Chương 42: Chapter 41: Empty Streets

I woke up cold. Ella was already outside. I found her standing past the outcrop, facing downhill. Her dress moved a little in the wind. From the back I couldn't see her face but I could see what she was looking at. The city. Thhe streets. Actual streets. What's left of what used to be walls, that still stood higher than a person. Roofs lying where they'd fallen. And past the rest of it, larger than everything around it. Ella didn't turn around. I didn't say good morning.

I decided to let her finish looking, and then, not saying a word she started down the slope. The slope didn't want to let us down quickly. Rock. Loose shale. The dress had been a question I'd decided not to ask on the way up, and I still wasn't going to ask it on the way down. She moved in it like the mountain ground was as flat as the ground in my house. The switchback that looked fastest wasn't.

She took a longer line without being asked and it turned out to be the only one that didn't end in a drop I couldn't see the bottom of. She knew this slope. I stopped trying to find my own way and just followed. The first thing I noticed when we reached the city was was the ground, to be exact it was the fact that there was nothing on it. No bones. No rust that had once been anything. No scattered shapes of someone leaving fast, dropped and never picked up.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! The last people here had walked out of a place and nothing had come in after them to take their place. I stood at the first wall and listened. Wind over broken stone. Something moving far off that could have been a bird and could have been nothing. I couldn't feel a golem in any direction. I couldn't feel anything. The village maintained itself because the things that ran it never learned that the people were gone.

Whatever had kept this place running hadn't gotten the news either. I touched the wall. Cold. Smooth. Nothing. Ella had kept walking. She didn't hesitate at the crossings. Didn't slow down to look at the gaps where doors used to be. Didn't read the walls the way I was reading them, looking for a story. Her feet turned left, then right, then through an arch that was more cracks than arch, like she'd done it yesterday. The buildings told me almost nothing and I tried to make them tell me something anyway.

Some of them had been tall. The ones that were left looked like they'd been built to be looked at from a distance — clean lines, worn smooth now. Others were lower, wider, built close to the ground. Here and there a ring of stones sat in the middle of the street with black stains inside it. I caught myself counting them. Four. Then I stopped counting.

The higher street followed the slope up and the walls on both sides had fallen inward, so for a while we walked down the middle of a roofless room that used to be two houses. Then the room ended and the street opened out and I stopped, not on purpose. My feet just stopped. It wasn't the castle yet. It was the street in front of it. Wider than the others. Longer than the others. The buildings on both sides stood a little further back from the street than anywhere else, like they'd been pushed back to make room.

The stones under my boots were the same dark stone as the thermal road we'd parked on at the bottom of the mountain, except here there was no heat left in them at all. She'd built this street the way she'd built the one under the car. The big building was at the end of it. Walls still standing. The gaping hole in the middle where the roof had collapsed inward, open to the sky. Ella stopped in the middle of the street. Looking like a lost kitten. I stopped behind her. I didn't say anything.

I didn't put my hand on her shoulder. I didn't ask if she was all right. She was holding something flat and still and I wasn't going to be the thing that broke the surface. I was still thinking of something to do with my hands when she started walking again. Straight up the street. Straight to the gap in the wall that used to be a door. And she went through it.