Chapter 8: History
“Have you gone, darling? Will you not stay and listen to an old woman’s sad tale?” Maryam voice drops to a clipped whisper. “Quickly now, and plainly, before we attract the wrong kind of attention. This barrier is coming down. I will not allow you or your little friends to stop that. But when the monsters finally go, it is all but inevitable that I will, too.
“If you are listening, if you have any power, any way to communicate, any way to outlast the end of this city and regain what you have lost, use it to help the ones who are left. Believe me or don’t, but I’ve protected as many as I could for as long as I could in the only way that I could. But I think you know we’ve reached the tipping point. Passed it. The cost of survival keeps going up, the lives saved fewer by
