But she wasn’t sure about that now.
She stood in the middle of a street in a huge ville, a cancerous orange sun hanging overhead and peering fitfully through layers of indigo-and-charcoal clouds. Wags lined the streets, some of them resting against one another where they’d wrecked.
White-gray ash overlay everything like a blanket of snow. It was inches thick in places, piled deep on the wags, against the tall buildings, strewed across the bloated corpses. Tiny breezes carried whirling ash dervishes yards away. Nothing lived.
Krysty tried to stop her movement, struggled to stop walking through the deathscape rendered in ash and pain around her. But she couldn’t; in the twisted nightmare, Phlorin controlled her body. Instead, Krysty turned her efforts to waking. She reached out for Ryan, feeling the emptiness that was there. Only the old woman living in the back of her brain didn’t allow her to maintain that sensation.
This is your legacy, Phlorin said.
Not mine, Krysty argued.
You can’t walk away from this. The Chosen are here to know.
To know what? Krysty scanned the death and destruction that lay in all directions around her. Despite all her experience with sudden death, with all the forms it could manifest itself in, these sights left her cold. There had been, she knew, life there in those streets only hours ago.
Now it was all gone.
She strode by a young man lying in the street, brickwork smashed around him from the nearby building. The swirling ash partially covered his face, but it hadn’t completely filled in his open mouth or the gaping eye socket. His limbs were twisted mockeries of anything human, the flesh burned from them in places from a searing heat.
To know what was here before, Phlorin answered her question.
What was where?
Here. In Deathlands before it became called Deathlands.
If you can remember all of this, why can’t you remember anything further back?
I can. I have the memories of my sisters to rely on.
The sensation of movement left Krysty dizzy. The scene before her blurred and changed. In moments, she seemed to be standing on the same street—or one like it—before the nukecaust had erupted and changed it forever.
The street was alive with movement and throbbed with an incessant noise like Krysty had never heard before. Wags raced along the street in both directions, clustered more tightly than an anthill, and people flowed along the sidewalks in dresses and clothing Krysty had seldom seen.
What is this place? Krysty asked.
A ville called Seattle. In its day, it was one of the largest villes in the predark times. It was drank down during the quakes that took the western coast.
How do you know about it? Krysty had seen fragments of vids concerning the ville. She’d even read about it in movie books that had survived the nukecaust and the intervening century. But never in all the vids and the images the books stirred up in her imagination had the ville ever seemed like this. She felt claustrophobic, lost amid the crush of people and wags, the noise and the smoke that burned the back of her throat.
One of the Chosen, an ancestor of mine, lived here at the time.
Krysty reached out for one of the people walking past her, wrapping her hand around the wrist of a man in a sharply fitted dark blue suit. She was surprised to realize she’d touched flesh over hard bone.
The man turned and gazed at her, cocking his head to one side. “Can I help you, miss?”
“No,” Krysty told him. “No, thank you. I’m quite all right.”
The man appeared uncertain for a moment, then moved on, rejoining the thronging flock that trudged along the sidewalk. She watched him go with mixed emotions.
How can you remember this? she asked.
Our memories go back generations. Our biggest concerns aren’t how we remember, but how is it you don’t.
No one can remember like this, Krysty protested.
We do.
How?
Someone has to keep records. Someone must learn the truth.
The truth of what?
Of how all this came to be, Phlorin said.
It happened because of the nukes, Krysty replied. Governments stocked them before skydark. More than enough to kill the world a hundred times over.