For a few minutes we remained seated in the shadows, recovering our breath while the voice of the Dead City reached through the shadows. It moaned. Not in the biblical sense, although in some ways I wouldn’t have been surprised; it was so much bigger and more oppressive now it loomed up in front of us. Instead, the eerie groan was of nature herself, creaking through the rubble alleyways and broken roofs, and whistling through every decrepit gutter. As if she was warning that nothing should ever breathe or live here again.
Silently, we examined the leather soles of our shoes, but somehow our slim goat-hide soles had protected us.
I threw a glance at Eli. His face was filled with the same quiet foreboding I was feeling. We all understood the dangers of the forest, and had learned how to combat the most cunning cats, ferocious boar and shrewd snakes. But a sea of scorpions was new to me. It had to be nature’s response to the arid conditions in this part of the landscape, and might explain why the Prolet insurgents had become landlocked in this crumbling shell of a city.
Silently, we bowed our heads together, an old Arafel custom to offer thanks for the sparing of a soul. There was no going back that way – that much was certain – and I couldn’t help but feel that this was the precise moment we were leaving Arafel behind. Was it for good? I pulled my trusted catapult from my leather pouch, and fought the sudden burning behind my eyes.
‘You think you can walk on it?’ I asked, as much to distract myself as anything else.
He nodded. ‘And if not, Max can give me a shoulder ride!’
I smiled as Max grimaced.
‘Yeah, right after you,’ he jibed. ‘Time to go?’ he added, crooking his neck to look into the darkness, while withdrawing a short, gleaming blade from his hunting belt.
I frowned. Like most hunters in Arafel, Max could handle a knife, bow and fishing spear with practised ease. But he was particularly gifted when it came to knives, often dispatching prey from as far as fifty metres away. His precision and brute strength also made him a formidable adversary in combat, but this was different.
I shot out a hand to pause his course, before loading a stone in my slingshot. Swiftly, I took aim and released so the stone flew through the broken archway into the darkness beyond. The hollow echo of the stone’s tumble filled the tense air, before it came to an abrupt standstill. My skin felt like a thousand scorpions were crawling across it, in some giant arachnid march. But there was no answer – nothing but the same chilling whistle of wind through the broken streets.
There was no more reason to hesitate.
Supporting Eli between us, we slipped off the stone and stole forward together. And as we passed beneath the crumbling Gothic arch and into the shadowed ruin beyond, I was immediately struck by a cloud of grey oppression, despite the green moss and hardy creepers.
The whistling moan of the wind was louder here, as though it belonged in the way life had once, whispering memories. Warning us. We stared around the ruined space in silent wonder. We’d made it; we were inside the Dead City. We were the first Outsiders from Arafel to have trodden here since the Great War, and we didn’t belong at all.
Swallowing, I tried to get my bearings. This first building was large and rectangular, with several broken pillars splayed across the debris-strewn floor. They must have once supported a high-vaulted roof, at least twenty times the height of our treehouse.
Briefly I wondered what purpose the space might have served, and then I spotted the parallel lines sunk into the floor a little way off. They were beyond rusted, and almost obscured by overgrowth, but I’d studied the old world enough to know I was looking at what our ancestors would have called a railway station.
‘Toxic boxes on wheels … They choked the earth and burned precious resources, making men fat and lazy …’
I could hear Grandpa as though he was standing next to me, and his words seemed to resonate eerily in this overgrown crypt. The space rang with the echo of a thousand impatient footsteps that no longer bore any connection to our forest community. I felt my hands grow clammy. Our ancestors’ obsession with speed and technology hadn’t brought them freedom; it had trapped them for all eternity.
‘Let’s move,’ I whispered to Max. ‘There’s no living soul here.’
Eli’s wan face gleamed in the thin moonlight, and I knew without asking that he, too, could hear the dead voices clamouring in this place.
Max threw us both a cursory glance before stepping out in front, his sure feet cutting across the echoes, and pushing back the ghosts. He cut a diagonal line across the floor towards another crumbling stone arch, before beckoning that we should follow. We traced his path across the cracked, overgrown concrete to pass beneath another wide, intact arch with some kind of long oblong set into the wall. Up above, there was a series of smaller oblong boxes attached to the ceiling, some broken and dangling. I guessed them to be old-world computers of some sort, but to me they looked like nameless gravestones.
We hurried beneath the thick arch, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the crumbling railway façade opened out onto what must have once been a long wide pavement, scattered with creeper-clad broken stones.
Concrete city foundations had prevented a lot of thick, upright growth; and a surprisingly clear old road ran parallel with the railway, lined with blackened, toothless buildings. Further up the road there was a circular juncture with several similar-looking routes extending from it like a spider’s web.
I glanced at Max in disbelief. It looked as though there was far more of a city skeleton remaining than any of us had ever expected, and the Prolets could be anywhere.
‘OK, steady progress, that’s all we need!’ he reassured, his gaze lingering on Eli.
I smiled tightly, conscious of how our footsteps seemed so intrusive here, a city that had once known the pounding of so many feet. And the sheer scale of the structured ruins meant there were countless roads and decaying buildings to scour. Even if we split up it would still be an impossible task to achieve in one night.
And yet we were here, and there was no going back.
The three of us started up the middle of the crumbling, overgrown road. Although the sun had long disappeared, everything was draped in a lazy veil of moonlight and clinging cloud. I fought a shiver. Even though the darkness was our friend, I felt more exposed now than I ever had in the outside forest at night.
My ears were straining and senses on high alert. There were enough walls remaining to differentiate between the buildings where people had once traded food and goods, and those that had offered shelter and a home. But there was a something else too, a feeling that the shells weren’t quite as lifeless as we first thought. There was a scuffle here, a rustle there, and always the sense that we were intruding, trespassing on hallowed, sacred ground.
Gritting my teeth, I focused on the sound of our feet on the cracked concrete, pushing all fanciful notions to the back of my mind. But Eli getting hurt so soon had sent a fracture haring through my confidence. Eli. I’d already come too close to losing him in Pantheon. There was no way I could risk either him or Max getting hurt again because of me. It would be worse than getting hurt myself. Which was why I knew that when the right moment came, I was headed to Pantheon. Alone.
We stole on, alert to every new noise. Eli was managing to walk unaided, but I could tell his leg was throbbing, despite the meadowsweet. I fumbled for my rations bag, intent on finding some willow bark for him to chew to dull the pain, only to graze my own shin against a dark object protruding between two broken slabs of concrete.
I yelped and reached down.
‘What’s the matter?’ Max whispered, turning to see why I’d paused.
I scowled down at the offending object, still rubbing. It was made from metal, and layered with years of grime and dirt, but with a little effort I could just make out black lettering running along its length.
‘Queen