Bron walked through the small town of Averieom, head swiveling this way and that as he took it in. He’d never been outside Jalseion before, not even to this village just beyond the great city’s sphere of direct control. An hour and a half away by automobile, a full day on foot. Not far at all. Yet it might as well have been another world.
Most noticeable to him was the lack of visible damage. No marks of explosions, of shattered vehicles and obliterated generators and devices. A few of the houses seemed to rest a bit crookedly, shingles loose, shutters off one hinge. As if they were toys taken up by a gigantic toddler and shaken violently, then set down again. But the buildings here were constructed low to the ground, most only one story, none higher than three. No tall buildings like in Jalseion to be tilted and wrecked and ruined by the shrugging of the earth.
The Medical Sanctuary was on the edge of Averieom nearest Jalseion. He and Calea had gone straight there, passing only a few holdings on the outskirts. Now, as Bron moved toward the center of Averieom, he got a better feeling for the town. It was a lovely little village, he was beginning to think. A soft, safe place to live and work and raise a family. Dr. Burdock’s fear of imminent violence seemed almost laughable in the midst of such peace.
Then Bron turned onto Capital Street, and the young doctor’s anxiety began to make more sense. Small huddles of people gathered here and there, tense, wide-eyed, afraid. Bron avoided them instinctively, moving slowly and steadily, like a child treading softfoot to prevent waking an adult in drunken slumber.
He passed a grocery with every window broken in. The shelves inside were all but bare, and the owner stood amongst the desolation, leaning on a broom, her face curiously blank and contemplative. The butchery was the same, and the bakery. Other less essential stores were spared: bookstore, cobbler, milliner. The import shop, where they had sold technology from Jalseion, had been put to the torch.
When he passed the shoe shop, Bron glanced at his feet. Worn, comfortable boots looked back at him, ones that hadn’t belonged to him a day ago. On their way out of Jalseion, he had stopped just long enough to rob the dead to replace his and Calea’s blood-soaked clothing, his ruined footwear. He did not feel guilty about this. The needs of the living outweighed the claims of the dead. These were good boots and would last him a long time.
Nor had Calea seemed disturbed by the theft. That bothered him a bit more. It was another thing he had failed to protect her from, this breaking of custom and law and traditional respect for corpses. Calea had never much been one for respect, though, so perhaps it was not surprising.
His feet still hurt. They would heal.
In the center of Averieom was the town’s Well, now drained dry and abandoned. A small, shallow thing–Dr. Burdock had aptly described it as a pond. A twisted shell of a building crouched on the bank, blown apart by an explosion. No doubt it had housed the town’s generator, run by Averieom’s small contingent of Select. A distant part of Bron hoped that no one had been hurt in the blast, and another part of him knew that that was unlikely. Generators needed to be manned every hour of the day to keep the flow of power steady. But he saw no bodies, no blood. Another welcome change from Jalseion.
A few more turns, a short stop to ask directions of a weary-looking woman in a garden, and he found the street he was seeking. This area was almost exactly on the opposite side of Averieom from the Medical Sanctuary, and Hillock Street was closer to the edge of town than the middle. The houses here were shabby. Not a run-down sort of shabby, either–these houses had not once been fine, but now fallen into disrepair. They had never been fine. They had been built shabby.
It was not unlike The Grunt where Bron had been born and, until very recently, had lived.
He didn’t know what to expect at the Cormorin house. Dr. Burdock seemed convinced that the girl and her family had fled. “Back to Thyrion whence they came, perhaps,” he’d said with a wry twist of his lips, strange on his owlish face. Perhaps the house would be empty. Perhaps the inhabitants would be shut up inside, paralyzed with fear.
What Bron did not expect was a house crumbled and collapsed, folded inward on itself almost delicately, almost beautifully. A house of cards fallen at a heavy breath. Bron stopped for half a step. He looked around the street and saw and heard no one, no faces, no voices, no neighbors to offer help or explain to him why nothing had been done about this in the last two days. He double-checked the name on the painted sign near the street in front of the house, confirming that this was, indeed, the Cormorin home.
Then he went to the rubble and began to dig and to call. “Nyasha! Nyasha Cormorin!”
Muscles in his shoulders and across his back burned and ached as he dragged at rotten beams, boards with faded blue paint chipped and peeling, chunks of wattle and crumbling plaster. In the past two days, he had climbed ropes, lowered himself down sheer steps, and crossed deconstructed landscapes of broken buildings and bleeding people. He had pushed past many distressed citizens begging for help to rescue wives, husbands, children, neighbors, and he had ignored them all in his singular quest to reach Calea Lisan.
The collapse of this house must have happened at the very moment of the disaster, and Dr. Burdock was wrong. The Cormorins hadn’t left. They were buried. This time, he would not pass on. This time, he would not shut his eyes to a family in danger. He would find the girl he was seeking, dead or alive.
“Nyasha Cormorin! Nyasha!”
He didn’t know her parents’ names. He hadn’t thought to ask. He didn’t know if she had any siblings, any other family. It didn’t matter. He would dig them out.
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