Descending Star

REUNION

Rex sat on fallen concrete, from a sundered retaining wall, partially buried in newly settled earth. He numbly listened to the national civil alert system on a wind-up short wave radio, a superfluous litany of the disaster. He sat on the former promontory of the expedition camp, which had flattened and merged with the prevailing landscape. With his own eyes he could see that the surrounding city had been leveled in every direction by the eight point four magnitude earthquake. He could not see a single electrical light, all the way to the horizon, not even emergency vehicles.

He sat on the earthquake's epicenter. He knew it, and so did the host country's disaster response authority. They would be here soon, most likely by air, and he knew that he had to leave. He waited only for Emelia. Colleen was lost, too, but this didn't concern him at all.

He had already cleaned up the remnants of their mess. Whatever freight trucks had failed to clear the area in the last hour prior to the disaster, he had destroyed and buried, along with whatever lingering artifacts he had found. The adamantium shards, especially, he had destroyed in a fire hot and intense enough for the job.

In the course of the cleanup, he had bumped into Sergei, who'd been aiding two crippled men to a truck, one on each shoulder, each man horribly contused and bloodied. Rex had offered to help find survivors. Sergei had spat at him, as the prelude to a breathless rant in Russian. Rex couldn't speak Russian, but he had understood Sergei well enough, without a translator.

Less than half of the workers at Dig One, three hundred forty feet deep, had made it out before Cythæra had plummeted down the mile-deep mineshaft like a gravity bomb, to detonate at bedrock and pulverize every iteration of Eden to arise in the past forty thousand years.

Rex wanted to imagine that she had blown herself to bits in the process, but he knew that he couldn't hope for that.

The deaths at the expedition site paled next to the carnage wrought across the countryside. The shortwave radio dutifully reported preliminary numbers. One hundred fifty thousand confirmed dead and climbing by the hour, six hundred thousand injured, seven million homeless and displaced. Those were the people accounted for. It would take weeks to tally the missing.

Rex had lost his humanity a century ago, but nevertheless he keeled over and wretched into the dirt.

A bone-white fist punched through the unsettled shale and clay at his feet. Emelia soon followed, blackened with grime and naked, her clothes long gone.

"My sentiments exactly," she muttered. Apparently she had heard his bilious expectoration from below-ground.

He removed his jacket and tossed it to her. She put the jacket on as she balanced atop the fallen concrete and surveyed Rex's cleanup job. Not an intact truck or artifact in sight, nothing left for looters to find, not that the absence would deter them. She also registered the hot remnants of the sodium fire and its sickly sweet ash, all that was left of the burned artifacts.

"No survivors," she said with disgust.

Rex told her that the authorities would still search. She expected he was right. Sergei had greased wheels all the way from this minor principality to the nation's capital. Bureaucrats at all levels had known the gist of their operations, and they would come looking for someone to blame, if nothing else. She had also gone below in search of lingering evidence. It was all gone. Dig One had collapsed into the subterranean aquifers below it. Even if the ruins of the city were razed and replaced by an open pit mine, the city of Cythæra's childhood would never be found.

"And what about the older walls?" Rex demanded. "What about the city on the river?" He referred to the first city, a mile below the alluvial plain, the place from forty thousand years ago, from before the Ice Age, where they had found the first walls of Eden.