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And for the first time in days, the door begins to slide open. This stillness, this blackness, it is a world too suddenly and starkly reversed.Ī loud metallic click rings from the train car door. “Stay very, very still.” For three days and nights on the rattling train, exposed to wind and sunlight, motion has been our constant companion. “Everyone stay still,” Sissy whispers next to me. Nobody moves, as if motion alone will cause the next unwanted chain of events to begin. Their individual fates hostage to the whims of the Ruler’s voracious appetite.įor a few minutes, the train drifts along the tunnel before lurching to a stop. Where, it is said, the only humans are those imprisoned in the catacombs like cattle in pens. Not the Civilization, the idyllic city they’d been told by the Mission elders was filled with millions of humans populating its streets and filling its stadiums and theaters and parks and restaurants and cafés and schools and amusement parks.īut the Palace. Yesterday, after Sissy and I recovered from the turning (the hellish fever broken, our discombobulated bodies knit back together), we told the girls what we suspected about our destination. “Not the Palace, not the Palace, not the…” she murmurs. A small hand, clammy with fear, clutches mine. Fear hums off our piled bodies in droves. As one, we’re flung forward onto the metal mesh floor. Under us, sparks of light shoot out from the shrieking, braking wheels of the train. A hot wind, dank and moist as a tongue, hurls through the bars of our caged car, gusts through our clothes and hair, our clenched hands, our crouched, shaking bodies. Our world of stark white and cobalt skies, in a sudden blink of an eye, is erased with pure black. Its opening gapes wide like a diseased mouth that eagerly swallows us whole. Then, with a sudden squawk, it flaps its wings and flies away.
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The hawk observes this building with a steely, unblinking stare. Nothing moves on, in, or around the building. The obelisk is otherwise, as with the entire building, the color of the desert. The windowed tip of this obelisk glimmers brightly under the sun like a lit candle. A tall, slim obelisk rises from the building’s dead center. It lies silent as a tombstone, circled almost completely by a thin rampart. Gone as if it were never even there.Ībout ten miles away, on the other side of a range of low-slung hills, lies a gigantic disc-shaped building spanning several city blocks. Like a snake, swiftly into a hole, disappearing. The hawk squawks in surprise as the train suddenly dips into an opening in the ground. It is a hawk, gazing curiously at the rippling shadow of the train beneath. None of the occupants on the train-and there are many, and they are tense, and they are standing with taut backs and frightened eyes-make a sound.Ī tiny black dot circles high in the blue sky. The train slows, its line of cars rattling like the links of a metal chain dragged. Only the black filament of the train’s moving shadow taints this baked wasteland. The sun, perched high in the sky, scorches the desert a blinding white.