The Collapse

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Darius lay face down, pressed through weeds that had crumbled the asphalt of what had once been a parking lot. Make yourself small—even smaller than you are. With luck, the weeds would hide his slight frame from the eyes of the Peaks and from his death, his slow agonizing death, should just one of them spot him from a perch somewhere high in the towers that surrounded him.

The towers. The tuneless wind whipping through forty or fifty stories of windows that time and vandals had shattered haunted him whenever he entered the city. It was always different in pitch or intensity, but it never yielded to silence. The rooms it poured through were empty now, the corridors deserted, the contents looted. Some ductwork remained, exposed when the wind ripped down the ceiling tiles, crashing them onto the floors only to be swept by the ever-present gale out the windows onto the streets below, streets that were vacant except for desultory Peak patrols.

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