Chapter 1: I’m Done (Part 1)

ᯓ★ There’s a spoiler-free Glossary in the Auxiliary Volume. Whenever you ever feel lost or forget a term, feel free to check it out! ⋆˚࿔

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Another dead body, huh? Not reeking of rot yet, so that’s something.

Milo Zeuqe nudged the corpse’s boot with his own.

...Maybe I should join them already.

"Milo!"

One last nudge got nothing useful out of the body. Leaving it in its bed of splintered beams, Milo faced Henry.

Ruins went on in every direction. Ash lay over the collapsed buildings, fine as flour, though not one beam showed a burn.

Nothing Milo knew of skipped the fire and went straight to ash.

But curiosity got him into the field; greed made him search it. Misprints killed people. The survivors sometimes came home rich.

His companions waved from the edge of the debris field, thirty paces off. Right. A ruin full of dead bodies was a poor place to lose track of the living ones.

Usually, you couldn’t find a pair less alike.

Layla Durand, sixteen, her pink coils lashing about her face and spilling all the way to her waist, bright as ever despite years spent on roads that reduced everyone else to soot.

Henry, rookie instructor to them both, ran to darker shades. Bruises from lost sleep shadowed his eyes; his brown hair might as well have been black.

Milo looked nothing like the person he imagined himself to be. Wavy blond strands slipped down his cheeks, framing icy-blue eyes only his mother had ever complimented. Cute, she’d said. Everyone since settled on freakish.

Today, though, Layla and Henry matched on one point: both had stopped exactly where the ash began, toe to the same line.

"Milo!" Henry shouted again, hands cupped around his mouth. "Come on!"

"The bodies haven’t rotted yet," Milo answered, beckoning them in instead. "Might be worth searching them."

Layla’s arms snapped over her chest. "Even here, that’s all you ramble about! We’ll always be Ashpickers if we go on Ashpicking. Wordplay changes nothing."

"Wordplay? Find diamonds, and nobody calls it Ashpicking anymore."

She exhaled and turned to Henry, begging the instructor with her whole face to talk some sense into him.

"Look." Milo pointed where the ruins piled higher. "Something tore trees out by the roots and flattened this many buildings. That’s a hybrid. Find its remains, and we’re diamondpickers by winter."

"Kid." Henry looked toward the higher ruins and still backed another step from the ash. "It’s not about that."

Kid. The audacity.

That rookie was twenty-four. Eight years was a head start, not a rank.

"What is it about, then?"

"Look at the sky."

Milo slowly lifted his head.

The lower clouds raced left, their edges blackening around orange seams. Above them, another layer surged right. Higher yet, a motionless violet band covered half the sky.

His neck prickled.

He looked back down anyway, and his next breath came in damp from the shattered wells.

If the sky came apart now, he would at least be dead before it hurt.

"It’s been doing that since we got here," he said, making it sound bored. "All morning, and nothing’s fallen yet, we have time. The good finds are deeper in. Nobody has picked the middle."

Neither of the pair budged.

When Henry went from intervening to just looking tired, Layla swung back to Milo.

"This place was marked as a Misprint! It was on the board before we ever set out!"

"Misprint," Milo echoed. "And when did a Misprint last cause trouble? Name one."

"Hybrids are Misprints too!"

"Alright, I walked into that one."

"Both of you, please." Henry stepped between their voices, a palm out to each. "Arguments are the last thing we need."

Layla uncrossed her arms and lowered her eyes to the ground.

"My sister would’ve said otherwise," the girl muttered. "He admitted I was right, sir. That means the argument is working."

Layla’s sister had wanted to become a Warden. Excuses, to her, were doors people closed on the truth, and every argument was a chance to kick one in. The girl had tested that advice once, and that anyone kept practicing it struck Milo as loyalty aimed at the grave.

She’d been gone a year now.

In a world where the same disasters came back around like seasons, everyone had a loss with a story attached.

Milo’s family and town had been erased, for comparison.

Henry cleared his throat.

"I’m sorry," the man said, quieter, before straightening and putting the instructor voice back on. "Milo. The sky’s unstable. We’re done here."

Overhead, the burning had banked down to embers, the purple draining out of the light.

"Don’t wait on me, then."

Milo headed into the deep ruins.

Wind pushed at his back, flapping the loose parts of his coat, brown leather gone stiff at the seams where the plating was sewn in.

"This is where we get rich," he added over his shoulder. "If I learn what erased my town on the way, even better."

Firm steps, eyes on the wreckage ahead and nowhere higher. Looking up twice was how people talked themselves into leaving.

Behind him, boots shifted in the ash but came no closer. No warning from Layla, no order from Henry. They had watched him do this too many times.

Last thing he needed was for his only two companions to leave him to die. Say a beam came down on his leg out here, with no Calamity to blame for it. Would the pair of them step over that line, or watch from thirty paces while he bled?

Milo’s next steps landed lighter.

After passing a second body and finding no valuables lodged in the flesh, he approached what had once been a crossroads. In the middle lay the first tree with the roots in the air, its crater beside it like the socket of a pulled tooth.

Dust thickened on the wind. Milo crouched beside the torn roots, one arm over his face, and checked the way back.

Layla and Henry shrank to two small shapes at the field’s edge.

As the dust swept over them, the man shielded his face with both arms and the girl bent over, coughing and raking ash out of her pink hair.

From there on, every body and root was his alone to rifle.

Is it even fair to share what I find with them? Coughing from afar is not what I’d call labor.

He shook the thought off and faced the roots.

Red specks dotted the exposed wood, and he rubbed one with his gloved thumb. Under the leather, it sank while a web of red spread into the surrounding grain.

Crack!

When he pulled his hand away, a piece the length of his forearm crumbled between his boots. The wood was packed with red pinpricks.

"Shit," he whispered. "Please be rust. Please be anything else."

Every Ashpicker learned the rule their first search. Red in dead wood?

Drop the haul.

Immediately.

Leave the town where it lies.

"Plague?!"

Milo kicked the piece away and scrubbed his glove on his coat. He shot upright, head snapping toward Layla and Henry.

The wind stopped. All of it, at once. Silence closed over the ash.

"S-Shit," he managed. "Layla! Henry!"

A wall of black vapor slammed across the field and cut the pair from his sight.

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "I’mDone (Part 2: Finale)" ... ⤵︎ [!]