At the grated bottom of the bowl, where corpses collect and melt to the river below in fat rotting chunks, I lie back and watch the other figures-the ones that are not prisoners here. Some even cling to the bars above, faces turned up and gasping at the slash of rain like monstrous white koi biting at the surface for food. Their instinct is to huddle, to hide, but where? Cruel, cornerless world. Prisoners scatter in orbit around me, hopelessly purposeful. A whisper leaps up-a single ember, and everywhere it touches: conflagration. Somewhere high-even higher than the spires of the plaza-comes the sounds of thunder, a great clearing of the throat. A prison without walls confinement without bounds. It is the most famous-and the cruelest-of the oubliettes of the Fifth Sovereign. I simply persist, each day an echo, huddled with prisoners and grimmer things in this massive stone bowl beneath the Judicial Plaza. Only in the ensuing silence did the city’s outer wall-stubbornly rooted into the rock face, protecting only smoke and emptiness-collapse. All filled with screams-I still hear them, especially the children-as everything plunged to the valley floor and shattered. The cluster of government offices that had inspired us to kill the city in the first place. Only a storm of cobbles, and they landed like hailstones.īuildings followed. The ghost city tilted as it fell, barely enough to see through the black spots burned into my retinas, then the streets divorced and the illusion was broken. I have memorized every single one-that ghost of the city, the amputated walkways and avenues backlit by the fading orange blooms of our bombs.īy my side, someone whose face I can no longer see whispered, “It’s beautiful.” For a heartbeat they retained their shapes, their curves, their intersections. When the city of Amarana fell, broken from the cliffside like a docked tail, its cobbled streets fell first.
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