Read Online Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition by Brendan Mancilla - Free Book Online

gasped, seeing the aged sign standing beside the stairs.
    Seven’s chivalric attempt to clean some of the grime away, sparing the ladies the dirty task, backfired. He stumbled away from the pedestal, Eight grabbing his shoulder and pulling him to safety.
    “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt us,” Null assured them, recognizing the translucent material from the elevator’s control scheme. It created a luminescent map of the city, hanging vertically against the directory’s screen. Glancing over her shoulder, Null saw Eight’s tight grip on Seven’s shoulder lessen, and the two separated in an attempt to save themselves from the embarrassment. Still, Seven’s bright red face brought a grin to Null’s, and she continued her explanation.
    “This is what their signs are made of. And this one’s a map,” she pointed at the intersecting lines of that noted the transportation lanes. “See, I was right. The majority of them converge...here,” she pointed at a location that she could safely say was near the center of the city.
    “Haven,” came a small voice. Null saw Eight approach the sign, pointing near its top, and she repeated the word. “Haven. That was a word from the song, but it’s also the city’s name.”
    “Day of wrath, oh day of mourning.”
    “See fulfilled the Founders’ warning.”
    “Haven and Earth in ashes burning.”
    “When from skyward we descend,” Null finished, aware that Twenty had rejoined the group, compelled by hypnosis to participate in the recitation of the lyrics with Seven and Eight. Alarmed, he shook himself from his stupor, glancing from Seven to Eight to Null, his expression overridden by suspicion and fear.
    “I hate it when that happens,” he snapped.
    “Another mystery,” Null agreed, shaken by the words that wandered from her of their own will.
    “We’re not going anywhere by standing in one place,” Eight decided, taking the lead and shaking off the last of her shame. Seven followed close at her side and Null’s intuition, echoing out at her from the same dark spot as the lyrics, told her not to be surprised at their protectiveness of one another.
    Null worried that they wanted a few minutes alone together. At the station’s platform they leapt the short distance onto the railway itself. To walk alongside Haven’s pillars, the buildings that kept the tomb-like city standing, felt surreal. This city was a feat of engineering, a marvel that must surely be undefeated in the world.
    “Did the map give you a better idea of how many people lived here?” Null overheard Eight ask Seven, the two of them still a short distance ahead of her. And, maintaining his unimpressed pace behind her, was Twenty.
    “Yeah,” he relented, his voice distracted.
    “That bad?”
    “They clustered everything as closely together as possible. The level of urban density suggests that they didn’t trust the land immediately surrounding the city for cultivation. I wonder what the bordering land around Haven is like, for them to have built up instead of out.”
    Feeling compelled to speak, Null asked, “You haven’t figured it out?” She discarded any pretense of privacy and walked alongside them. Luckily, the railway was wide enough to support at least five people, but Null kept a wary eye on its edges.
    “Figured what out?” asked Eight, her brow heavy with worry.
    “There is no land around the city. There’s only water. We’re on an island.”
    “An island?” Seven’s abysmal reaction was obvious to Eight and Null. “How are we going to find any food or water on an island?”
    “I had an idea that this was a coastal region, but I didn’t think that on top of everything else we were stranded on an island,” Eight admitted, her shoulders sagging with exhaustion. “How did you figure out that Haven sits on an island?”
    “I think that in my past life I was something of an architect. That was why I went up into the building I told you about. It was there that I saw the ocean