Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

At first light he crept from our hiding place. A few minutes later he returned to wake me.

“Get up,” he said. He braided his hair, tying the end with a black silk ribbon. “Even if they think we’re dead we can’t stay here.”

“But the virus?”

“It doesn’t live more than an hour in the open air. But we can’t trust Leslie or the others not to come looking for your corpse.”

“Will the lazars hunt us?” I stretched, wondering what we would be able to eat.

Justice stood, hands slouched in the deep pockets of his jacket as he watched me tuck in my shirt. “This is probably the best time to avoid them. After the rain of roses they’re—sated.”

“I have never seen one,” I admitted, and smiled. “I’m thirsty.”

Justice stared at me as though waiting for me to say something else; to apologize, perhaps. I adjusted the cuff of my shirt, wishing I’d brought other clothes. After a moment he shook his head.

“Well, come on, then,” he said. We left the tomb.

Sunrise misted the eastern edge of the woods, where through the deep green leaves I glimpsed the chromati haze of the Glass Fountain and the purer emerald of HEL lawns.

Justice said, “You can go back if you want. Go ahead: see what happens.”

“I don’t want to go back.” I turned from this last sight of my home to follow him. “You didn’t have to free me. I’ll go on alone now if you want.”

“Hah.” He snorted, but paused to hold a wiry sumac hip while I passed beneath it. “No point letting you get killed out here after all that trouble.” As I passed, his voice rose slightly. “Why’d you bite me last night?”

“’I don’t like to fuck.”

“’Then why did you kiss me?”

“I tapped you.”

His eyes darkened as he stepped beside me, kicking at mushrooms and damp leaves. “What?”

I squinted to find a path among the ancient trees. “I can read blood.”

He stared at me for a long moment. I met his gaze, finally shrugged and turned to make my way through the tangled forest.

We walked in silence until the sun hung high overhead, Justice seemed to find his way by the sun, and by following the river. Occasionally we glimpsed it through the trees, a litter of blue and gold.

A heavy jasmine-scented steam began to rise from the earth. This came from carpets of white flowers that covered the ground like moss, their blossoms no bigger than my fingernail. As I stooped to watch them the tiny blooms opened and closed like little gaping mouths. When I touched one it snapped at my finger.

“Look, Justice! It’s hungry—”

He shook his head and pulled me to my feet. “No, Wendy.”

“Are they poisonous?”

“Sometimes. Things change, after the rain of roses.”

I followed him. When he wasn’t looking I would kick at the mats of white flowers and watch them seethe as we passed.

We skirted the rotted foundations of small wooden buildings, the collapsed tangle of steel walls and cavernous bunkers and commercial ziggurats that during the Third Ascension had been built upon the earlier ruins. On the decaying ziggurat steps I saw copperheads drowsing in coiled knots and other, larger snakes, blue-black and with scales so long and fine they looked like feathers. The fallen steel archways were pied with lizards, golden-eyed and blue-tongued, waiting patiently for crickets to waken and warm themselves on the metal. I was hungry. In the trees ahead Justice waited for me to catch up. I waved to him to go on ahead, waited for him to turn away so that I could capture a lizard as it dozed. It was lovely, raised rounded scales like tiny rust-and-azure studs. I wished I could save its skin; but I killed it quickly by biting its neck. I sucked the little blood there was from its body cavity and made quick mouthful of the meat in belly and tail. A flicker of the animal’s hunger and heat sparked in my brain: the warmth of insects and then the quick slash of my own teeth through its spine. That was all it gave me. I was sorry about the pretty scales.

I skipped ahead to join Justice and we continued in silence for a time.

“You’ve never been this far outside before, have you?” he said at last.

“We had no need to leave HEL .”

For what? Dr. Harrow had warned me that the world outside was a decadent place, and dangerous. Certainly the ruined City of Trees was no place for a creature dependent upon a carefully administered regime of chemicals and stolen dreams. But Justice only motioned for me to follow him to the edge of the forest. We left the cool shelter of the trees behind.

“Where are we?” I asked, stepping among shattered blocks of granite.

“Near the Key Bridge.”

A path of white stones curled from the edge of the broken road and stretched through the trees. Justice hesitated, squatting on a ledge of tarmac.

“Are we lost?”

He shook his head. “No. But it will be dark soon. That’s the City, there.”

He pointed to the far shore of the river. Through a green scrim I glimpsed broken roofs and towers vying with tree tops for the afternoon sun.

“Tired?”

“No.” Instead I felt edgy, wide awake. At HEL we would have been dressing for dinner, or stealing things for a secret meeting in our quarters. And a certain uneasiness shaded all my thoughts now: fear of those brilliant eyes and the longing they kindled within me; fear of the loneliness that crept over me whenever I recalled Dr. Harrow’s white form lying still on the floor of the Home Room …

“Good. We’ll cross there—” He pointed, and I peered through the thicket. For the first time I saw the bridge spanning the murky river, its ancient fretwork rusted to a filigree of red and black, virginia creeper scalloping the tower struts in waves of green that shimmered in the warm breeze.

We followed the path of white stones. It skimmed the broken ribs of what had once been a road, hedged by tall bronzed oaks and a winding network of ditches now filled with stagnant water. Occasionally the rusted shell of an automobile or velocipede poked from the greenery or lay submerged in the brackish pools like gaunt pike. Once we heard something thrash in the ditch. Justice pulled me after him into the brush, and from there we glimpsed a pale slender appendage like an arm or tentacle gently plying the surface of the black water behind us. Justice watched impassively until it withdrew and the ripples subsided in the scummy pool.

In a few more minutes we reached the bridge. Justice shook his head as though testing the air. Then he turned to me, laughing in relief.

“This is it. We made it.”

And as I followed Justice I suddenly felt Him again inside me, stirring against the shell of nerve and bone that contained Him. I knew that the dark flash that tore through me was not my jubilation, not Dr. Harrow’s or Aidan’s but His, the Other now with me and within me.

He saw the City too, and the sight filled Him with a raging joy: joy and blood-hunger and a thirst for worship.

But for myself, crossing that river, the sluggish guardian of my childhood—what stirred me at first sight of the fallen City of Trees unfurled before me like a ruined flag, all the more valiant for its tattered heraldry?

The tales Dr., Harrow had told us of the City painted a grimy metropolis, justly forsaken: a cheap bauble not worth preserving. Its people died horrible deaths in the Long Night of the First Ascension—starvation, radiation sickness, plague. Its rulers had already fled west. There they perished in the wilderness or else joined the fledgling alliance that a century later would bring about the Second Ascension. Since then the City was held by the researchers (and camp followers) who had been sent to recover some of the knowledge of the Civil Servants, and then, in the chaos following the first mutagenic warfare, forgotten. They owned the City now: mad watchdogs of useless knowledge and their whores, feasting upon the ruins like fat ticks. And in the streets lived cannibal children and the geneslaves who preyed upon the living.