Page 2

The night is dark, with patchy cloud cover and no moon. It’s cool and the air feels moist, as though there is a mist, just too thin to be seen, wafting around them. There is a smell, too, faint and indescribable, a medley of old dust and corroded metal and many other things besides.

Here, at ground level, the broken city looks completely different, and much more frightening. The walls of the nearest buildings vanish upwards into darkness, and the streets are canyons where any possible danger might be lurking. Hunter Leader signals, his hand moving in the gestures they’ve learned over the last week of training, over and over until they have them perfect. Here, at night, they have to make as little noise as possible.

Hunter Leader moves silently and with purpose, like a leopard from the savannah of his native land. He has instructed them to space themselves out, so that each can only see the one in front. Hunter Two brings up the rear.

They move down a broad street, which must have once – before the Happening – been a fairly substantial avenue. Vehicles, wrecked so long ago that most of them have corroded to metal skeletons, make humps here and there in the darkness. At one point, Hunter Leader holds up a hand and gestures back over their shoulders. They turn.

They can see the Wall from here, the sheer immense height of it, the watchtowers with their searchlights moving back and forth, the string of red pinpoint dots of light that mark the parapet. Suddenly, and for the first time, the three tourists feel isolated from the world beyond, and alone.

"Let’s go," Hunter Leader murmurs. Whispering isn’t allowed because the sibilants carry much further than soft speech. Turning, he lopes off down the street, not looking back to see if they’re following, but of course they do.

Far behind them now, the searchlights paint the night.

She calls herself Jasmine. It’s probably not the name she was born with, but there are a lot of things she’s left behind, like how she came by her combination of curly black West African hair and slanted East Asian eyes, high Slavic cheekbones and Gypsy-brown skin. Nobody ever has the time or inclination to ask questions, she discovered a long time ago, so long as her credit is good. 

Once a boyfriend had told her she looked exotic. It was when they were lying tangled in bed after love. "Exotic!" she had said, laughing explosively. "Is that even a word for the modern world? Who isn’t exotic, in one way or another?" 

"Oh," he had said, struggling to explain, "I mean...unusual. We don’t much see people like you."

"Good for you. I’m not for everyone."

She had never been with that boyfriend again.

She glances, now, over her shoulder at the figure of Hunter Two behind her. Like all the Hunters, he moves smoothly and without the tension that’s knotting her gut. The Hunters ought to know this ravaged city as well as game rangers know the wildlife preserves. She tells herself that the danger they keep emphasising is at least partly of their own construct, meant to impress the tourists, but she can’t quite believe it.

They’ve already been moving for hours, and seen nothing so far, not even a track in the blown dust. The night is at its deepest now, and a wind has sprung up off the river, redolent with the stink of mud and decay. The Hunters are still fresh, of course, but the tourists are starting to flag. Hunter Leader gestures for a halt.

They’re in a small square formed by tall buildings crowded together. What must once have been a very large tractor or bulldozer of some kind has burned in the centre of the square; the concrete is charred in an enormous black circle, and the corpse of the vehicle has so collapsed in on itself that it looks like a shapeless, angular mass.

"Juice break," Hunter Leader murmurs. Standing next to the burned-out caterpillar tracks, they open small packs of fruit juice – Jasmine has apple – and unwrap bars of dark chocolate.

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