24. Into the Sunset
Mina
I climbed the stairs, past the dimensional distortion, to the ground floor of Town Hall. There was nowhere to go but back to the bunker, out into the Sliver-infested streets, or up, so I went up, climbing until I ran out of stairs.
The top floor had a wide marble hallway lined with offices, including my mother’s.
I’d run up and down that hallway so many times as a kid, whenever she’d had to bring me to work with her. I had the strangest impulse to do it one more time, but the exuberance I’d had to spare back then would have taken months to save up now.
I rested my arm and forehead on the tinted, full-length window at the hallway’s end, overlooking the cracked ruins of my town. It looked like a plate that had been dropped on a tile floor.
There had been a time
