Cibola Burn

Across from her, Michaela had her hands over her ears, her mouth open in a shriek that Elvi couldn’t hear. She had thought the rain would be cold, but it wasn’t. The slurry that soaked up on the ruin’s floor was warm and salty, and somehow that was worse. She laced her fingers together, squeezing until her knuckles ached. The mud-thick water filled the air until the spray made it hard to breathe. Someone lurched through the archway to her left, but she could no more make out who than stop the catastrophe by willing it. She felt certain that the ruins would fail, the more-than-ancient walls snap apart, and she and all the rest of them would be thrown into the storm, crushed or drowned or both. All she could think of was being in the heavy shuttle, the confusion and the panic when it was going down, the trauma of the impact. This felt the same, but it went on and on and on until she found herself almost missing the sudden impact of the crash. That, at least, had ended.

She knew that it was daytime, but the only lights were the cold white of the emergency lights and the near-constant barrage of lightning that caught people’s faces like a strobe. A young man, his face set and stony like an image of suffering and endurance. A child no more than eight years old, his head buried in his mother’s shoulder. Wei and Murtry in uniform, standing as close as lovers and shouting into each other’s ears in the effort to be heard, their faces flushed red. The vast shifts of barometric pressure were invisible, but she felt them in the sense of overwhelming illness, of wrongness, that washed through her body. She couldn’t tell if the shaking came from the walls of the storm-battered ruins, more little earthquakes, or her own overloaded nervous system.

At some point, her perception of time changed. She couldn’t say if the storm had been hours or days or minutes. It was like the half-awareness of trauma, the doomed patience of being assaulted and knowing the only thing that would end it was the mercy of the attacker. Now and then, she would feel herself rising to some fuller consciousness, and will herself back into the stupor. Shock. Maybe she was going into shock. Her awareness seemed to blink in and out. She was curled against Fayez, both her hands squeezing at his elbow, and didn’t remember how she’d gotten there. The dark slurry of mud was ankle high all through the ruins, brown and green. She was covered in it. They were all covered in it.

When this is over, I’m going to go back to my hut, take a long bath, and sleep for a week, she thought. She knew it was ridiculous. Her hut would no more have withstood this than a match could stay lit underwater, but she still thought it and some part of her believed it was true. A blinding-bright flash and crackling detonation came almost simultaneously. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and endured.

The first change she noticed was a baby screaming. It was an exhausted sound. She shifted, her shirt and pants soaked and cold and adhering to her skin with the muck. She craned her neck, trying to find where the grating noise was coming from. She felt the thought shifting at the base of her skull before she knew what it was, a surreal lag between the realization and being conscious of it. She could hear a baby crying. She could hear something – anything – that wasn’t the malice and venom of the storm. She tried to stand up, and her legs buckled under her. Kneeling in the muck, she gathered herself, squared her shoulders, and tried again. The rain slanted in through the windows of the ruin, but only at about twenty degrees. It still fell in buckets out of a black sky. The wind gusted and pushed and howled. In any other context, it would have been the teeth of a gale. Here and now, it meant the worst was over.

“Doctor Okoye?”

Murtry’s face was lit from below, the emergency lantern hung over his shoulder. His expression was the same polite smile over sober, focused attention. Her battered mind wondered whether there was anything that could shake the man’s soul, and thought perhaps there wasn’t. She wanted to be reassured by his predictability, but her body wasn’t able to feel comfort. Not now.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” he said, his hand on her shoulder.

She nodded, and when he started to step away, she clutched at him. “How long?”

“The front hit a little over sixteen hours ago,” he said.