The cells of Lalibela’s wings glittered like mirror shards. Urszula rode tall in her saddle, silhouetted against the sun, wild hair whipping in the turbulence.
My chest clamped tight as I watched them dwindle in the sky. Here I was again, watching her leave, acutely aware that every glimpse might be my last. Why it stung so much to see her go, baffled me. Was I that scared of being alone?
I turned and clambered up into the ruins, looking for a place where the Old Ones didn’t lay quite as thickly. But those damned mummies were everywhere.
A human femur, bleached white, protruded from a slough. Knuckle bones lay strewn in the dry groove of a drainage channel. Apparently not all bodies were preserved.
Most of the mummies were tucked away in pleasant little nooks with pretty views, as if these people knew what was happening to them and had time to seek out cozy places to settle into for eternity. The bones, in contrast, were dispersed more randomly, pinned under blocks, often with skulls crushed and limbs shattered. These were obviously victims of violence.
Other signs of calamity riddled these ruins. Slabs upended or torn out of walls. Fractured and toppled columns. Spherical pocks and pits gouged into massive flagstones, their bottoms retaining bits of pulverized stone.
The damage looked far from recent. Thick-stemmed, bonsai-like shrubs grew from some of the cracks. Ferns took advantage of the moisture that collected in the deeper pits.
War must have stricken this place sometime after many of the Old Ones had already begun to enter their long sleep. Given the newness of Frelsi, it had to have involved Dusters fighting Dusters. This wasn’t totally unexpected, given what Urszula had told me, but it sure was disappointing.
I sat down on a sun-warmed block of stone overlooking the lower terraces. A spring trickled nearby, its musical gurgle calming to my nerves.
Sleepily, I admired an ivied wall that supported the next terrace. In its diversity, it reminded me of one of those living billboards that were gaining popularity in cities around the world—vertical landscapes planted with grasses and shrubs whose diverse colors and textures created an artistic effect.
An eye blinked at me from behind the greenery.
“Gah!” I lurched back, sliding off the stone, landing hard on my elbow.
A mummy sat upright on a bench-like ledge at the base of the wall, peering through the draping foliage.
I got up and moved away but something about this one made me do a double-take. And then it hit me. Those heavy-lidded eyes and that rotund face made him a dead ringer for Mr. Ortiz, the guy who had tended the gardens of some of our wealthier neighbors back in Ft. Pierce.
Mr. O had always been kind to me. I had known him since I was a little thing. He would see me playing in the backyard and bring over toads and interesting beetles for me to see. Every baseball, Frisbee or water rocket that went astray, he would retrieve and return, always with a kindly smile and never a sharp word. He even taught me how to make screech whistles out of grass blades.
This mummy’s resemblance to Mr. O was uncanny even through that grey blotchiness that all Dusters sported and all the withering and weathering he had suffered from being exposed to the elements for so long.
I knew it couldn’t actually be him. Mr. Ortiz had a thin corona of fuzz surrounding his bald spot. This guy had a full head of crusted and matted hair. So maybe he wasn’t an exact replica, but if he wasn’t so gray, he could have passed as the real Mr. O’s brother.
I couldn’t help being drawn to him, desperate as I was for any semblance of familiarity in this world. That placid, half-smile, sad but kindly, was so like Mr. O’s, it disarmed me.
