Tsetseg’s arms slither across her planet, soot scratching at her throat. She swallows, and fragments of ash tumble down her gullet. A meal that burns inside.
The city around her is a sun-bleached ruin. Even the buildings left standing are half crumbled, and she moves carefully to avoid damaging them more. They weren’t built to withstand someone of her size, after all.
The buildings were taller, once. Encourage them to build up, not out—that was one of the first lessons Tsetseg had been taught in her youth. So she had fashioned Shen Kuo to flood over time, for the shorelines to creep inward to force her people to turn their attention to the sky.
She squints at the sun overhead and, distracted, steps in a puddle of sewage. She hisses at the acidic water stinging her suckers. If only she’d been allowed to intervene at the end. She misses the noise—the rumble of chrome wheels down the streets, the clicks of ceiling lights and fingerprint locks. The singing.
