After Fate Fell

25 • ELLA

TITLE CHANGE!
After it All —> After Fate Fell

I just want to give a big shoutout to wqnderlvst for being such an amazing supporter! I love reading their comments on almost every chapter. It makes me smile and I love seeing that people care about all the work I put into this book. Thanks to them and to all of you for reading and supporting!
-Braden
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1 year, 3 months, and 15 days after it all
•ELLA•

We land in Francistown, Botswana at 7:09 am Central Africa Time the next morning. If it weren't for all the adrenaline in my veins, I would have some major jet lag right now. I did get a chance to catch a few hours of sleep on the flight, so that helped too.

Back in Norfolk, Five discovered that the Sahara is mostly rock and gravel, not sand. In fact, only about fifteen percent of the great African desert is sand dunes. Which led us to believe that Legacy is not alluding to the Sahara. Instead, there is another desert, a much smaller desert, in southern Africa, actually, the oldest desert in the world.
The Namib desert, on the southwestern coast of the African continent. "Namib" literally translates to "land of no people", which is the other part of Legacy's description of the place we need to go. So that's where we're headed.
The issue is, even though it may be a much smaller desert than the Sahara, it spans roughly 1,100 miles of coastline, and juts inland into the countries of Namibia, Angola, and South Africa. At least Legacy told me that the depletion source is along the coast, but that still leaves a huge amount of land. We need something else to help narrow the area down, but right now we have nothing and we can't think of anything that could help us.

We climb down the stairs out of the plane and step into a city that looks like any other we've been to before. I try to remember if in all my years of being on Earth I had ever even been somewhere in the giant continent of Africa. Of course, I was just in Morocco a couple days ago, but I'm thinking about before that. Maybe. Everything just blurs together, it's odd that I can't remember something so simple.

"I've been to Mozambique before," Five says, his mind obviously on the same subject as mine. "Beira. It's odd that people think of Africa as an empty wasteland, and that people live only in huts. Beira was just like any other city, tall buildings, vibrant culture, fast-paced life. I only remember a little about it because I was so young, but I remember really liking it there. I forget why we had to leave," he says wistfully, obviously very fond of the memories he had there.

We take a shuttle into the heart of the city. I'm so tired of being in cities, but there's definitely some things that need to be done before we venture off into the desert. We need to stock up on food, water, and supplies. We need to somehow narrow down an area to start searching. We need to contact the others to see where they are.
It's going to take more than just walking off into the desert to kill this thing. We need to think about survival, and then we also need to have transportation. We aren't going on foot, so we need some type of car most likely, unless somehow by chance there's a railroad that goes out into the desert, which is highly unlikely.

We find a little restaurant that sounds good and decide to stop in to sit down and figure stuff out. I'm going to get in contact with the others while we're here.
Once we're seated, we start to discuss everything.

"So what about the others? They don't even know we're here yet," Five says.

"I know. It's been a crazy few hours, and honestly a crazy week at that. I was planning on getting in contact with them as soon as we found somewhere to catch up on everything. Which is here, and now," I tell him. I understand why he's antsy about this, because honestly it does seem a little odd to just board a flight to Botswana without notifying the others. We did only have an hour or so until takeoff time when we realized that Botswana was the flight we needed to take, so we didn't really have much time to think about anything other than getting tickets and boarding.
But now we do. So now it's time to let them know where we are and ask how everything's going. I'm sure that Marina and Nine are either within a few hours of finding Sam, or they've already found him, and I'm hoping that John and Six are done with their little silent treatment now.