When the whole crowd of them stopped at an empty intersection so that Scott could ‘get his bearings,’ the remnants of some ancient public address system fired up and blatted out noise. What little she could make out through all the audial corrosion were mostly unknown words, peppered with odd, random-seeming numbers or verbs. The longer she had to stand there and listen to its tortured, droning gibberish, the easier it became to imagine how the blanks could be filled: system pressure rising warning warning severe storm watch in effect until nine hours and three error trafficeye six reports all lanes open on Cinoq Bridge please drive safely error trafficeye seven reports error error error no lanes visible on Jaavi Bridge please drive with caution the current time is three hours and sixteen contagion risk seven percent error error threat level high but stable tune to error error error for news and updates—

“This way,” Scott decided, and set off.

Amber lingered as the group moved on, reaching out to touch the cracked, dead window of a kiosk on the curb. It flickered and came on, spilling writing and static across its face until the whole window was filled and then going black again after voicing the grim message, “No response. No arrival,” in a dead, metallic voice. She shivered and moved around to the next window, reaching.

Meoraq caught her wrist. “Don’t.”

“What happened to this place?” she asked as they went together after Scott and the others.

He shrugged his spines, but they snapped pretty flat when he was done. He looked okay and he sounded okay, but he was still pissed, clearly.

“Do you even know where we are?”

“It was a city once, is that what you need to hear? No longer. The Ancients fell and all of their works fell with them. There is nothing to find here.”

“That smell is getting worse!” Maria called, trying to cover her face in her sleeve. “Can’t we just leave?”

“We are leaving!” Scott said irritably. “We’re just…taking a shortcut!”

“How can this be a shortcut when you don’t know where we’re going?”

“I know it’s shorter to go through something than to go around.” Scott gave Eric something of a dirty look and turned up another street, seemingly at random. It took them to the bottom of a long hill lined on both sides with clean, burned-out buildings.

“Oh my God, really? Uphill?”

Eric put his arm around Maria’s shoulder. “Ease up, baby. We’ll be out of here in just a sec.”

“You’ve been saying that forever. God, what is that smell?!”

Amber tried to exchange glances with Meoraq, but he was looking down another street. “We’re not going to see a huge pile of bodies over that hill, are we?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.”

“But is that what a huge pile of bodies smells like?”

“It would depend on what they died of,” he said, sounding distracted and a little annoyed with her, but not particularly bothered by the idea.

“You don’t believe in ghosts on this planet, do you?” said Amber, only half-kidding. At his puzzled glance, she added, “Dead people…walking around after they’ve died? Ghosts?”

“Ah.” He glanced down another side-street. “Yes, we do.”

“You do?”

He grunted.

They walked.

“Do you think this place is haunted?” Amber asked, just as a soft, cool hand slipped into hers.

She didn’t scream, but what she did was bad enough: grabbing at Meoraq’s arm, who already had a sword in his other hand and aimed over her shoulder at what turned out to be just Nicci.

His head cocked. His sword did not immediately lower.

“You scared the ever-loving Christ out of me!” Amber snapped.

“I was just…I only…” Tears, the big, slow kind, dribbled down her baby sister’s pale cheeks one at a time and dropped off her chin. “I don’t like this place,” she whispered. “Can’t I please come walk with you?”

Amber took her hand at once, pulling her into an awkward hug as Meoraq slowly let his sword-arm drop. “Yeah, of course you can, you know you can.”

“You’re always yelling at me!” Nicci wept.

Meoraq flared his mouth open at Nicci’s shaking back and exhaled soundlessly through his teeth.

“I don’t mean it,” said Amber, glaring at him. “You know I don’t mean it. We’re sisters, Nicci. I love you. You’re all I’ve got.”

Thunder clapped and rolled, not on top of them yet, but close enough to echo in the empty streets. Nicci jumped in her arms and wailed even louder.

“And now it’s going to rain,” groaned Maria, somewhere at the head of the crowd. “Perfect.”

“Baby, please. You know I love you, but please.”

At the top of the hill, Scott suddenly stopped walking.

Maria threw up her hands. “Fine, I’m shutting up!”

Scott didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn around right away and when he did, he looked greyish. He looked at his people, and then he looked past all of them at Meoraq. He didn’t say anything.

“Stay here,” Meoraq said and ran, jostling people roughly aside and reaching the top in maybe half a minute. He saw what there was on the other side. His spines came forward. He slowed to a walk, sheathing his sword.

So it couldn’t be that bad. Amber gave Nicci a squeeze and let go of her. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

By the time she got to the top of the hill, a crowd had formed, thick enough to shield whatever they were looking at from view, but loose enough that she could slip through it without pushing too many people. She heard Scott (who sounded just as grey as he’d looked) asking if this was bad, if they were in trouble. Then she saw it for herself.

It wasn’t a pile of bodies after all.

It was a pit of them.

It looked like it was miles across, although it probably wasn’t. It was just the shock of seeing something so big thrown down in the middle of the city which had followed such neat, orderly lines. It was perfectly round in shape, with a raised lip of broken pavement all the way around it. The sides appeared smooth but uneven, melted. It had partially-filled with water—if it could be assumed that black foulness had started out as water—and although that might smell bad enough on its own, there could not have been less than a hundred bloated corpses mushed together along the sloping sides.

Somehow worse than what was in the pit was what was around it: small triangular flags had been set around the lip, outlining the whole thing in a hundred shades of fluttering yellow. Whatever had caused this crater had happened long ago and the animals might be falling in on their own, but someone had planted those flags.

Staring at them, trying to estimate how many hundreds or even thousands of flags she might be looking at, it dawned on Amber that the only reason she was able to see the pit at all was because virtually everything between it and the top of this hill had been flattened. There were no more buildings down there, no kiosks, no lamps—only the grey crazyquilt of their foundations and the nice, clean streets that ran between them. It was not perfectly flat; the ground buckled at regular intervals, forming concentric rings around the pit, almost like ripples in a pond after someone has dropped a rock in it.

‘Or a bomb,’ thought Amber, creeping forward in sick fascination.

Meoraq pulled her back, started to push her toward the crowd, then yanked her around and gaped at her, all his spines up and quivering for a split-second before they slapped loudly flat. “I told you to stay where you were!”

“I, uh, thought you were talking to Nicci.”

He thrust a finger in her face, leaning close enough that she could feel his breath against her skin. “That is a lie and it had better be the only one you ever tell me!”

Amber looked back over her shoulder at the pit…the crater…and felt Meoraq blow a fuming snort against her throat. “What killed them?” she asked, eyeing the bodies. From here, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought they were all animals. She just didn’t know yet if that made her feel better or not. “Did they…Did they just fall in?”