by J D Cortese
“Hop in,” said Sarinda. “We have a ride.”
“How did you get this?” he said, touching the badly-damaged sailcloth roof, in the style of island vehicles and golf carts.
“My dad's the Major, remember? These things know who I am, so I don't need a keypad.”
“I guess your father doesn't like to leave around any limos.” Agdinar was trying to loosen up, after depositing Tysa on the back seat. He took a spot on the small front one.
Sarinda looked toward City Hall Park, where loud bouts of yelling suggested they needed to hurry up.
“My father is not a generous man,” she said, and stepped on the accelerator.
The whining from the cart engine might have reached the Hawks, because three of them were now running toward them and in pursuit.
Chapter 19
The ticketing cart accelerated with a high-pitched scream and, even though they were designed to outrun sneaky violators of the parking law, what lay ahead on the southern end of Broadway Avenue was not encouraging.
The Hawks had cultivated a jungle of abandoned cars, forming with them intersecting linear patterns that left little space for maneuvering. Their vehicle helped them, being small and narrow front to back. And Sarinda was, apparently, quite a deft driver.
But maybe not enough for a clean escape.
A crashing sound made Agdinar turn to look back. The Hawks had trashed two parked cars at the park's exit, sending one tumbling across the avenue's gap. They were driving a military vehicle, with an external skeleton resembling a portable cage. It was a massive thing that would hit and throw around cars as if they were ping-pong balls; its wheels were so large it could run over the smallest of them like speed bumps.
Sarinda might have seen in her mirror the monster chasing them, because she started to swerve with violence, just before the first explosive bullets blew plumes of black asphalt.
Agdinar was still looking at the Hawks' attack vehicle, but he did grab Tysa before a harsh left turn sent her flying out of the cart. A second later, Sarinda quickly shifted to the right and into a westbound street. The sound of the cart’s engine suggested it could catch fire any time.
They had only made three blocks in their escape, and the Hawks had already gained a third of the distance between them. The monstrous thing was more race car than tank, and that was not good news.
As soon as Agdinar left Tysa on the safety of the gap between the seats, and turned back toward Sarinda, his eyes opened until they hurt.
The street ahead was a dead end.
They were moving fast, and about half a block ahead there were a hundred yellow and orange signs that had once told distracted New Yorkers their world pretty much ended right there. He couldn't read most, but one of them—with a blinking fluorescent green background—stated in the largest possible letters:
SUBWAY RECOVERY PROJECT
KEEP AWAY
Agdinar touched Sarinda's shoulder and she turned to him for the briefest moment, before stepping hard on the electric juice. The engine sounded like a train’s whistle.
Sarinda was bent over the car’s wheel, relishing the moment. Seeing her made Agdinar shiver.
He could see the Hawk's vehicle in his side’s mirror, less than a block away. As for the front glass, in its last moments of normalcy it returned a crowded view, a jumble of posters and street signs.
And very thick, very heavy interlinked barriers lying ahead.
They took one street sign clean, and then toppled a dozen orange cones that belonged in a city museum.
The third sign was better anchored to the ground, and it bent over them, punishing the front of the cart. The front glass cracked into an opaque spider’s web. Sarinda just kept looking around it and watching for the irregular pavement. She drove following a swerving pattern; the tires of each side took turns spinning in the air.
The Hawks' vehicle now looked like a black wall, so very close in Sarinda's driver-side mirror. It was a relief when the pole of another street sign took that mirror off clean with a bang.
Ahead, the barriers formed a circle around the center of the one-way street. And, beyond where they could possibly still go, the street ended in a wall of construction workers' temporary housings, fronted by a very tall water tank.
Agdinar thought on those long-gone people taking showers in their boxy mobile housing, and how good it would be to bathe with real water and get a rest in his old room at Tower City.
And then, the cart crashed into a low barrier and his world began to spin. Fast.
* * *
It was a few seconds, but it seemed like hours had passed by the time Agdinar stood. He saw the Hawks coming down the street, slowing down only to negotiate the many barriers and signs still standing.
“Run,” he heard. “Run.”
It was Sarinda. She was further ahead, standing where the forest of barriers ended and holding Tysa, who seemed barely conscious and hung from her friend's arms with her head facing down.
Agdinar did run, to reach them—although they appeared to be farther away than he'd thought. His head was as woozy as his body, and the corners of his world had grown foggy shadows.
There was a big crashing noise, enormous. He turned to catch sight of the Hawks' vehicle bouncing while crossing the first line of barriers. They were heavy enough to break some of the lower bars of its armored cage.
They wouldn't stand a chance on foot, and what remained of the construction work further west would be impenetrable. Running through that mess would be even more dangerous than the assault vehicle.
“We are—” he started, and then Sarinda stopped him with an open palm.
“Look,” she yelled.
He looked back, just in time for the show.
When they had put up those warning signs, the city crewmen hadn't been exaggerating at all. The recovery of the damaged subways in Lower Manhattan—after five drownings in as many mega-hurricane surges—was a tricky business.
And not just for the water-filled tunnels, but also for the weakened streets above the stations.
The black vehicle had been advancing quite fast, and its occupants didn't notice the cracks and crevices all over the circular opening.
That was, until the entire street gave out under them and, in a single noisy gulp, the sinkhole swallowed the Hawks' special vehicle into the underground.
“Did you know?”
“I do know what my father does for the city, but also what he has given up trying to fix. I guess it's their fault,” she said, pointing to the smoking hole, “for occupying the city illegally.” She then yelled to the growing dark hole, “Time to pay your dues, guys.”
Sarinda smiled and, without another word, started to walk, dragging Tysa with her.
Watching the sinkhole getting ready to engulf the poor city cart they’d used, Agdinar thought that, even while Sarinda had an air of beauty and elegance about her, she could also be quite ruthless. They would need that to survive.
Another puff of dirt, smoke, and unknown city elements consumed by fire was coughed up by the huge blackened throat and covered them as they started to move westward.
Chapter 20
They were on the ground and the phantasmagoria of the city loomed. Skyscrapers abandoned after the first mega-hurricanes hit in the late ’20s. Other big buildings, also abandoned, but by the rich companies that departed the city after Chinatown burst all the radiation counters. And the few office buildings that had survived downwind in Manhattan South, barely in use after the Descent. All others had been destroyed by the battles that stabbed the underbelly of Manhattan, now only remembered as old confrontations between a military force once called police and the anarchic machine of the Hawknights.
The thin skyscrapers from the early twenty-first century coexisted with new ones, robot-designed and built to resemble flowers or tropical fruits made from irregular pieces of glass. Many were now barren shells, and screamed as the winds passed through a million broken windows.
; Agdinar felt that they were telling them to get out of New York.
They were so tired the day’s twilight surprised them with a wall of climbing shadows.
Agdinar didn't know the streets well enough to trudge them from the ground. He was relying on Sarinda, who was so tense she refused his offer of help with supporting Tysa. And he was also nervous and bumped onto a couple of loose tiles; he started to walk sighting his feet rather than the streets ahead.
* * *
They had penetrated a tall fence that isolated a complex of deserted buildings and skirted with some difficulty a partially demolished structure—which had been white in the past and now was dark gray. The building spurted a thousand spines like the skeleton of a prehistoric dinosaur. Sarinda kept going ahead, apparently with a target in mind.
In the creeping darkness, Agdinar had trouble understanding the dimensions of the opening between those buildings. There was an excavation that seemed full of water, bluish, but was really an empty pit, built as a perfect square. He knew immediately that there was another one nearby, as the Watchers had studied the 2001 Memorial as the first historical sign of the Descent. As with most things in that neighborhood, not much was left of the original monument. New Yorkers had not visited this corner of the city in two decades.
Tysa had found Sarinda and now sat with her head down, while Sarinda stood near the edge of the memorial’s balustrade. She was looking away, and Agdinar felt he shouldn’t approach her.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, her voice tilting to tears.
“And broken.”
“Like everything. Like the city.” Sarinda waved to the blue shadows. She seemed to be calling the night, the very thing that might have saved them.
“I have never been here,” Agdinar said. He was experiencing a sour mix of emotions, something confusing and very human. He shuddered and turned away.
“It was a beautiful fountain…once, long ago.”
He tried to see it without his corneal viewers, like a human of the times would. See it as the large pool that once was, not the battered construction covered in parts by a mountain of dirt. The Watchers had been taught about their witnessing of the events. It was, after all, the prelude of the First Descent and harbinger of the one to come. He shuddered again, and a cold tear escaped his eye.
A tree had managed to break the pool’s ground, an irregular surface pulverized by explosions. Agdinar thought of it as a hopeful sign. “We were lucky,” he said, “escaping from the Hawks.”
“Not so sure we will be able to keep escaping them,” Sarinda said, pointing to the lights of vehicles moving far into the city’s east. “Look at this mess—bad things do happen. It’ll be hard to get away.”
She was trembling, and her voice carried future tears to her eyes. Agdinar extended his hand, and she took it. He couldn’t find anything to say and remained there, in the rising night and under a clouded moon, holding Sarinda’s hand and hoping he could bring her some warmth.
Before they went to see how Tysa was doing on her corner, he turned a light on his fingers and showed Sarinda how to do the same. They kept moving their hands on the plaques that topped the balustrade, like fireflies, and read the names of those who had perished along an entire side of the pool.
* * *
They kept wandering the city in large circles and, at some point, entered the immense space of an abandoned gallery of business, just facing the river. Later, Sarinda asked for Agdinar’s help to cross the enormous gash of a highway, crowded with abandoned vehicles and huge piles of crashed concrete. The elevator to the only walkway that could cross the highway was stuck, and they had to cross on foot. Slowly, painfully.
It was amazing that New York, severed in half at the waist like an unlucky magician's assistant, had remained functional for half a million people. The streets ahead of them had been wounded by some extensive uprooting of their inner vascular system. This had happened in more fortunate times, when, occasionally, people worked on applying regular fixes to the decay. One of these times, it had been the last.
There was both abandonment and care. Junk was everywhere, but some of the trash had been picked up recently. It was in those small actions that the city showed how it hadn’t lost its soul.
Their random walking across the ruins—still trying to thwart any pursuing Hawks—took them only a few blocks north in total, and then they decided it was time to camp. The frigid wind coming from the ocean made walking with a hurt Tysa all but impossible without any rest.
Sarinda chose an out-of-place construction site to hide, which resembled an archeological dig. It was now surrounded by demolition debris. She told Agdinar it had been built as a memorial for some immigrants—he was too worried to pay close attention to the story. It was true that, underneath a series of walkways and useful viewing points, a crisscrossing corridor would offer them some protection. Agdinar fashioned a blanket for Tysa out of threads from both their suits. She was snoring five minutes after they covered her.
The way the walls of the construction’s underpass had been smashed with what might have been wrecking balls unsettled him, and he followed Sarinda to the top of the simulated settlement—which resembled what the first explorers might have built over there—as he wasn’t going to fall asleep with so much uncertainty. And he wanted to be with her rather than alone.
“Is Tysa all right?” Sarinda said, eyes on a distant river flare.
“She will be. Needs more sleep.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t go back to my apartment.”
“We need to find a safer place for you two,” he said. “Out of the city.” Agdinar couldn’t bring himself to elaborate on the where and risk upsetting Sarinda. And he didn’t want her to go away.
Sarinda was looking down from the corner that faced the overgrown river. “Are you going to stay here?”
“Yes, for a while. We are still too close to the Hawks’ hangouts, and their patrols will be all over the South corner.”
“I don’t think they’ll be looking for us near the river,” she said, “we are still close to City Hall.”
“You never know.”
“But you do,” she said, and raised her eyes to his. “What’s going to happen now?”
“I said that we need to move, and soon.”
“No. I meant with all of us, with the city. You—your people—know what will happen.”
Agdinar wanted to have an answer, but he was confused too. “Nobody really knows,” he said. “We are here, aren’t we? If it were all set in stone, we wouldn’t have escaped. There’s hope, in what we know of time itself, that some things can be changed.”
“You don’t sound very confident.”
“One day we will study time like it’s a game of chess. Every move, each event, it affects the entire game forever after. We are here because even the least of all things could change the whole history of the world.” Agdinar was trying to convince Sarinda about something—something that would allow him to stay with her—but he didn’t know at all what would happen. He needed her, her confidence, not any of the Watchers’ past or future tales.
“Quite a poetic way to put it,” Sarinda said, watching his awkward stance and smiling. “You haven’t really answered my question. With the city, what’s going to happen?”
Agdinar tried to turn away from Sarinda, but he couldn’t. He felt desolated and couldn’t hide it from her. “There’s going to be even more chaos,” he said, “and another Descent, worse than the first one. About how it will happen, we know very little.”
He had tried to be hopeful, but only prophecies of doom could come from what he knew. He hoped that Management had lied about the extent of it, like they had about so many other things.
Sarinda was quiet for a minute, watching the riverside. He knew that she was fighting tears, and he rested his hand on her shoulder.
“You know, you can leave us here,” she finally said. “Just wait until the morning. You’ve done enough to help.” The te
ars had arrived. “I am grateful,” she added.
Agdinar held Sarinda more forcefully this time, and she rested her head on his. A part of him wanted to agree with her and let their plight and its torture end—he was so far out of his element. Sarinda then got closer and Agdinar felt her warmth—not with his suit’s instruments, but on his face—and smelled again the faint perfume of her skin. He found his fingers intertwined with hers, and knew that he would never leave her.
He was going to fix her future, so she would get to live it. Agdinar didn’t know how, but he was sure it would mean going against everything he had known as a Watcher.
* * *
Tysa woke up after an hour of alarming nightmares they heard from afar, which brought them twice to check on her. She was terrified to the point of shivering, scared about their staying so close to City Hall. And so, they left the protection of the ruinous structure and kept walking in the dark; soon, they lost the feeling of being chased and stopped their constant looking back. Tysa was less hunched now, clearly more relaxed, and walking faster. She seemed to have gained inches of height.
Sarinda kept up with her friend’s pace, never too close but also always with her eyes covering what Tysa couldn't see of her surroundings. Agdinar saw it for what it was: love, from an older sister.
He also kept his watch around them, and occasionally above them. It was, after all, what he did, what he was.
A watcher. A pair of eyes that searched for minute disruptions, for anything that could foretell a different future. He hadn’t been given a life, or a family. Just the knowledge that maybe, somehow, would help his new companions.