The drowned city was a dead thing; a dried out exoskeleton that remained behind. It was whipped by the wind and sand, worn and beaten, and it had long since lost its function. There was no light, other than the diffuse gray that came from every direction. The only sound was her, breathing in time with the wind as she ran.

Emily found no evidence that anything had ever been alive there, other than the rational supposition that something must have built it in the first place. There were no skeletons, or old furniture, or lost toys. There were only the broken buildings and the girders that used to hold them up. The only footprints were those that she left behind her. She slipped in a doorway, half clogged with piled sand, the door itself long gone. She did not dare turn around, and when she could not find another door to exit, she leaped through a hole placed high enough it must have been a window, and kept moving. Here and there she clambered over walls that had been diminished to piles of rubble. A main thoroughfare was nothing but a long collection of dunes, piled against the walls facing the wind.

The arms of the dark sun were still following, though they had somehow split, sectioned themselves again and again, so that rather than immense trunks, they were now a million small creeping vines. They could not see, did not know where she was, but crept along, probing, covering the city behind her in a quivering, bruised mass that pulsed red.

It was a dream, it must have been, and yet it seemed imperative to run. Even if it was the ineffectual running of a nightmare, if she could run long enough that she could wake up, just wake up, somehow that felt like the answer. She could remember more now, where she had been a moment before falling asleep. The pulsating mass was the same color, the same tracework of black vines that worked up the arms of Tank, before she screamed herself to silence. That had worked up her own arms and legs over a year prior, as she wasted away in a cell somewhere far, far from home.

Perhaps the desert was what they all saw, every last one of the infected, before it pulled them under. Maybe they all saw the creature that hung and clawed from the sky, and that’s why Tank had lost her mind at the end—she had been running in terror, too.

Emily left the drowned city behind. She could not help but feel a pang of curiosity for it, a little mystery that she did not have the time or ability to investigate. The vines of pulsing bruise and red had taken it, and in a few places had snapped the buildings, pulling the debris in to the center mass for closer inspection. The tumor of creature itself dominated an ever-larger part of the sky, and she could not tell if it was growing, or if it had just drifted closer. It plunged more tendrils into the walls, into the ground, lifting up the pieces and scouring the sand, swallowing it all.

The ground felt strange, still not entirely there, and the sand shifted as the arms of the tumor drifted through them, buzzed in concentric waves as it bellowed behind her, and still she ran.

Until the ground ended, and the horizon became a sharp cliff, and she was perched on a rock overlooking the drop. The wind blew sand off the edge, and it still whispered, taking occasional snippets of voice with it as it fell. She could not see the ground below, could not tell if there was ground below, as all she could see was more of the same stormy, gray clouds beneath her.

She sat down, unwilling to jump, and knowing that she could not turn, that the creature was still searching, was in the very earth under her feet, searching. She closed her eyes, refusing to move, and knowing it made no difference.

When she opened them again, she was standing by a bedside.