drunk, stumbling around town asking half-cocked questions about Vampires wasn’t helping anyone.
I crushed three empty packs of Clayfields as I searched for something in the house to stop the hammers dancing in my head. I checked under the desk and in the dustbin. No luck.
I looked in the mirror. A mistake. An impressionist painter had tried to do my portrait while riding a runaway carriage. None of the cuts were seeping or bleeding but the bruises had moved in. It looked like someone had stuffed a bunch of opals under my skin while I slept.
I mopped at the crusted blood that had collected in the corners of my eyes and mouth. I ran a comb through my haggard mop of hair and brushed my busted teeth and gums. Half an hour later, I still looked like a bucket of shit, I just had a cleaner bucket.
Thunder rolled through the bricks of the old building. The floorboards shivered, the gutters shrieked and the fixtures jangled in their sockets. I opened the Angel door and the wind tried to push me back into bed.
It was stupid to think of her at that moment. What could I do if the storm wanted to try to take her down? Heading up to the old mansion wouldn’t do anything for anyone.
But I already knew I wouldn’t be able to help it. I found some clean, dry clothes and headed out the door.
CONDEMNED.
Red tape was stretched across the rusted gates.
CONDEMNED.
The sign on the fence said that the site was due for demolition. I pulled it off to read the print but my eyes stopped on the logo at the top of the page.
I found the business card in my pocket. The one given to me by the cheesy developer who wanted me to kick all the Dwarven steelworkers out on their asses.
The logo on the card was the same.
I tore away the tape and slid inside but the pot and the key and Amari were all untouched. She was still sitting there, in her place, right where she should always be. For ever. I marched north to make sure it would stay that way.
Nobody believed that Sunder would survive the Coda. The fires died in an instant. Without the flames, Sunder had nothing. No power. No industry. No heating. Nothing to trade and no way to go on. A good chunk of the city died in the first month. The poor went cold and hungry in their homes and the rich took their carriages out to the wilderness to search for medicine or magic to try to change things back.
The Governor never returned, and most of the other Ministers had enough money to leave town. To their merit, some of the police stayed. Once they’d adapted to their new bodies and patched up their pride, they were the first to hit the streets and try to bring some order to the city. Then suddenly one morning, we had a Mayor.
Henry Piston was a Human; a hard-faced businessman who came to Sunder a few years before it fell. His trade was meat. With trucks and trains and wagons, Piston would provide the chicken, buffalo and bison to the hungry stomachs of the city.
Luckily for him, all the animals he farmed had no magic in their genetic make-up. The abattoirs were Human-run, non-magic machines that only took a little post-Coda calibration to get working again. He had no horses, but the biggest of the bison were saved from slaughter and employed to pull the wagons instead. So, before we had salad or new clothes or hot water, we had steak and hearty soup on every street. For most of us, that was about the best Mayor we could imagine.
Word still hadn’t spread about exactly what happened or why the world had died the way it did. Blame was thrown in all directions and, as usual, the politicians in power got a lot of the blame. The missing Governor Lark had spent taxpayers’ money on his own mansion and countless other luxuries. Many believed it was the choices made by greedy governments that caused the world to crumble. Therefore, Piston thought it would be wise to distance himself from the previous leader.
He shunned the marble mansion and instead took over two manors at the top of the city. He made one his home and the other his office: colossal brick buildings built by the greatest masons around, with wooden interiors that never seemed to age.
On the hill beside the