The New World

The sound of the empty winds blowing through ruins a thousand years old decreased as the evening fell still. The harsh sunlight of an hour before left a lingering heat in the rubble, not enough to entice long-dead creatures back to life, but enough to cause a faint red glow in the eerie crags. But no one heard the winds, or saw the glow.

For a millennium, the ruins had stood, once a whole city but now just a collection of oddly-shaped bits of concrete, stone and steel. The builders were long dead, wiped out by their own contentious behavior, with no survivors, no progeny, no legacy other than the ruins and the secret below them.

Hardly anyone came to this place. At first discovery, it had been explored by the initial settling teams, and then declared off limits as a possible danger. But as the years went by, the only real danger was the instability of the remaining structures and the possibility that one could wander out here alone, get lost or injured, and not be found until it was too late. It was far from any settlement and offered only a lonely and insistent reminder that someone else had been here first.

Cora didn't mind the danger or the solitude. She was an experienced climber, always brought provisions and a communicator, and was very careful. The melancholy loneliness of the place intrigued her. In the crowded settlement, her people enjoyed the warmth of continual companionship, the communion of close living, the strength of numbers. Only a few ever sought to be alone, and solitary pursuits, while not frowned upon, were rare.

She found a flat spot inside the perimeter of broken walls and set up her communicator, then unpacked a bag of snacks and stuck a flexible tube into it. She flattened herself out and absorbed the warmth of the floor. Cora knew something lay under the floor, but in her many visits to the place she had been unable to determine what it was. It felt like a vast set of dry chambers, like lungs.

She tried again to pass through the barrier into the chambers, but was unable to do so. Eventually the floor turned cooler and she moved. She began to slowly perambulate the ruins, gliding carefully over the rubble, avoiding anything sharp or too fragile to hold her weight without breaking. Here and there, pockets of warmth remained and she absorbed them with pleasure. So intent was she on the pursuit of the warmth that she failed to notice the cracks in an unfamiliar section of the flooring. Her weight caused a breach and she fell.

She was uninjured, but disoriented and confused. The air was old, stale, and full of crackling particulates. She moved enough to assure herself that there was no danger of falling even further into the interior of the ruins, then reached out on either side, feeling rows of metal pieces interspersed with dry materials. She would have to find the edge of this place in order to climb out. She carefully moved across the rubble, recognizing metal and stone, but not recognizing the dry, flaking materials. She picked one up and examined it. It was not edible, but had an organic quality to it. Could it be a part of one of the previous inhabitants? Was it a dry lung?

She tucked the item into her pouch and continued along the floor until a tall obstruction offered a way back to the surface. Attaching to it, she pulled herself up and found her way back to the familiar flat place where she had left her communicator.

She was uninjured, so there was no need to communicate just yet. She consumed her snack and rested. She would take the flaking object back to the settlement as she had taken the very first object she had found at the ruins. No had one ever found a use for the first object, a tube-like piece of metal with little protrusions and holes along its length. A bit of building material, perhaps, she had conjectured.

This new bit of detritus would probably be equally mystifying. What had they used them for, those long-dead unknowns? Cora felt the flaking object. It was leaved, like the inside of a lung, but without any inflation. What could it be? She remembered bearing the first object back to the settlement. She had carried it aloft, and the winds had blown through it. There was no one to hear the whistle of the flute, though, just as there would be no one to read the book. Cora's kind could only feel.

Find more by Kate Thornton in the Author Index.

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