Trapped

We received no formal send-off: everyone else was searching for Sebastian. Opal had rallied all available staff and faculty to scour the immediate neighborhood for signs of the boy. The grooms who saddled our horses were in a hurry to join the hunt-they hung around long enough to make sure we got mounted, then hastened into the night. Heaven knows why they were so eager to blunder through the muddy countryside; maybe they just wanted to get it over with, so they could then return to bed.

Whatever the explanation, we were left alone in the stable yard-dark except for the stars and a torch-sized flame sitting on the Caryatid's shoulder like a parrot. None of us believed this was just a quick trip to the lake. We were embarking on a quest; who knew when or if we'd return?

It was Pelinor who finally broke the silence. "There's no reason to be glum," he said. "We aren't heroes, are we?"

Impervia lifted an eyebrow. "What do you mean by that?"

"Well…" He gave his mustache a suck. "Quests go one of two ways: either the company dies off one by one until the hero is left to save the world single-handed; or everyone else survives and it's the hero who has to make a tragic sacrifice at the end." He looked around at our company. "Since nobody here shows heroic promise, perhaps we'll all come out of this with our skins intact."

"Unless," said Impervia, "God intends to demonstrate that everyone has the potential for heroism. In that case, each of us will be tested to the utmost… and we shall live or die accordingly."

"I'm a teacher," Myoko muttered. "I give tests, I don't take them."

Impervia attempted to blister Myoko with a haughty look. In our holy sister's worldview, no one was immune to the occasional pop quiz administered by heaven.

"Of course," I said, "there's always the chance we won't be bound by the stereotypes of bedtime stories-that things will unfold, devoid of meaning, because we're living in real life!"

Annah, who'd slipped her horse beside mine, gave me the ghost of a smile… but the Caryatid gasped in shock. "Phil," she said, "this isn't real life. This is a quest."

I hoped she was joking; but I couldn't tell for sure.

The main road to Dover-on-Sea was an OldTech asphalt highway, cracked with age and lined with the shadowed hulks of collapsed buildings. Close to town, the buildings were mostly houses: shoddily constructed things, thrown up four hundred years ago when Simka was going through a period of overoptimistic expansion. Armies of aluminized clapboard had marched past the town limits into the countryside, wasting prime farmland; then a few years later, the people in those houses turned tail and ran… most of them heading for outer space, courtesy of the League of Peoples.

The subdivisions fell empty. The townhouses just fell.

I don't think it happened quickly-first the roofs sprang leaks, then the interior wood and plaster began to rot. Birds and mice and carpenter ants took turns nibbling holes for nests. Heavy winter snowfalls made the crossbeams sag; heavy spring rains undermined the foundations; heavy summer thunderstorms blew off shingles and siding; heavy autumn melancholy leached away whatever survival instincts the houses could muster as they slowly crumbled away.

A century of that, and Simka's version of suburbia was fit only for wrens and raccoons. Three centuries more and you could barely recognize the houses at all… but in places, one could still see concrete steps with rusty metal railings leading up to doors that weren't there, and netless basketball hoops standing on poles in the middle of tumble-down trash warrens.

Farther out in the country, the houses were mostly intact: farmers had occupied nearly every OldTech residence and they kept their homesteads in good repair. Admittedly, the houses didn't contain much of their original building materials-everything had been replaced over the past four centuries, except for hardy components like flagstones-but they were still standing in one piece, more or less on the sites where they were first constructed.

Therefore, if you saw a collapsed building in the country, it wasn't a house. It might be an OldTech diner with a paintless tin sign creaking rustily in the wind… or a country church with its spire toppled onto its briar-patch graveyard… perhaps an aluminum barn that once enclosed millions of snow-white mushrooms, still harboring mushroom descendants under heaps of debris.