The teacher’s wing was dim, the faded yellow safety lights shadowing a figure sitting againt Tei’s door. “This is not where I expected you to be.” Nadja leaned her head back against the door, meeting Elana’s gaze. “I couldn’t sleep in the room you gave me.  I came here, but she didn’t answer.”  Elana knew [...]

It was almost midnight and the Common House administrator was in bed, but still awake.  A half-full mug of tea sat cold on her nightstand next to the oil lamp she’d lit when the electric power from the building’s atomic battery turned off at nine.  She shifted against the pillow propped behind her back, causing [...]

“I thought you lookouts were supposed to be preternaturally alert.”  Tei’s voice brought Nadja awake.  She half-stretched in the chair, but remained lounging, watching her friend bustle about the small room. “Ah yes.  But I’m off-watch now, just a regular person.”  Nadja saw Tei glancing at the bag of market goods she’d thrown on the [...]

Nadja glanced back at the tower only once as she walked into the village.  She knew off-watches were to prevent lookouts from going stir-crazy, to remind them who they were protecting and to keep them from becoming too isolated and insular.  Like princes in a tower, she thought.  More imagery from Tei’s stories, found in [...]

A lot of people more or less liked being on watch and just as many hated the mandatory shift every adult had to serve in rotation.  Tei was ambivalent.  There were regular lookouts, of course, people who thrived on the isolation and adrenaline, but even they wanted some time off to go about the village.  [...]

Mildreth’s family kept a building that was half-business, half-home, with an upper balcony crowded with toys, chairs and Mildreth’s easel shading customers eating below on the patio.  The food was monastically simple, a no-nonsense leavened bread and a stew that’d been going for so long it was a perfectly balanced medley of ambrosia.  If a [...]

Hanging the smoking oil lamp on a hook by the door, Tei switched on her torch before entering the master computer room.  It still boggled her, that this thing had once actually been a master, instead of a neutered central point for the handful of pre-fall cameras, recorders and handhelds found by the village while [...]

    Johnnie stood in his garden and tried to see the hills.  The fog was up, making the western boundary a towering dark smear in a light grey wall.  Between him and the hills were a hell of a lot of other buildings, but his family’s place was taller than most and the hulking view [...]

    There were more than a thousand gardens, of course.  The place that became the Five Cities was built on the skeleton of a forest and haunted by its fecund past.  It was lush with a flamboyant excess of greenspace, laid out and continually added to in an attempt to appease the leafy fates.  But [...]

    Bliss was pretty goddamn bored.  She was pretty fucking bored.  She was goddamned, fucking bored because she’d recently learned how cool it was to swear and her parents had moved the family to the Five Cities.  It wasn’t just that they’d left the East, where she had perfectly good friends, but they’d moved to [...]