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, “The Left Behind,” is here.
The last time we were with Sila and Jun, they found their path southeastward blocked by a vast body of water, larger than anything they would call a lake. Now they’ve turned south, making one last try at finding living remnants of the Ancient Ones. If they don’t find anything by the new moon, Jun promised Sila they would begin looking for a place to spend the winter. But now their path leads them into an increasingly inhospitable urban ruin.
SILA and Jun continued south along the vast lake the next day. But as much as they tried to stay near the shore, they soon ran into the remains of another village of the Ancient Ones, with rubble and other wreckage right down to the water. They moved inland, then followed a steel pathway south. Several of the snake-machines passed going both directions, but if anyone, whether machine or human, was on board to see them, they gave no sign. One of the snake-machines carried small balls of brown metal that fell off as the machine rattled along the tracks. Jun picked up a handful of these, rolled them around for a bit, then put them in the pouch he wore at his side.
The next day they spotted a line of trees along a small river west of the pathway. They followed that south, the rubble of the Ancient Ones closing in on both sides, Sila’s sense of unease growing as their path narrowed. Now she wished they were back in the dense forest she’d once hoped to escape.
On a bluff above the river, they came to the most tangled litter of metal debris they’d found yet. It looked like a giant had twisted the steel pathways into elaborate swirling shapes that soared through the air, but then had smashed them to pieces. Twisted loops of weathered metal hung from rotted supports. But there were new machines here as well, some cutting the lengths of steel apart with what looked like fire, others hoisting the cut lengths onto other machines.
Day by day the river grew bigger, and so did the evidence of a huge village of the Ancient Ones. The river had been spanned in many places, and the broken rubble and rusted remains of these bridges often blocked their path. And always from the banks above came the sound of machines tearing at the old structures.
They came to a prairie filled with ruined machines unlike those they’d seen before, long metal tubes, three or four times as tall as a person, with appendages on either side that reminded Sila of the fletching on her arrows—or the wings of a bird.
“Those must be the flying machines Mar Gan told me about,” Jun said. They were far larger than any of the machines they’d spotted flying through the air. No one was flying these. People might have built this world, but now the machines ruled. Here, too, the machines were taking it all to pieces, smaller ones moving about among the metal bodies and wings. “Ada is tearing apart the world left by the Ancient Ones.”
“But why?”
“Maybe they’re doing the same thing we did with that piece of toothed metal, turning it to other uses.”
It was as good an explanation as any, but they had no way of knowing for sure. Only the Ancient Ones or Ada herself could tell who had built these old machines, what they were for, or what the new machines were doing with them; there seemed little likelihood of encountering either.
They turned to leave that scene behind but brought up short.
Eastward, toward the water, ruins of buildings dotted the skyline, crumpled metal lattices with the gray of an overcast sky showing through the gaps. But there were other metal things as well, looking more like trees than buildings, with long arms sticking out sideways, slowly swinging this way and that.
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