His hand on her arm tightened minutely, then let go. He started after Scott and the others, taking long strides but hardly moving, so that he seemed almost to be gliding through the grass like a hunting cat. She could not help tensing when he came up behind Scott, but he simply moved on ahead and took the lead.

Scott smirk was obvious even in his voice. “Glad you decided to join us.”

“Don’t talk to me,” said Meoraq curtly.

“You need to work on this attitude of yours. There’s no reason we—”

Meoraq swung around and slapped Scott clear off his feet, sending him crashing into Dag and Crandall. Then he drew his hooked sword. Without a word, he turned back around and kept walking.

After that, no one said anything. It made the mood, already low, that much worse, which in turn made the landscape around them seem even bleaker than it was. To Amber, the fallen towers looked like tombstones in some forgotten cemetery, and why shouldn’t they? She knew now that they had been walking across the burial mounds of this city all morning. For hours. And a city that size didn’t just curl up and die on its own. Something had killed it.

An unnecessarily theatrical turn of phrase, perhaps, especially considering the already bleak landscape, but no sooner had it taken its crawl through Amber’s brain than it was underlined by the first hint of rot in the air.

She wasn’t sure at first. No one else seemed to have noticed, or at least, no one else had reacted. The wind was at their backs (and pushing the storm steadily toward them) and the smell came and went with the force of its gusts. But the closer they got to the ruins, the stronger that smell became, until Amber finally turned to her sister in some desperation and asked if she could smell it too.

“It’s nothing,” said Nicci. And in a sudden, angry rush, “Stop trying to make trouble all the time! You always do this!”

Startled, Amber stopped walking. Nicci did not. If anything, she went faster. Even after Amber started moving again, the distance between them kept growing, until Nicci was up with the women from the Resource Tent and Amber was alone.

‘So let it go,’ she thought, watching some sympathetic Manifestor respond to whatever Nicci was saying with a sidelong, walking hug. ‘Let it go and she’ll come back. She always does.’

But something stank. Something was dead and rotting. Something big.

“Doesn’t anyone else smell that?” Amber called.

Immediately, half a dozen Manifestors groaned at her to shut up, but Maria turned around and called back, “God, yes! I feel like I’m going to puke!”

“It’s nothing,” said Scott.

Meoraq, his sword still drawn, threw a flat, unforgiving glance back at him.

Scott moved over to put a few more people between them. “Probably a dead deer,” he told Maria. “It won’t be as bad once we get into town.”

If Maria had a reply apart from the scornful look she gave him, Amber couldn’t hear it, but no one else said anything.

The grass began to thin. There was pavement beneath, so weathered that it looked more like gravel poured out and glued in place, but obviously pavement. A street. The hills to either side got steeper and lumpier as the grass receded, until suddenly they weren’t hills at all, but heaps of broken concrete, metal, glass, and all the wreckage one might reasonably expect to see when a city block has been demolished.

Except that the streets had been cleared. Had to have been. Buildings did not fall straight down and pile themselves up like that, leaving the weathered pavement beyond the curb largely uncluttered. And as they traveled deeper into the ruins, the streets not only got wider and cleaner, they also began to show signs of repair. Likewise, the devastation lining the streets gradually changed from piles of debris to hollow shells, missing one, two, or even three walls, but upright and recognizable buildings. And then even those were behind them, and they were there in one of those lamplit pockets which had looked so much like it might still be inhabited when viewed from a distance.

Scott stopped, so everyone stopped, bunching up there at the first intersection where things had gone from knocked down but cleaned up to empty but sort of functional. Meoraq alone moved on, a sword in each hand and eyes in constant motion, to check each of the crossing streets and peer through each broken window. He had almost made it back to them when Scott suddenly cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered out a hello. The wind, greatly deflected by the buildings now surrounding them, ate the echoes after one or two bounces, but that was enough.

No one came out to greet them and although the fine hairs on the back of Amber’s neck were standing straight up and prickling almost painfully, she got no real sense of being watched. There was movement—furry things scurried in the shadows, considerably smaller and less threatening than the rats Amber had grown up with—but no life. The city was dead; the last of its concrete bones, rotting; and whatever was keeping the power on and the streets swept probably did not want its rest disturbed.

Meoraq was staring at Scott, his head cocked, his throat striped with bright, bright yellow, silent.

“I think maybe we should move on.” Scott looked back at his loyal lieutenants. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s creepy as fuck,” Crandall replied with half a shrug, “but creepy won’t kill us.”

Eric seconded that with a firm nod. “That storm is going to hit us before we even get near one of those bridges, much less check it out and see if it’s safe to cross. Any salvage you expected to find here is long gone, but even if shelter is the only thing we get out of this place, that’s good enough for me. Having said that—” He glanced up, up, and up at the nearest tower. “—I am not comfortable bedding down right here.”

“Plus, it stinks,” Maria announced.

“Miss Alverez, this is an official debriefing, so please be quiet,” Scott told her, and to the rest of them, announced, “For now, we’re going to keep heading for the bridges, but we’ll be keeping our eyes open for a good spot to take cover. Don’t worry, people. We’ll all stay dry tonight.”

Exclamations of relief met this rather lofty promise, but looking around, Amber could see doubt for the first time in a number of faces as they eyed the height of the broken towers enveloping them and perhaps reflected on the fact that rain was not necessarily the worst thing that could fall on a person’s head.

But Scott had decided and there was no point in arguing. He chose a street and headed out. Eric followed him and Maria followed Eric, and that started the first group, which started the next one, and pretty soon they were all walking. Even Amber, so what did that say?

* * *

After so many days struggling through hip-high grass, wading streams and climbing rocky slopes, a little stroll down the street should have been an easy feat. Distance, like time, could be subjective without a mechanical means of assessing it, but Amber knew they couldn’t be much more than a mile from the first of the bridges and it was taking all day to get there. The ground still rose and fell, but gently, in city-hills that had been smoothed and paved and was unquestionably easier on Amber’s feet than Meoraq’s wildlands. It wasn’t what they were walking on that slowed them now, but what they were walking through.

It wasn’t quite silent. Passing too close to the dark shops made the windows sputter and light up, playing out the corroded remains of advertisements for whatever products had once been on display, but few of those recordings played for more than a few seconds before dying out and one of the windows shattered from the effort. On another street, the remains of what had obviously been a restaurant groaned out some of the daily specials and wheezed its door open at them, showing anyone who looked in the desiccated carcass of a saoq who had apparently wandered in and been unable to get out. Several furry heads poked curiously out of the nest that had been built in its dried belly.