She’d seen the man handing out the packs before. She was one of those who provided for others, not one who needed support. She’d lived her whole life without ever needing basic. Nono felt a little stab of shame as her turn came near. The side of the van slid open, and the queue shifted in anticipation. Another week’s rations, however thin they might be.
#THE EXPANSE BOOKS ANNA SKIN#
The international district had large Norwegian and Vietnamese enclaves, but no matter the shade of their skin or the texture of their hair, ash and misery had made a single tribe of them all. The others that waited with her had the same empty stare. Here and there, jagged cracks and furrows like vast snake tracks showed where children had tried to play anyway, but no one was sliding down it now. The pack of dust and ash had made a crust over the gently sloping hills where the grass had been. The layers of bureaucracy had been pressed thin by the urgency of the situation. She knew she should have been grateful. Not the UN, not even basic administration. The relief center was a van parked at the edge of a public park. It had a leafy trefoil icon on its side, the logo of the hydroponic farm. She coughed out a bitter laugh, and then she just coughed. The place she’d grown up, and the place she’d brought her little family back to at the end of her adventures. Zuma Rock stood above it all, a permanent landmark. The ash and dust might streak the stone, but they could not change it. A previous generation’s fondness for wide thoroughfares between thin, mazy streets and curved, quasi-organic architectural forms marked the neighborhoods. The international district was recent, historically speaking. Few of the buildings were over a hundred years old. Yes, it was tainted, dirty, incomplete, but it was blue. As the reddened sun slid toward the west, the city lights of the moon appeared in the east, gems on a field of blue. It was to be expected, she told herself, as if any of this could have been foreseen.Īnd still, three months in, there came a break in the vast, blindfolded sky. Sometimes they were cut off from the world for days at a time.
Network access through their hand terminals was spotty and unreliable. With the hydroponic houses and hospitals and government buildings taking precedence, there were still brownouts more days than not. By the time a fusion reactor was trucked north from the yards at Kinshasa, half of the city had spent fifteen days in the dark. There was no sun to drive the solar panels, and the gritty air fouled the wind farms faster than the teams could clean them. If you were not in immediate distress, please stay home. Two hundred dead in the city, the newsfeeds said, four thousand wounded.
#THE EXPANSE BOOKS ANNA WINDOWS#
The shock wave still had blown out windows and collapsed buildings. Three and a half thousand kilometers stretched between the crater where Laghouat had been and Abuja. Even as she’d helped the volunteer teams to clear the rubble and care for the injured, she’d understood that her wracking cough and the black phlegm she spat out came from breathing in the dead. Ash and grit rained down on Greater Abuja until it piled up in drifts, changing her city to the same yellow-gray as the sky. Even the ruddy disk of the sun struggled to penetrate the filthy clouds. The impact at Laghouat-first of the three strikes that had broken the world-had thrown so much of the Sahara into the air that she hadn’t seen the moon or stars for weeks. The rocks had fallen three months ago, and Namono could see some blue in the sky again.
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