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When magic gnawed on a building, it slowly ground concrete into dust, a fine gray powder that was completely inert and useless. There were small hills of that dust in the city centers, and most cities had no idea what to do with it. Ned’s father would have gotten it dirt cheap. In fact, Wilmington probably paid him to remove it.
Hmm. And I bet these bricks were magic-proof, too. There was a business opportunity if I ever saw one.
“How are they made?” Curran asked.
“A proprietary process of mixing it with water, cornstarch, and sticky rice,” I read.
“How strong could rice concrete be?” Keelan asked.
“They built the Great Wall with it, you ignorant savage,” Da-Eun told him.
The speed limit dropped to twenty miles, and we joined the short line of pickup trucks, carts, and riders crawling through the gates.
“Ned has a house set up for us,” I said. “Take the second left past the gate.”
Before the Shift, Burgaw must’ve been a typical Southern town with plenty of space to spread out. I’d guess ranch-style houses, generous lots, and few if any front fences. Hints of the old town were still there, mainly in the layout of roads and parking lots, but the city wall only enclosed a square mile, and space inside was at a premium. The houses sat closer together, a lot of them two stories and a good number of them almost touching. The lawns had been converted to vegetable gardens and fenced in with chicken wire or short wooden fences. I saw a communal stable and a reinforced, bunker-like building with the sign South Walker Shelter. The town was compact, purposefully laid out, and ready to defend itself.
Ned’s directions brought us across Penderton, all the way north. A couple of street markers were missing, so we stopped to ask a local for directions, and he helpfully told us to “go on past where Pender Prison used to be.” The prison was no longer there, although some of the white one-story buildings remained. It now housed the town guard barracks, a municipal storage facility, and an emergency clinic, all sheltered behind a razor-wire fence.
“They expect the threat to come from the north,” Curran said. “This is a fallback point.”
“CC?” Keelan said.
“Mhm,” Curran said. “The radio tower.”
A command center, designed to coordinate the defense if the wall was breached. Nice.
The house Ned set out for us was just two streets over, on the imaginatively named North Wall Road. The wall was on the other side of the street. We parked the SUVs in the garage, hauled out our bags, and went into the house. It was a nice three-story place, with a porch on the ground level and wide wrap-around balconies on the top two floors. Curran and I dropped our bags in one of the third-floor bedrooms, and I walked out onto the balcony.
The wall was in front and below me, with a solid gatehouse almost directly across from the balcony, guarded by a tower on the right side. The two nearest towers rose about equal distance to the left and to the right. Past the wall, five hundred yards of clear ground offered a nice kill zone. Beyond it, the woods towered, like a second ominous wall.
Curran stepped out onto the balcony and came over to lean on the guardrail next to me. We looked at the woods.
“This is the timber gate,” I said. “Before the problem started, they harvested timber in the north forest and brought it through here to the sawmills.”
“Makes sense,” Curran said.
We watched two guards cautiously check us out from their respective towers and turn back to the forest. That tree line five hundred yards away was where the strange women first appeared.
We still didn’t know who they were or what they did with the people they had taken. Were the tribute people alive? Were they enslaved, or were they killed? Of all the magic practices, human sacrifice was the worst. It gave you a boost of magic but at a terrible cost. It tapped into the kind of powers that fed on humanity and drove us mad. They had been long banished from the world by tech, and that was for the best. Even my father steered clear of it.
The woods waited.
“Do you want to go in?” I asked.
“We have six hours of daylight left.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“We’re going in five,” Curran called out.
A chorus of ragged “Yes, Alpha” answered him.
Five minutes later, we assembled in front of the house, a small army in sweatpants. I was the only fighter out of uniform.
“We’ll enter together,” Curran said quietly. “As we go in, drift into two groups. Group One: Kate, Keelan, Troy, Owen, and Hakeem. The rest with me. We’ll widen the gap by five hundred yards and hold it there.”
He was splitting us up to invite an attack on one group or the other. Might as well find out what sort of welcome party the forest had planned for us.
