When the World Goes Cold

Chapter 4

Day one had been slow. Once the sun's belly dragged along the ground, we came out of the crumbled tattoo parlor and started our trip. I went ahead, eyes slowly roaming across the trees towering on our right side. Forests were harder to see into, and that showed in how caution held my pace back. No one raised a question. Guess they took Marshall's words to heart.

And maybe it wasn't just caution, because even after the sun got pulled under the horizon, I went as slow. Maybe the weight chained through my chest and wrapped around my ankles was fear. That would explain the figures I saw lunging at us from the edges of my vision, which always dove aside when I looked head on; why I didn't protest when, after a few hours, the others were ready to toss it in. I stayed up the whole time, just the wind alive with me during the void when it wasn't quite night or day, when the world was light enough to see the shadows dancing but not enough to dispel them back into the ground.

Day two went faster. Sleep deprivation had to do with it, but with Alina behind me, I couldn't help how my spine tensed with each of her footsteps or that my thoughts were only centered on how vulnerable I was.

We made it to the interstate, filled with the skeletons of cars that long had their parts ripped off, at sunset. Kősdre towered in the distance, reflecting the orange light as if it was its own sun. A fog oozed from the city itself, and we soon set up camp in a trailer that was only filled with the shards of its own windows.

Now, on the final day, that same cold wind which gripped my bones at night continued into the afternoon. Though it wasn't exactly the start of fall, it didn't normally get such a bitterness so soon, when the trees still were more crimson than bark.

A wrinkled mass of gray leather fell into my arms.

I unfolded the jacket, pausing at the corduroy collar, torn from when I'd left it on the Alex's floor and her dog got a hold of it.

"This is mine."

Atlas nodded. They had held onto their silence for the whole trip, and it seemed like they would keep doing it.

I dropped my backpack onto my arm so I could secure it between the straps.

The downtown exit sign laid across the ramp itself, cars piled on top of each other like the body mountains Orphans would build just to burn. Looking beyond it, Kősdre's corpse splayed out, the same shade of brown as the mountains which had been used to build it. Some skyscrapers reflected broken flashes of sunlight, while others were hollow and dark, propped up by unrelenting steel beams driven through them, almost parading how dead the city was.

"Nat, you been here before?" Alina asked."Yeah."

"I thought so, since you refused to look for any signs."

Emilian laughed.

"It would've been a waste of time. I know the way."

She shook her head. "You know the inside, too?"

"Yes. Well."