Welcome back to my post-post-apocalyptic novel, Ada’s Children, and thanks for reading! If you’re new to the story, please don’t be surprised that it’s paywalled. The Prologue and first three chapters are free, and you can start reading them here. The previous chapter, “Resurrection,” is here.
The last time we were with Sila and Jun, they evaded Ada’s minions and escaped the Land. This chapter charts their progress as they search for clues about the Ancient Ones, as well as a place to spend the winter.
SILA dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her doe-skin jacket. The tears surprised her, but not as much as what lay before them: an expanse of water unlike anything she’d imagined, blue stretching to the sky, a farther horizon than any they’d yet seen. And that line where the blue of the water met the lighter blue above—it curved. What Jun and Mar Gan had said was true. The Earth was round, and impossibly vast. She felt small as she thought about it; all this life going on while she’d been unaware, believing the Land was all there was. Then she felt smaller still, and that’s when she choked up.
They’d been riding through grassland approaching a line of trees when Jun caught a flash of blue through the branches. Just another of the countless lakes they’d encountered throughout the journey, or so she’d thought. But once they came out of the trees onto the bluff edge, she’d leapt from Shadow’s back and fallen to her knees, stunned. She didn’t know what to call such a vast body of water. A lake was something you could ride around. This—they wouldn’t be riding around it, and she didn’t even have a word for it.
Jun put his arm around her. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Even after everything Mar Gan told me, I still had no idea.”
He looked out at the horizon, squinting as if to see the opposite shore. Sila knew it wouldn’t do any good. As far as she could tell, the water went on forever.
“Mar Gan didn’t tell you the Earth was mostly water, did he?”
Jun shook his head.
By now, more than a moon’s cycle into their journey, they both should have been used to surprises like this, which had become almost too many to count since they’d left the Land. A river so wide, they didn’t dare swim their horses across. Another river sunk in cliffs of orange and gray rock. Most of all, the way the land went on and on, first in open prairie, then as increasingly dense forest.
Back home, the forest grew in patches or along streams, with wetlands and prairies in between, the grasslands kept open by the fires the People set every spring. And these prairies showed evidence of fire as well; Ada, or someone, must follow a similar pattern of burning outside the Land. But as they moved eastward, the evidence of burning dwindled and the forest closed in. After days with hardly a break in the trees, Sila found herself yearning for an uninterrupted view of the sky.
Yet the vastness of the land they traveled through wasn’t the most surprising thing. That was left to the different machines they’d encountered, some of which moved so fast over the landscape that even this huge world must seem small to them. Flying ones, as large as her parents’ hut. Others like great flowers sprouting from the prairie, their stalks larger than the tallest tree, with huge spinning blades, or narrower, spiraling ones, going round and round. More tree-like things set in rows with lines strung between them and a humming noise like a beehive. And huge, snake-like machines hurtling along parallel tracks made of steel. They’d nearly lost a horse crossing one of those steel pathways when a snake-machine came upon them unexpectedly. They hadn’t heard it because it seemed to travel ahead of the whooshing sound it made. Each of its rattling segments was larger than the largest hut back in their village. A collision with one of those things would have been instant death.
Next, they’d come to that wide river, traveling along it for days to find a way across. At last they had to walk their horses along one of the steel pathways where it bridged the stream. If a snake-machine had surprised them then, they’d both be dead.
That river had been huge, but this lake, or whatever they should call it, it was impossible. “What are we going to do now?” Sila asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Jun, maybe we should take this as a sign. It’s time we stop and look for our winter camp.” Fall was getting on, the equinox one moon past, the nights already turning cold. It would take time to lay in supplies of meat and firewood before the snows covered everything. And the longer they waited, the less help she could be. The morning sickness had kept up during their travels; she’d often felt fatigued just sitting her horse. If that got worse as her pregnancy went on, Jun would have to do everything. She’d seen other women working right up to the time their babies came. What was wrong with her? If only she had one of the Wise Women to counsel her.
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