Shards and Ashes

that she was flying to Germany with him.

But it didn’t make sense that in eight short years, the world had fallen completely apart. First everyone talked about fuel reserves and no TV, no grid, no net, and very few people. It was as if things were melting. Evaporating. As if the world itself was losing time—or running out of it.

They climbed. She looked down at the coastline. The ocean and sky were the same color. Skyscrapers had collapsed. Streets were broken up. There were no birds. Her mother was buried somewhere below her, in a grave not far from their house because, without transportation, they couldn’t get her to a graveyard.

Her throat tightening, she brushed tears from her eyes and focused, trying to see her mother’s grave in her mind. What she saw was her mother’s face, deep black; her lips, so brown, pulled back from white teeth in a smile.

Her throat tightened. She gripped the armrest so hard the beds of her fingernails stung.

“Why did I come with you?” she asked him through tears.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Why did I come get you?”

Hours later, they began their descent through a sky the color of old copper. The sun was beginning to set. Snow was falling onto skeletons of trees and vast deadfalls. Anticipation skittered through her as his castle came into view. It sat on a hill, as he had said. Half of it had been destroyed; the other half rose into the aged, metallic sky.

They landed and rolled to a stop. Alex had explained that he’d been adopted by a wealthy couple named Aaron and Maria Cohen. They had been on a trip to Greece when the Collapse occurred. That was what he called it. Explosions, earthquakes, riots. Eight years of looking for them. Finally he’d found a key, and then a bank safe- deposit box. There were his adoption papers, saying that he had been born in a town called Ritterburg, in the heart of the Black Forest. He’d lived in the castle for three months before he’d come to get Dana.

“Here we are,” he said, sounding nervous.

Alex had brought a little foldable ladder. She didn’t really need it. As she climbed down, he retrieved her suitcase and his black duffel. A gritty brown wind brushed over her. Strips of faded blue cloth dangled from flagpoles at the top of the castle, and somewhere a hinge squeaked back and forth in the bitter wind.

Neither one of them spoke as he led the way to the castle. With his long coat and boots, he looked like Neo from The Matrix. There were patches of snow on the ground. They were gray and they kind of smelled, but it was the first snow she had ever seen.

Alex put his hand on the small wooden door cut into the larger, older door, to push it open. The rectangle of wood hung in the air for a second, then disintegrated, falling to the snow in a heap of fine ash. He pulled back his hand and stared at the space where the door had been.

“Shit,” he said. “Things are getting worse.”

“No kidding,” she murmured.

He crossed the threshold, and she reluctantly—so very reluctantly—followed him in. There wasn’t much left. No roof, piles of stone and rubble, blackened walls stretching up hundreds of feet.

“I’ve got all the stuff in my room,” he said. “Books, research.”

Her cheeks warmed. “Do I have a room?”

“Ja.” His smile stretched into a grin. “Just across the hall from mine.”

“You were pretty sure of yourself when you came to find me,” she muttered, crossing her arms over her chest. She didn’t like this place. Things were tapping for her attention just beneath her consciousness, whispering just a little too softly for her to hear.

He looked over at her. “I cast a lot of magics to find you, Dana. I didn’t know if you would come, but I wanted to make sure you would feel welcome.”

“You could just work a spell on me,” she said. “The way you did back in LA.”

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I wasn’t proud of it.”

His manga-man black coat billowed around his legs as he crossed the marble floor. Most of the black-and- white squares had been smashed. He led her down a narrow passage bordered on either side by piles of wood and stone. There was more roof there, blocking out the light. Flicking on a flashlight, he led the way. It was icy, and she wrapped one hand around the other. She became aware that a low-level sadness—no, it was despair tinged with anger—crept up the backs of her legs like a needy, starving dog. Freaked out, she glanced over her shoulder, seeing nothing.

“Something’s here,” she announced. “I feel it.”

“What? What do you feel?” he asked, sounding excited. He painted the walls with the beam from his flashlight.

She told him.

“Maybe it’s a ghost?” he said.

“Maybe?” she echoed, alarmed. “Damn it, Alex.”

He opened a door, pulling back his hand quickly as if he expected it to fall apart the way the front door had. His flashlight passed over a stone floor, swept clean. He moved to a table and lit a trio of candles, except she didn’t see a lighter or a match.

He handed a candle to her. In the soft glow, she saw him open his palm, and a small ball of light appeared.

“I’m not clear what your ‘gift’ is,” she said.

“One of them is light,” he replied. “At least, I think it is. I’m on my own figuring all this out.”

They moved toward a bed dressed in a thick, furry coverlet and topped with a stack of pillows. Unhappiness rose around her like a mist.

“This place is bad,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Bad,” he said. “How—”

She pushed past him, not willing to stay inside. He joined her in the hall.

“Better?” he asked.

“Not really.” She looked left and right. “What happened here?”

“They were attacked, as far as I can tell.” He made a face. “There are a lot of bones. And cages.” He pointed to an open door. “That’s my room.”

“Bones? I think we should leave,” she said. “We’ll get the stuff you need from here and go somewhere else.”

“Hmm,” he answered noncommittally.

There was a sleeping bag on the floor of his room, and a heavy wooden table. Stacks and stacks of leather- bound books and several open boxes littered the surface. Candles, crystals, and herbs were spilling out of the boxes.

“Oh, my God,” she said. It would take them days to cart all of it out of the castle.

“Ja, you see,” he replied.

Then he walked to the table and placed his palm on a black book with scrolled gold writing that she couldn’t read.

“I don’t know what it says, either,” he told her as he flipped it open. There was a loose photograph of a woman with red hair, red eyebrows, and big blue eyes. She was wearing a catsuit and body armor strapped over that. She had a black helmet on her hip with ZECHERLE in white. He tapped his finger on the lettering. “That’s your aunt’s last name. Maybe it’s your father’s, too.”

Delaney Zecherle. Her mom’s last name was Martin. Her mom’s first name had been Tenaya.

He turned the page, edged a small photograph from the crease with his thumbnail, and handed it to her.

She caught her breath at the sight of herself as a little girl in a school picture, grinning away, with no notion of what was to come. She was missing her two front teeth.

“I was six,” she said.

She turned over the picture. The handwriting was careful; she read, Delaney Martin (Dana) . And the address of their house, the one she was still living in with Jordan and the others. Then, (your niece!).

“Is that your mother’s handwriting?” Alex asked her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. We never wrote anything down.”