Powerless

It began a long time ago

It has been a while after the war. Several decades, but it's difficult to count without clear days or seasons. Some cities still keep on burning, somehow. The pillars of dark smoke are visible on the other islands on the horizon since what now feels like always. It's curious how these flames find fuel when we struggle to find anything combustible or explosive anywhere else.

I was just a small girl when the skies lit up and became veiled in darkness seemingly at the same time. Nothing grows outside to this moment, as despite it being somewhat bright all day and all night no true sunlight ever touched the ground, blocked by the airborne layer of ash. They say in five years it should clear up enough. They say that every five years. Maybe when the cities burn down completely, but they just keep on going.

I miss that, the sunlight. I used to sit in my room for the most time, avoiding the glowing sun and blowing wind, and ironically it might have saved me from the first, the nearest flash. Like in that old joke, the wheel has turned. Now the sun blows and the wind can carry sandstorms, where glow comes from sparks from all the friction.

Maybe it's radioactive, too, but my mom taught me to be careful, distrustful of my intuition saying it should glow. I always carry a necklace made out of a scintillating crystal my mom scavenged and gifted to me for my sixteenth birthday, although nowadays it's much more of a memento than anything useful. Not only it suffered over the years, barely glows at all, but the radiation sources became very rare. Shame. They were useful, especially for an exoskeleton user, like my mom and of course myself. Basic chemistry allows to extract the useful nuclides and use them to power the machines and the more sensible lamps used to grow potatoes. Still, it didn't take long for most of them to simply decay. Maybe it would be better if the army used plutonium instead of rejecting it for safety reasons, mom kept saying.

I remember it very vaguely, when the soldiers descended in these suits of armor. Darkness seemed permanent except for the sky menacingly lighting up in the distance. After a while the constant hum and hiss of stressed buildings and flames became my silence, only disrupted by occasional sounds of metal clashing with metal and roars of the detonations. To this day I reflexively duck and cover when I hear that, even though it's usually just a distant skyscraper finally giving in to fires.

Some of these soldiers were the invaders we could never even recognize. The others were sent to protect us, like Yank. By the end of the week, I woke up to find her lying on the ground in front of her suit. Dead, her face slashed. It surprised me to see she was a woman, as the sheer acoustics of the Machine made her voice sound like a booming demigod. We had no idea what happened at the time, but we had to survive.

I wasn't big enough to use the armor, my mom sure tried to make me take it. She commandeered it and picked up what we nicknamed Claymore; a heavy battle sword very obviously made to cut through solid steel. I got to pick up Blaster, actually a laser rifle that could effectively blind another power suit or painfully scorch someone's face. It was clunky and cumbersome, making me long for a regular gun like from these video games about the third world war, but in real life no one owned that. I had to dispose of it in the end, as it ran on some chemicals we had no way to replace.

We didn't realize it yet, but all other soldiers were by then gone. They all disappeared, leaving behind everyone. Maybe they just fled out of cowardice, unlike Yank, who paid a price for staying. Or maybe they tried to take their battle away from the city, to keep us safe.

Yeah, right.

Mom passed only maybe a decade later, the last couple years being especially turbulent. Protecting our settlement was becoming more difficult not only because others fared even worse than us and wanted to take things from us, but also because both mom and the Machine were getting older. I had to take up the baton. I practiced in the suit before, and I knew its secrets. The darkest and the most important one made it really hard to move. I traded all the scrap I could find for a couple years to train in relative peace before I finally managed to be able to take the next step and pick up a security job.