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About mid-span they came to a place where the roadway had collapsed Cars lay in a twisted heap on the deck below A narrow ledge along the guardrail, four feet wide at thedeal," Alicia said to Soldier "Nothing to it"

The height was irrelevant; it was the water she feared Beyond the edge lay a sing elid with dread, she led Soldier across How strange, she thought, to fear nothing but this

The sun was behind theuided them to street level, into an area of warehouses and factories She re the backbone of the island The nuave way to blocks of apartments and brownstones, interspersed with vacant lots, soles In so up through the manholes Never had Alicia been in such a place; the island’s sheer density astounded her She are of the tiniest sounds anddown the walls of the buildings’ interiors The acrid spore-smell of mold The funk of rot The stench of the city itself, death’s te came on Bats flittered in the sky She was on Lenox Avenue, in the 110s, when a wall of vegetation rose in her path At the heart of the abandoned city, a woodland had taken root, flowering to ht Soldier to a halt and tuned her thoughts to the trees; when the virals came, they came from above It wasn’t her they’d want, of course; Alicia was one of them But there was Soldier to consider She allowed a few o by, and when she was satisfied that they would pass in safety, tapped her heels to his flanks

"Let’s go"

Just like that, the city vanished They could have been in the ht had fallen in full, lit by a waning rind of h to swish against her thighs; then the trees again staked their claiht of stone steps onto Fifty-ninth Street Here the buildings had names Helmsley Park Lane Essex House The Ritz-Carlton The Plaza She jogged east to Madison Avenue and headed south again The buildings grew taller, towering above the roadway; the street numbers continued their relentless decline Fifty-sixth Fifty-first Forty-eighth Forty-third

Forty-second

She disreat towers that surrounded it but with a royal aspect A castle, fit for a king High, arched s gazed darkly upon the street; along the roofline, at the center of the facade, a stone figure stood with his arms outstretched in welco’s face, chiseled in ht, were the words GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL

Alicia, I’lad that you have come

She could feel her brothers and sisters plainly now They were everywhere beneath her, a vast repository curled in slumber in the bowels of the city Did they sense her presence also? There was, Alicia realized, a single hour that all the days since your birth pointed you toward What you thought was a ht beco a road, and when you reached your destination and looked back, only one path--the one chosen for you--was visible

She clipped a rope to Soldier’s bridle Two nights before, camped on the outskirts of Newark, she’d prepared a pine-knot torch Now, crouched on the sidewalk, she shaved a pile of tinder, ignited it with her firesteel, and dipped the end of the torch in the fla it aloft The torch, which would burn for hours, gave off a sht to her chest, then reached her right hand over the opposite shoulder to withdraw her sword froed, hard-tipped, the cords at the handle worn fro for her; it was si its powerher When the ht, Alicia resheathed her weapon and opened the door to the terlass crunched underfoot; she heard the squeaks of rats Ten feet past the door, two options: straight ahead, down a sloping hallway to the station’s lower level, or left, through an arched portal

She went left

Space expanded around her She was in the main room of the station, but it did not seem like a station--athered to coher presence Shafts of h s onto the floor, spreading like a pale yellow liquid The silence was intense; she could hear the blood swishing in her ears Looking up, she sahat she thought was the sky until she realized it was a painting Stars were strewn across the ceiling, and in theirwater from a pitcher