After half an hour of searching, they found a heavy-duty solarcar with large tires. The water tank that fueled it was full, and it would go hundreds of clommets before requiring a refill. They pulled a dead man out of the driver’s seat, and this time, it was Trett who vomited when he saw the smeared blood the man left behind. They returned to the store for a tarp to cover the seat. Then, for the first time in his life, Trett drove a solarcar.
Ellin followed him on the dubhov. Trett seemed to figure out the controls quickly, but there was no way for his first drive to be a smooth one. The vehicle’s big wheels bounced over crashed hovs and dead bodies. Ellin tried to look away from the smashed corpses and resolved to travel in front of the solarcar next time.
Back at the store, they loaded the car with as many supplies as they could manage. When they finished, they leaned against the car, their sweaty bodies smudging the windows.
“We need to check social media,” Ellin said, blinking hard, “and I don’t want to.”
Trett’s shoulders fell as he let out a long sigh. “You’re right, we need to. But I’ve gotta get away from all these bodies, Ellin. I can’t stay in this city a minute longer than necessary. Let’s leave Krenner, then check our flexes.”
“Good idea.”
Ellin drove the dubhov, and Trett followed. Exiting the city was far more difficult than they’d expected. Many streets were blocked by crashed solarcars, which Trett couldn’t just run over. Ellin went ahead in her hov to find passable routes, repeatedly doubling back for Trett to follow her.
Bodies, vehicles, and buildings still surrounded them when the orange sky faded to black. Familiar stars blinked into existence, and Ellin lifted her eyes to them. “It’s odd, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Our planet is devasted, but the rest of the universe is as beautiful as ever.”
It had been dark for at least an hour when they finally exited the stinking city. After a few more clommets, the road was mostly clear of crashed vehicles and bodies. Ellin stopped, and behind her, Trett brought the solarcar to a halt.
They sat together in the road. Ellin pulled out her flex, despite the anxious knots in her stomach. She and Trett held the device between them, and she tapped a social media icon.
For the first time since she’d started her internship at Merak Technologies nearly eight weeks earlier, Ellin signed into social media under her real identity. She was greeted with the faces and names of familiar friends, and for a second, relief blossomed in her chest.
Then reality set in. Nobody was posting about worldwide apocalypse; they were telling jokes and sharing pictures. These posts were hours or days old. “I’m going to get rid of everything more than six hours old,” she murmured.
She did, and the page turned blank.
Trett released a long breath. “We need to look at public posts. Still from the last six hours.”
Ellin nodded and, ignoring the frightened lump in her throat, expanded the filters to include people she didn’t know. She hovered her finger above the Search button, closed her eyes tightly, and tapped.
“Oh, thank God,” Trett breathed.
Ellin opened her eyes. Trett was scrolling through an endless list of posts from people who’d lived, all over the world.
Survivors.
Trett slowed his scrolling, and together, he and Ellin read one post after another, mostly cries for help from confused, grieving people. Invariably, they’d lost their entire families. Most of them were utterly alone, though some had encountered other survivors. They were all horrified and desperate, and while Ellin understood those reactions, the posts flooded her with renewed hope. It ran from her eyes in salty streams and escaped from her chest in harsh sobs.
She and Trett sat on the deserted road all night, huddled in a blanket, reading social media posts. By the time dawn colored the still-orange sky, they’d seen a few mentions of meeting places in various parts of the world. Before long, someone posted a link to a growing list of meeting spots, organized by location. Ellin clicked, and she and Trett found one a little over a hundred clommets away.
“Let’s go,” Trett said, standing.
Ellin reached up and took his hand. “Wait.” When he turned a questioning gaze on her, she patted the ground next to her. Trett sat again, and she asked, “Do you remember what Rona said? About what we’re supposed to do?”
He nodded slowly. “Protect the stone.”
Before leaving the dig site, they’d hidden the pieces of broken stone in a research cabinet, not sure what else they could do with it. “Yes,” Ellin said. “She told us to protect the stone. She also told us to tell the story. We”—she paused, swallowing a sudden influx of emotion—“we’re the only ones who know what happened, Trett. There are so many scared people out there, and they need to know the truth.”
So together, they wrote the story of a stone, a wealthy businessman, and a seer. They told of Nomi and Sep, heroes who deserved to be remembered. Ellin included links to radiation data, proof that this story wasn’t some apocalyptic hoax. She and Trett passed the flex back and forth, taking turns writing.
It was nearly noon when Trett typed out the last of their story. He tapped the screen to post it, and then he set the flex on the road, stood, and pulled Ellin to her feet. He hugged her tight, his arms warm and firm.
Ellen felt Trett’s chest rising and falling in a soothing rhythm. She adjusted her breathing to match his, repeatedly inhaling the wonder of their survival and exhaling grief over all they’d lost. In time, she let herself cry for Rona and her friends and even her long-dead parents, and she felt Trett’s chest shudder with his own tears.
At last, they stopped weeping and pulled apart. Ellin picked up her flex. The story they’d posted was still open, and she gasped. “Trett—look.”
His eyes widened when he saw the screen. Thousands of people were, at that moment, reading their words. Hundreds had already shared the post. Watching the numbers rise, Ellin shook her head in wonder. Rona had been right, again. People needed to hear this story.
“We need to get the stone,” Ellin said. “Too many people know where it is now. We can’t let someone else find it.”
Trett’s brows shot up. “What will we do with it? We don’t know if it’s still dangerous.”
“I know.” Ellin gazed out at the horizon. “Everything Rona prophesied was true. I don’t know what it means for us to protect the stone, but we have to do it.”
Trett nodded. “We’ll go to the dig site, then to the meeting place. But first—I’m starving.”
They ate some of the food they’d looted. Afterward, they brushed their teeth, a task that felt almost obscenely normal in this tragic, new world.
The road to the dig site was deserted, though Ellin and Trett did see one solarcar along the way. It had crashed into a tree. Ellin wondered how many years it would remain there. Would humanity ever recover enough to clean up the mess of the apocalypse?
At the research building, they found that the stone pieces were already cooling, though their broken, orange edges remained luminescent. Ellin used her flex to take pictures of the stone. With gloved hands, she and Trett moved the pieces into a tarp.
Before leaving, they took pictures of the cave and the bodies of Merak and his employees. They added several photos to their story, which had now been shared thousands of times.
Once the stone was safely in the solarcar, Ellin instructed her flex to give her verbal directions to the meeting location. She drove away, followed by Trett.
A few hours later, as the sun dipped low in the sky, they pulled up to a small house, surrounded by evergreen trees. Seven people waited in the front yard, including a wide-eyed, young child. Trett and Ellin stepped into the street and linked hands.
An elderly woman approached them, her lined face creased in a gentle, sad smile. She stopped in front of them and grasped their free hands. “Welcome,” she said. “You’re not alone.”
Epilogue
MONDAY, CYON 11, 7 PD (POST DAY)
> “Come lie in the hammock with me.”
Ellin looked up from the corn she was shucking. “I’ve got to get this done.”
Trett pulled out the chair next to her, sat, and took her calloused hand in his. “The kids are napping. The corn can wait. Just for a few minutes?”
It was a little chilly on the covered porch, and a slight breeze rustled the husks on the table. Ellin looked past the wooden awning, where the sun shone brightly.
“The sun is warm today,” Trett said, like he’d read her mind. His gaze flicked down, and he shooed away a shimshim that was creeping toward the basket of corn on the porch floor. It scampered off, its blue skin shining in the sun. Trett moved the basket to the table.
Ellin stood, smiling. “I think I can spare fifteen minutes.”
Trett took her hand and led her to the big hammock they’d tied between two trees. He got in first, then pulled her next to him, almost toppling them both.
Ellin let herself laugh hard. She’d been trying to laugh more lately. Her kids helped with that resolution, as did Trett. She settled close to him, resting on his arm, her head on his shoulder.
Above them, tree branches filtered some of the sun, but the leaves had already fallen, and plenty of the sky was still visible. Ellin gazed up at the pale-orange expanse. When the stone had broken seven years before, the merciless, orange beams had covered the globe, then gradually faded. But the sky had retained a slight coloration, like a permanent, pale sunrise. It was a lovely, heartbreaking reminder of the apocalypse.
Most people now referred to that terrible event as The Day. While the stone’s effects were as horrifying as Rona had predicted, an estimated one in ten thousand people had been, for some reason, immune to the deadly radiation. In minutes, a global population of four billion shrank to less than half a million.
The small group Ellin and Trett had joined had rapidly grown as they’d connected with other survivors. About a thousand people now lived in their fertile valley east of Cellerin Mountain. They had a teacher and even a doctor, luxuries many other places didn’t have. These days, everyone was a farmer—even the doctors and teachers.
“Has it been fifteen minutes?” Ellin asked.
“No,” Trett responded in a lazy voice.
Ellin elbowed him. Trett had no idea how long it had been, and neither did she. They didn’t have a functioning clock, since most electronic devices had stopped working years ago. For once, she decided her never-ending chores didn’t matter. She cuddled in closer to Trett and kept watching the sky.
“What kind of bird do you think that is?” she asked, pointing.
Trett watched for a few seconds. “Too far away to tell.”
The thing gliding in the sky came a little closer, and a jet of fire emerged from its mouth.
They both laughed. “Not a bird,” Ellin said.
The world had changed in many ways since the day orange filled the sky. It hadn’t taken long for the survivors to notice strange things happening, phenomena they could only describe as magical.
New creatures, similar to those described in pre-colonial human mythology, had appeared. Unlike the dragon figure in Trett’s old fountain, however, these beasts seemed to belong on Anyari, with recognizable traits such as compound eyes.
A few times a year, Ellin spotted a dragon or two flying overhead. The basket-weave texture of their skin marked them as reptids. No one knew where dragons had come from, but Ellin wondered if the stone’s radiation had spurred instant evolution in an existing reptid species.
In a nearby wooded area, several locals had seen creatures similar to the unicorns described in Trett’s favorite stories. The most common hypothesis was that the cervida species had given rise to Anyarian unicorns. Cervidas were docile animals, about as tall as a person’s chest, with four long legs made for swift running. They thrived in wooded areas and often stole food from gardens and fields.
Unicorns, however, were significantly larger than cervidas, with shoulders around two mets tall. And unlike a cervida, who had two small, blunt horns, every unicorn boasted one long, glossy-white, pointed horn. Occasionally, someone got close enough to touch a sleeping unicorn’s horn. Every time, the hapless human fell into a deep sleep that lasted a least a week.
While Ellin hadn’t heard of any other magical beasts in their area, rumors abounded of ocean fishers and sailors encountering sea monsters. Perhaps other types of wondrous creatures were scattered around the rest of the planet.
Nomads and visitors from distant communities passed along other strange tales too. They spoke of rivers parting for them to cross, of meadows that gave peace to everyone who entered them, and of boiling rain. They even described young children with powers to create fire or move the earth.
Ellin didn’t know what was true and what was embellished, but no one doubted their world had changed in fundamental ways. It seemed that the very stone that had caused the apocalypse had also ushered in a new era of magic that, in Ellin’s opinion, belonged in fantasy stories, not reality.
Perhaps she’d be happier with the changes if she understood them. Surely Anyarians would eventually redevelop the world’s technologies, and researchers would explore the world’s new, supernatural qualities. Knowing such a day was far in the future, however, Ellin had resolved to laugh at dragons and find contentment in the miracle of her own survival.
The dragon flew out of sight. Ellin pushed herself up on an elbow, shifting her gaze to her house, then to the street beyond. “The chapel’s busy,” she said, before settling back to her original position.
Trett didn’t look. “Usually is.”
The chapel sat a few dozen mets beyond their farmhouse. Inside was the broken stone that had caused the apocalypse. The strange artifact’s iridescent orange surfaces still glowed, hinting at untapped power.
In the early days, Ellin and Trett had kept the stone hidden among their other supplies, unsure how to best follow Rona’s mandate to protect it. Rona’s other command, however, was easy to obey: Tell the story. Every person in their small group had been hungry to hear the truth of the apocalypse. Many of them wished they could see the stone, and Ellin and Trett at last revealed the mysterious artifact.
Immediately, Ellin realized how important the stone was to the grieving populace. Everyone gathered around the broken pieces. Survivors who’d shown no emotion knelt and wept. Others treated the stone as if it were alive, screaming their grief and fear at its black and orange surfaces. Some found strength by being near something that had killed so many but hadn’t touched them. It was more than a stone. It was a symbol of what they’d lost and what they’d survived.
The group converted a small outbuilding on Ellin and Trett’s property into a home for the stone, protecting it in a glass case retrieved from a museum. They agreed to take turns guarding it.
Within three years, a Rimorian emissary arrived and, with the community’s permission, moved into the building. She guarded the artifact and comforted visitors. Soon everyone referred to the building as a chapel, and people traveled for weeks to visit the stone. Ellin and Trett often took their own shifts at the chapel, sharing their story.
They held a unique status in their community, not only as the bearers of truth, but as the only couple anyone knew of who’d survived The Day together. It didn’t take long for their peers to treat them as leaders. Four years after The Day, the group had voted Ellin and Trett onto their new legislature. The older woman who’d established their community became the mayor, but everyone expected Ellin to eventually be elected to that position.
Ellin was thinking how nice it was that no one from the community had interrupted them all day when she heard the back door open. A voice called, “Mommy? Daddy? I can’t sleep.”
Ellin released a sigh. She kissed Trett and whispered, “Can we ignore one of our youngest constituents?”
“I can’t sleep,” the little voice repeated.
Ellin and Trett sat up and repositioned themselves, using the hammock m
ore like a swing, their feet hanging off the edge.
“C’mere, baby,” Trett said, reaching out to Liri who, at five, was the oldest of their three children.
Liri joined them, sitting on Trett’s lap and burying her face in his chest. They spent a few peaceful minutes together, but Liri was an active sort, and she never cuddled for long. Soon, she jumped down and settled herself under one of the trees supporting the hammock.
“Back to the corn,” Ellin said, standing and stretching.
Trett stood too. “I have more harvesting to do before the sun goes down.”
Ellin returned to the porch. When she turned to check on Liri, she groaned at what she saw. She ran back to the tree and squatted next to her daughter. “Liri Abrios, spit it out.”
Trett’s warm laugh reached them from where he’d stopped on his way to the fields, and Ellin shot him a glare.
Liri kept chewing. Ellin tried to put her finger in the girl’s mouth, but Liri moved her head back and forth, determined to ingest what was in her mouth. A little sliver of chewed, brown mush escaped her lips.
At last, Liri swallowed. She grinned up at her mother. “It tastes so good, Mommy.”
By then, Trett was kneeling next to Liri too. “Honey, you can’t eat tree bark. We’ve talked about this. Your body isn’t made to digest it.”
Liri stood, and her little fists clenched tight at her sides. “But it tastes good, Daddy! It tastes good!” She reached out to the tree and grasped a piece of bark, trying to pry it off.
Ellin put out a hand to stop her but was distracted by a sudden darkening of the sky. She looked up.
Green leaves had sprouted all over the tree—spring growth, in the middle of autumn.
“Trett . . . ?” Ellin breathed.
He looked up, and his mouth dropped open.
They both turned their gazes on Liri. She’d stopped trying to pull the bark off the tree. Now she was pressing both hands against the trunk, and the smile on her upturned face was full of wonder.
The Seer’s Sister: Prequel to The Magic Eaters Trilogy Page 26