bank. Lia looks pensively at the small craft. They tether it to the shore and then launch it out into the water to test that it floats. The reeds are pitched and hide-covered and it slips straight with the current and bobbles atop the water, right and true.

“This passage will take you across to the far side. Keep a quick pace and you’ll make it by sundown.” He looks down to the ground and takes a slow, deliberate breath. “I hope you reach your destination,” he tells them earnestly. “Careful of what you find there. It’s a dangerous substance they handle. I’ve seen with my own eyes what it can do in the wrong hands, as I’m the one that placed it in them.”

“It’s not your fault,” says Lia. “It’s monsters.”

Thomas lets out a terse laugh. “I make no excuses. I wish there was more I could do for you.”

“There is something,” says Jack.

“Oh?”

“If you see your friend Collins again, tell them they’re in danger if they stay there. The Temple will come looking for us. They’re likely to kill anyone they come across.”

Thomas winces. “Of course. I think I’ll see them again very soon.”

“I’m glad you told us what you know. And she’s right—it’s not your fault. They still would have become killers.”

“That may well be.”

“We’d better not waste any more light,” says Jack, glancing at Lia. He climbs into the little skiff and grabs the makeshift ore resting in the hull.

Thomas nods cordially. “I’m glad to have met you.”

“Thank you,” says Lia. “We’d have been eaten by wolves if not for you.”

Thomas smiles. Lia takes his hand and steadies herself as she steps into the skiff. When they’re situated, he unties them and heaves against the stern and pushes them into the current.

“If you see my brother, tell him that Thomas says hello. Tell him I love him.”

“Who’s your brother?”

“You’ll know him if you see him.”

Jack plunks the ore into the water and they float downstream toward the sprawling marsh, and a network of moss-covered branches envelops them. Thomas stands on the bank like some rustic frontiersman, his long beard flowing in the breeze, and the bear and the wolf sit nobly at his side. They stay for a long while and watch Jack and Lia diminish away into the rusted iron swamp, worrisome looks on each of their faces.