Calan - The Immortality Paradox

Chapter Sixteen: Last of the Aquarians, Part One

Date: 389, OA19,655

Location: Lleno de Vida, Arena, Canol system

Tanwen's power was relentless over Lleno de Vida.

Tendrils of heat rose from the streets. Beams of light reflected from the glass towers. Golden particles of sand dusted the city like the ashes of a burnt civilisation that once was rich. The humidity coiled around every body like the fatal hug of an Acuadros serpent. Vehicles abandoned were bleached of their colours in the sunlight. Apart from the carrion birds, there were no signs of life.

Sand ground underfoot as Sargeant Evans made her way down the Camino Minorista. The faded facades and signage of the retail units appeared mournful, as if desperate for Evans' custom. The public bank, with its formidable, marble entraceway, in laughable irony, had transformed its usual white to gold; blending with the encroaching desert. One of the final store fronts on the street was an old fashion outlet; shards of glass still in place where the windows used to reside. Its contents had been stripped some time ago.

Taking a sharp corner down a descending side street, Evans was reminded of the time she'd spent here as a child, exploring the vibrant city centre for the first time after arriving in an X-Class Draconian Carrier. Gone was the strange shirt and shorts trainee uniform she used to wear on her jaunts. Gone was the LifePort she used to carry around to take snapshots of the quirky sky-high rooftops. Instead she'd daubed her stiflingly black, combat uniform and carried her charged weapon. Gone also was the beautiful sight of the digital billboard hanging on the side of the spa domes in the distance. The one dome had practically vanished beneath a layer of the desert's onslaught and the billboard was nowhere to be seen.

The skeletons of retail structures gradually remodelled into residential houses, four-storeys high. Each were constructed of the same white-painted brick, windows of single-pane glass. The doors and walls now wore a new coat of paint; the scars of dilapidation and vandalism. Childish, incoherent messages had been graffitied across brick and glass alike; the vestiges of a dying culture. Even the houses themselves looked sick in the sun.

The bedridden patient had mentioned the crumbling house under the shadow of an acacia at the heart of La Fuente district. Evans found it and the tree both sizzling in the heat. The trunk of the tree sprouted from a layer of sand in the square, and there was no sign of the beautiful, tesselated pattern of stone on the pedestrianised street. Distant spires of city skyscrapers protruded like metal horns in the background.

Nearby movement caught the Sargeant's eye. A curtain shivered in a window of the house. Keeping to the shadows of the buildings, Evans held her weapon aloft and shouldered her way through an unhinged door. It crashed to the ground, and a frightened child fell backwards over a moth-eaten settee in the corner of a former lounge. Immediately diverting her aim to the floor, she tried reorganising her face into an expression of kindness.

The child could not have been older than ten. A young face that had seen too much already was hidden under a fringe of once-brunette, now chalky-white hair. Dishevelled and cleaven clothes did little to conceal the callused skin of his forerms and the threads of dried blood on his fingers. Fearful eyes watched over the top of the settee as his trembling hands clutched the fabric.

'Please...don't be afraid.' Evans re-attached her weapon to a loop on her uniform and held up her hands to demonstrate harmlessness. The boy did not move, and his blue and bloodshot eyes screamed in terror. 'I'm here to help, I promise. I'm a soldier of the Aquarius Chapter. My job is to protect you. Therefore...I will not hurt you.'

'Anthony?' A voice came from above. Frail and faltering.

The boy's furtive eyes moved from Evans to the nearby stairwell and back. Maintaining her arms up high, she cautiously peered up the stairs. It was dark, and the walls were peeling like dried skin. The wooden steps had been scratched and polished by millions of feet. Looking back at the boy, she saw him eyeing an exit sheepishly.