Ashfall

Chapter One

Amber.

That was the first thing, before there was an Ezra to notice it. A warm, wrong amber. The color of a struck match held too close to the eye, pouring through a spider-cracked disk of glass. It had no business being that color. Sky was blue. Sky had always been blue. This one had gone the shade of old honey and rust. Like something burning slowly a long way off, but it slid and wobbled overhead as though seen from the bottom of a pond.

He watched it for a while. He didn't know he was watching. He didn't know he was anything.

Then the body reported in. One system at a time, as it always had, and Ezra Cole remembered that he had a body and that it was his job to run it.

Lungs. Working. Each breath dragged up out of a well.

Fingers. Present. Numb. All ten of them. Though they felt borrowed, loaned out to a stranger who hadn't taken care of them.

Toes. He wiggled them. They prickled as they do when you've sat too long.

Weight. Wrong. Everything too heavy. Hard to breathe. His own arm a sandbag laid across his chest. He felt the pull of the ground stronger than any ground he could remember.

And cold. Not the clean, dreamless cold of the long sleep. A wet cold. A living cold, the kind that gets inside your shirt and stays there for a while.

Two hundred years, said the small procedural voice at the back of his skull, the one he kept for the work, the one that never got loud. Give or take. You slept two hundred years and that noise. An alarm. Something set off the alarm.

The alarm. Yes. There had been an alarm, hadn't there. A sound like the world tearing its own seam.

He reached upward for something. Anything. His arm too heavy. He lacked coordination. More of a flop, really. A desperate flail. He found nothing but the amber light, but with it came a smell. Scorched ceramic, hot metal, and under it, threaded through it, the deep green reek of rot and standing water.

That last one bothered him. He couldn't have said why yet. His mind was still coming up out of the cold in pieces, and the pieces didn't fit.

Focus. Inventory.

He knew how to do this even when he didn't know his own name. Especially then.

He was strapped into a seat. Good. That was correct, that was where a man was supposed to be.

The harness bit into his shoulders and hips, five points of it, and the seat was canted over at an angle that a seat should not be, tilting him down and to the left so that his own blood had pooled hot in that ear. Around him, the curved ribs of a small space, close as a coffin and about as friendly.