An Inheritance of Ashes (31 page)

I lowered the soap spoon. “The regiment won't
like
the real Jones.”

Heron caught my eye, caught what I left unspoken:
Just like they'd hate the cheesemaker John Balsam
. “I don't know,” he said carefully, “if he will be enough to keep them satisfied until Miss Chandler reinvents mortar. But I don't have any better ideas.”

“Big-game hunting,” Tyler muttered, decimating the carrots into round, bright coins. There was a hitch in his voice, a broken, hip-twist hitch that I hadn't heard since he'd asked to court me. He'd rolled his sleeves up, and the glint of his army buttons was no longer visible at his wrists.
He is,
I thought, and I could recognize it now,
heartbroken.

“We just need something bigger,” I fumbled. “Thom said the god's body was big.”
Think, Hallie,
I ordered myself, a mere maker of malt and herder of goats.
Don't just give up. Think.
The grease shimmered at the top of the soap pot, casting rainbows across the surface. They shifted under my spoon like patterned skin. Like the hide that was rotting in the river—

The spoon stopped.

“There
is
something big enough to plug that hole,” I said quietly. “Beast Island.”

Heron whistled, low. Tyler's head rose, slowly and then faster. His eyes were like hazel stars. “Beast Island—it came from there, too. It's—what's her word?”

“Acidic,” I said.

“Oh, God, we'd need help,” he fretted gleefully. “Boats, rope, a trestle.
Lots
of boats.”

“We need,” Heron said, “Windstown.”

I put the soap spoon down. If I'd been told the air was lye now, that I could never breathe deep again, in that instant I would have believed it. “We can't. Windstown won't come. The things we said to Pitts the last time we were there—”

“They have to,” Tyler said.

“I can't. Pitts won't listen; he just puts on his sash and chain and plays God—”

“He
has
to,” Tyler repeated, simple, stubborn. “They're our neighbors, and it's the end of the world.”

I swallowed and thought of all the worst fears that had come to pass this week: Marthe's face contorted with pain at my lies; Thom, frightened and embittered, bloodying the sheets of his wedding bed; Asphodel Jones in my smokehouse, knowing my name, my face, what made me flinch. My little niece, fists raised and mouth seeking, looking for warmth and light as monsters strode across the land that should, one day, be hers.

“What's one more?” I said, a little hysterical, and Tyler cast me a worried glance. I shook my head. It was a thought for that silent green world, so far outside the humble day to day of living; so far from
seed,
or
plow,
or
goat
. If I was going to live up to the vow I'd made there, I had to not act like my uncle, not act like I was in this alone. I had, I thought with a flicker of sheer panic, to
try.

“I need a water bottle,” I said. “And I need a torch. The light's going to go soon.”

Heron nodded. “I'll get them.”

“How are we going to get there?” Tyler asked. “The hole's right near the river dock. I haven't
seen
your dock in a few days.”

I swallowed. “I'll take the bridge.”

Tyler put down the kitchen knife. “You've got to be kidding. It's falling apart. They blocked it off for a
reason,
Hal.”

“I'll run,” I promised. My heart was already pounding. “Because if I don't, we'll die anyway, and this guy I know told me it was better to try.”

“That Tiger guy,” he said with just a hint of warmth.

“That one,” I agreed, and took his hand in mine.

I didn't have to say the rest.
Hope,
he registered, his eyes alight. Tyler's fingers laced and relaced between mine, seeking restless new combinations.
You're a fidget,
I thought warmly, and leaned into his arm. Tyler took both my hands in his and kissed them firmly, knuckle by knuckle. “Pack your kit. I'll get the cart and drive you to the edge.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, and Heron came downstairs, water bottle in hand.

I looked up the stairs, at the boards and buttresses of the house we'd kept by never, ever taking a thing Alonso Pitts had sneeringly offered. I swallowed hard. “Tell Marthe,” I asked him. “Tell her I'll be back soon.”

IT WAS TEN MILES TO THE FOOT OF THE BRIDGE, EVERY ONE OF
them charred and pockmarked with the signs of war. Tyler drove me along the old road in the Blakely family cart as the sun set behind us, tingeing everything red: the fallen trees, the scorched-out hedges, the barns that listed to one side like wounded men. The Twisted Things had desolated the land by the river shore. Ash choked the cold air. The snow heaped, and it was black.

By the time the bridge loomed on the horizon, a sleeping giant, we were silent. Its cords and cables drifted, creaking, in the wind.

“Here,” Tyler said, and reined the ponies in. “I'll help with your pack.”

I stepped down from the cart and faced the arching road before me with trepidation. I hadn't remembered the bridge running so narrow or so high: a steep hill of metal and asphalt that crested in the middle of the river before it fell away into the dead streets of Old Windstown.

“You're sure about this?” Tyler asked.

“No,” I said, and shouldered my pack.

Tyler's forehead crinkled with resignation. “Come home safe to me,” he said, and squeezed my hand one last time.

I nodded. There was nothing else to say.

The bridge was wild land: weed-eaten concrete. They had only cleared one lane of it when the old cities withered. Its sides were littered with the rusted skeletons of ancient machines, their workings outside all modern comprehension. They hulked and crumbled in the wind, as inscrutable as the hills: a silent monument to whatever ended our great-grandparents' world.

I swallowed bile and started quickly down the cleared lane, through the high wind that rose over the river, thick with ash.

The bridge was slippery underfoot, the black asphalt slicked with frozen river spray and fragments of powdered rust. I climbed carefully, testing each step against its persistent upward curve. I wasn't yet to the bridge's apex when the sharp howl split the sky.

Dogs,
I thought, and turned sharply. Caught in the glare of the setting sun, I saw them pacing, edge-tailed, behind me on the shore. “Oh, great,” I muttered, and looked around for a stick, a log, something: the ferals were wild, but they didn't pick a fight unless it was mid-February and they were starving. There was nothing to hand; the bones of the bridge had been picked dry decades ago. Nothing here was anything anyone wanted.

“Well, I did say I'd run,” I muttered, and picked up speed. The bridge swayed beneath me like a boat on the water; the roadway under my boot was spidered with cracks. I strode faster. The pavement shuddered, a howl of metal and cord that sent the ferals behind me squealing for the trees. The whole bridge, sinuous, rocked in the too-hot otherworldly wind.

My foot slid. I didn't care.

I ran.

I bent double and scrambled across the endlessly arching bridge, my legs burning, my lungs burning. If it came down, there was nowhere to go. There was nothing to either side but killing winter water. I put my head down and pushed, forced myself faster.

Over the bridge's shuddering beams, against the sunset, the deer-horned trees walked through the river, calling weird and fluting hunting calls. Their leaves brushed the cables one by one, and the metal blackened in their monstrous wake. I heard a creak. A soft ping.

A metal bridge cable as thick as my arm whipped low over my head and crashed into dead metal and glass.

I shrieked, staggered into a rusting, frozen hulk as the bridge shook itself like a wet dog. The wind howled through its ruins, churned the river into roaring waves. The asphalt shook again beneath me, and shards flew everywhere as the second huge cable frayed above me and let go.

I tripped and tumbled, bruising, rolling down the bridge as the cables sang overhead. The roadway shuddered beneath me, vibrating with the endless
snap! snap! snap!
of metal, stronger than anything we'd ever know to make again. The deer-horned trees tossed the bridge to and fro, and I fell between those ancient machines, down the other side. I scrabbled for a handhold on the bucking, disintegrating bridge. It reared up, and I landed in something softer, colder.
Snow,
I thought. Weeds prickled my palms.
I'm on the other side.

Inching and wriggling into the darkness, I lifted my head to the riverside.

The bridge was falling, finally falling. Its broken back arched and split, the girders screaming as the road ripped away. The ground boomed, once, twice, as each piece tumbled into the river. I clung to the soil with my bleeding, aching fingers and shut my eyes as tight as I could.

When I opened them, the river was a disaster of metal. The disintegrated vehicles of our ancestors bobbed through the river, whispering their steel farewells. Around them, the dead bridge ribboned through the water, its concrete flaking slowly. The deer-horned trees called, almost lost, to each other and waded through the river, to the north.

I pulled myself up, breath heaving, and scrabbled to my feet. My knee twinged furiously. I ignored it.
Still alive,
I thought, delirious.
I did it,
and I stumbled into the ruins of Old Windstown.

The dead city behind the Windstown barricade was a maze. The Chandlers had mapped and tamed their home in the ruins on our side of the river, but Old Windstown had been abandoned for a full century, left derelict to the dogs and raccoons while men and women kept to the safe township on the other side of the walls. Trees grew riot through the concrete, buckling up pavement, knocking roof tiles to the dirt. I steered through them, limping carefully, blinded by the scattershot flares of light on the horizon and the scent of distant flames. The Twisted Things had been to Old Windstown. High above me, gutted concrete buildings smoked from their awful wings.

I ducked down and stumbled through the alleys, leaned panting against an ancient redbrick wall. Three raccoons squealed, frightened, and ran out of a door across the street, and the roof behind them creaked and fell in. A flock of spinner birds fled, startled, from its ruins in the other direction: looking for another place to light, another thing to destroy.

I wiped my nose shakily. My fingers came away sticky with blood. The old city sat silent around me, dusty with destruction and smoke.

“You're still alive,” I whispered to myself encouragingly, like a good auntie would. I was almost to Windstown: I could see the barricade stretching above the rooftops, keeping out the rot. The militia had a door in it, always guarded, well-attended, for the nights they had to go out and repair the barricade or keep the ferals at bay. All I had to do was
find
it, and I'd be safe in the treed Windstown streets. Minutes from Mackenzie Green's, or Prickett's, or Alonso Pitts.

I tiptoed toward the barricade, around corners and dead ends. It stretched stories high above me, a beacon, a testament to years of keeping civilization alive; keeping the wilderness and desolation out. And then I saw the latest impossible thing.

There was a crack in the Windstown wall.

The barricade that kept Windstown bright and safe gapped open, showing chair legs and bent metal within. I peered through the century-old hoardings and mortar dust. The slimmest sliver of light peeked all the way through.

“We
can't
spare a guard here,” a voice floated on its tail. “The fire brigade needs me. There's smoke on Main Street.”

“There's smoke
everywhere,
dammit—” I heard, and that voice I recognized.

I raised a fist and banged hard on the wall. “Johan? Johan Prickett?”

The spat stopped abruptly. The wind whistled around me ominously. “Who's there?” he asked. It was definitely Johan, Janelle's other dad, tousle-haired and usually so very mild.

“Johan?” I called. “It's Hallie Hoffmann. I need to get in. Where's the door?”

The silence lengthened. “Ah,
shit,
” he said. “You need to get to Cooper Street. Where's that on the—north, Hallie. Go north, two blocks. I'm going for the door, all right? We're coming.”

The voices faded into footsteps, and then there was nothing but wind and the rumbling sky. I scrambled against the rough base of the barricade and found north by starlight. It was impossible to count two blocks in the shattered ruins.
They've left,
an old shred of Papa said.
They aren't coming back.

“Shut up,” I told him, and kept moving along the wall.

Heartbeats, seconds, hours later I heard the raised voice: “Hallie?” It was Darnell Prickett, his rich innkeeper's bellow. “Hallie, are you there?”

“Darnell—” I started, joyfully. “Where are you? Where do I go?”

“Hold on,” he said, and some ancient machinery creaked, tortured with time. A whole section of the wall buckled open slowly, dust and smoke shedding into the air behind it.

Mackenzie Green poked her head through the opening and reached out both hands. “Child, how in the name of every god standing did you get out
there?
”

“Mackenzie,” I said, almost sobbing with relief. “I came across the bridge. It finally broke. It's gone.”

Mackenzie's eyes widened. “That's what the sound was. Come on, quickly now,” she said, and pulled me through the gate into the safe, bright streets of Windstown.

They were not as safe as I'd left them. Now the neat rows of redbrick houses had scars. Smoke rose over their shingles, fitful and dirty brown. The shouts of the Windstown fire brigade drifted up behind it: the sunset light had segued into the sooty glow of flames. They lit up paper signs plastered on the scarred concrete walls: row after row of John Balsam's ink-drawn face, with
MISSING
scrawled atop it.