The Everburning City

Interlude I, Worse than the Wait

Candice

The train clacked like a frightened metronome, the regular clicking just a little too quick to match up with the seconds. Like the engine itself was eager to flee.

Candice sat by herself at the end of a long bench, her hands folded on her lap and her forehead nearly resting on her thumbs. She let her body rock with the sway of the train as it turned off one of the causeways and followed the wall.

All the while, she sat and waited for her thoughts to finally follower her off the last wall. Off the wall, and the people she felt she had left behind.

Roderick's smile kept reappear in her thoughts. Vividly, like being able to just look up at a painting on the wall. His slightly crooked smile, where the left side of his mouth came up a little higher than his right, and his one eye squinted ever so slightly, etched in her thoughts as clearly as her own hands.

Gwen's stupid hat, faded and crumpled, the brim unable to sit straight, and the crown slightly lumpy from where she had put her fist into it. The sight of her standing against the Gloam, torch in hand, was nearly as clear in Candice's thoughts as Roderick's smile.

The soldiers that came to help them. Hendricks, with that airy accent she recognized in her own voice. Mildred, missing a sleeve and her pouches heavy with tools. Darius, swarmed by the dead puppets the Gloam made. And Valen Redgrave, who became their walls when the Gloam came.

They were gone, now. Left behind to wait for a strike team of Crafters. And as the miles wound on, she became more and more convinced that she would never see any of them again.

"We're two minutes from Wanderwisp!" someone called out. Candice raised her head up and out of her melancholy, in order to listen. "Soldiers to your muster points. Prisoners from the work camps, you'll report to the platform twenty-two for a ride the rest of the way to the City."

The voice was familiar, it took Candice a moment to remember. The captain of the company that nearly murdered Valen's group. Last name Orelli, Candice hadn't heard anyone use her first name yet. "Have your personal belongs with you when the train stops, these cars are being commandeered. Medics from the Bureau of Health and Public Safety will be at the platform waiting."

Candice nodded, and clutched her bag. But even as she watched Captain Orelli pass by, the soldier wouldn't willingly look her in the eyes. Every time there was even so much as a risk of it, Orelli would look away, or find something interesting on the floor.

None of the soldiers would look her in the eyes.

So after the captain passed, Candice spun in her seat, and watched the train approached the settlement of Wanderwisp.

There were few things this bright, so far from the City. With fifty thousand people, and the infrastructure and industry that was built around them, the stone towers rising up to reach above the walls glowed. Orange light haloed buildings and lined the streets. From what Candice could remember of her history lessons, Wanderwisp was only a little smaller than the entire City when the Gloam first reached it.

A hiss and a screech shattered the silence, and shook Candice out of her quiet stupor. She rocked with the train as the brakes pulled the train to a slow stop.

Through the window, Candice could see a small crowd of people waiting. All of them were dressed in white, immaculate white that Candice hadn't seen in nearly half a year. In the City, with the dust and ash that was always falling, only two groups were ever seen wearing clean white clothes.

The privileged of high society; bureau chiefs and assistants, Parliamentarians and experts, the people regarded as important enough to live in the sky gardens of High Central, in the heart of the city. They wore white as a status symbol, proof of how high they had risen from dirt and work.