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She leaned one booted toe forward and placed it quietly on the nearest stair. The second step was climbed with equal slowness and silence. While her mask-impaired side vision permitted it, Briar watched the door behind her shrink as she rose.
She’d heard stories about the rotters, and she’d seen a few of them in the first days after the Blight broke, but how many could possibly be left inside the city? Surely at some point they would die, or fail, or decay, or simply succumb to the elements. They must be in terrible shape, and weak as kittens if they still crawled or shambled.
Or that is what she told herself as she climbed.
Bending her knees to crouch, she kept her head below the crest of the stairwell until the last possible moment, and then she craned her neck to see without exposing herself to whatever might wait above.
More dark than bright, the city was not quite so bleak that she’d need a light, but it wouldn’t be long before the tar-thick shadows of the walls and the roofs would cast the whole scene into early midnight.
The street crumbled at Briar’s eye level, slick and muddy from rainwater and Blight runoff. Its bricks split and spread. The whole surface was uneven and lumpy, and it was littered with debris. Carts sprawled overturned and broken; the mostly dismembered and long-decayed corpses of horses and dogs were scattered into piles of sticky bones, loosely connected by stringy, green-gray tissue.
Briar swiveled her head slowly left, then right. She couldn’t see far in any direction.
Between the dimness and the concentrated, thickened air, no more than half a block could be discerned at once. Which way the streets ran, there was no telling. North and south, east and west, none of it meant anything without the sun to guess it by.
Not even the faintest gust of air ruffled Briar’s hair, and she couldn’t hear the water, or the birds. Once upon a time there had been birds by the thousands, most of them crows and seagulls, all of them loud. Together the tribes had made a mighty racket of feathers and clacking calls, and the silence without them was strange. No birds, no people. No machines or horses.
Nothing moved.
Leading with her left hand, Briar crept up and out of her hole on leather-soled feet that didn’t make a sound to disturb the disturbing silence.
Finally she stood out in the open, close against the building beside the stairs.
The only sound was the rustle of her own hair against the straps and sides of the face mask, and when she quit moving, even that faint tickle of noise ceased.
She was standing on an incline, and she could see a place downhill where the incline increased sharply—dropping off and out of sight. At the edges of the drop-off, there were stalls filled with empty bins. And off to the side, and up, as Briar explored the scene with her eyes, she saw the remains of a half-toppled sign and an enormous clock without any hands.
And this must be… “The market. I’m near Pike Street. ”
She almost said it aloud, but then merely mouthed the observation. The street made a dead end at the market, and on the other side of the market was the Sound—or it would’ve been, if the wall hadn’t cut the shoreline away from it.
The building at her back must face Commercial Avenue, the street that once ran alongside the ocean and now ran alongside the wall.
For the next few blocks, any of the streets that paralleled Pike would take her in roughly the direction she’d chosen.
She hugged close to the building, aiming rifle and eyes up and down the street as she shuffled sideways. Breathing inside the mask hadn’t become any easier, but she was growing accustomed to it and there was no alternative, anyway. Her chest was sore from the extra effort her muscles were making to inflate and deflate her lungs, and down at one corner of her left eyepiece, the view was getting foggy from condensation.
Heading uphill ever so slightly, she worked her way away from the wall, which she couldn’t even see. Briar knew that its tall blank shadow reached up into the sky, but it vanished from view far sooner and it was easy to forget, especially when she’d turned away from it.
Through her head ran endless calculations. How far was she from the lavender house on the hill? How long would it take to reach it if she ran? If she walked? If she skulked like this, squeezing between the tendrils of low-lying, stinking fog?
She flexed her cheek, trying to shake the condensation and make it gather or roll.
It didn’t work. The vapor clung to the mask.
She sighed, and a second sigh gave it a funny echo.
Confused, she shook her face. It must have b
een a trick of the straps, or the way the device fit around her forehead. It could’ve been her hair, brushing against the exterior. It might’ve been her boots, scraping unexpectedly against a jagged paving stone. The sound could’ve come from anywhere. It was so quiet, anyway. Hardly a sound at all, really.
Her feet wouldn’t move. Neither would her arms, or her hands, locked around the rifle. Even her neck would barely turn, lest she recreate the noise, or fail to. The only thing worse than hearing it again would be hearing it again and knowing it hadn’t come from her own careful movements.
So slowly that even her long coat didn’t tap itself against her legs, Briar retreated, feeling with her heels, praying that there was nothing behind her. Her heel found a curb, and stopped there.
She stepped up onto it.
The sound came again. There was a whistle to it, and a moan. It was almost a hiss, and it could’ve been a strangled gasp. Above all, it was quiet, and it seemed to have no source.
