City of Ruins Read Online Free PDF

were parked on some broken
pavement just above the beach area.
    I couldn’t see what happened to Clyne, but he
wasn’t in the van with us.
    How could all of those soldiers be waiting
there like that? How did they know where we’d wind up? Did A.J.
know? But then, it seemed like they were after him, or his group,
too.
    The van started up, and while I wasn’t
exactly sure where they were taking us, I had a pretty good guess:
down to the DARPA tunnels, to answer questions. I’d had a van ride
like that before — after my dad and I had moved west from New
Jersey, to his family’s abandoned winery in the Valley of the Moon,
Dad was hoping he would left alone to do his research, to figure
out a way to bring my mom back from wherever she was lost in the
time stream.
    It seems like such a long time ago—as though
I wasn’t just a year younger then, but way younger. Young enough to
think everything would always work out for the best and that the
good guys always win.
    For that earlier drive, they had the windows
completely blacked out, and I couldn’t see where I was going.
    This time, there was a place in the back
where the paint over the glass had started to peel away, and you
could peek out of it.
    I was still shivering, and Thea found some
old blankets in the back, the kind they wrap heavy boxes in. They
were smelly, but she put one around me to keep me warm. Then she
looked out the peephole.
    “All your citizens,” she said, peering out.
“where are they?”
    We’d been driving awhile, and I think we were
somewhere downtown—Market Street, maybe, or Geary, ’cause of the
hills, heading down toward Union Square, and then down toward the
Bay, in the direction of the old Ferry building or the Giants’
ballpark…
    I leaned over, pulled the blanket closer, and
looked, too. Thea was right, there was hardly anyone around.
    “Maybe it’s Christmas,” I told her. “It
always seems to be Christmas when I’m in San Francisco.”
    “The winter festival?” she asked. Then she
peered back out the window. “But shouldn’t there be more people out
on the boulevards if there’s a festival?”
    “It’s usually the kind of festival people
celebrate in their homes.” Not me, of course, not anymore. Back
when I had two parents that lived with me in a single place — in a
single time — I even used to have two holidays. Not only Christmas
trees, but we lit candles for Chanukah, too. Another kind of winter
festival. It was something my mother’s family did when she was
growing up, and so did we.
    There used to be a lot of lights in our
house, when December rolled around.
    “Well, does that explain the absence of
vehicles, too?” Thea was looking at me, her eyes widening a little
bit, her curly dark hair still wet and clinging to her face.
    Now that she was fourteen, she was managing
to look, I don’t know, not so much like a girl, anymore, but kind
of cute, even in situations where there was really no point in
looking cute.
    Like in a DARPA van, where even having that
thought —about her potential cuteness— felt completely beside the
point, too. God, now that I’d turned thirteen, was I gonna have
corny ideas in my head like that all the time?
    Then I thought about that quick kiss thing we
did in New Orleans.
    “Are you okay?” she asked, leaning in to look
at me.
    “I’m sorry I got you into all this,
Thea.”
    “Into what?”
    “This…” I waved my hands around the van and
pointed to the city outside. “All of this. Taking you away from
your home, from your mom, when she needed you. From your own
time.”
    “That was not you, Friend Eli.”
    Friend Eli! She was sounding like Clyne, even
without Clyne being around. Maybe we were all sounding more like
one another now. Maybe that’s ’cause we were the only family any of
us had left. Like three kids left in the house alone while our
parents ran off to the corner store for a moment.
    Except that the parents never came back, and
the house was like all