The Wanderers
Pre-order Now. Full Release on 7 July
“Death feels colder than I had imagined.”
They built a wall to keep the wasteland out. They built a dome to keep the sky away. They built a life inside to forget the world that died.
But the Wanderers remembered.
When the Wanderers leave for the wasteland and the gates lock behind them, Arlo watches the woman he loves walk toward almost certain death.
He follows alone. Beyond the Great Wall. Into the grey.
To find her, he must defy the city's ruthless enforcers and cross a dying world where nothing grows — almost nothing.
A standalone Crooked Atlas story.
Read a taste below…
Death feels colder than I had imagined. People always said it would feel that way, but I couldn’t have expected, couldn’t have imagined, just how deep the chill would sink into the body, like glaciers forming in my heart.
It’s not just the feeling of my skin or the temperature of my body falling—it's the freezing of my mind, my consciousness, too. I think it is the loneliness of death that makes it feel that way.
Although I am not completely without company.
More bodies surround me, their lives having ended before mine. Their souls have departed this world, their final sacrifice a great gift to this planet. In a world where meaning has been lost, I am glad they found theirs.
I will join them, just as soon as the roots have taken hold, holding me tightly to the wall of this cave, as I let my life and my soul be taken so I can come to my final rest.
As the end draws near, I can’t help but wonder whether I have earned the right to stillness. My desires have led me here—I followed them without much thought—and now, as I rest my head on Elowen’s lifeless shoulder, my mind wanders to a world, a life that could have been, perhaps should have been.
#
‘How many times is that?’ Elowen said, her eyes more beautiful than ever.
‘Six,’ I replied.
Clanks of metal rang out as I reset the cans in their tower and collected the rubble we’d been throwing. She’d knocked down more cans than I had six times in a row, and she was barely even trying, throwing the rubble from her perch on the low wall without looking most of the time. Elowen had been like that for a while, always distant, not living in the moment, as if her mind were somewhere far, far away.
Having collected the rubble from the crack in the paving, I held it out to Elowen. She didn't take it. I don’t even think she noticed I was standing right there. ‘We don’t have to play if you don’t want to,’ I said.
Her eyes twitched as my words pulled her from her trance. ‘Sorry, Arlo. I was thinking about something.’
I dropped the rubble to the ground and sat beside her on the wall, taking her hand and kissing her soft cheek. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
She kept staring away, her fingers not tightening around mine as they used to. After a moment's thought, she shook her head.
I let go. When she felt this way, it was hard to tell whether she wanted me to hold her or even wanted me at all. She would shut herself off, trying to block out the noise and the pain. In those moments, I could find nothing to help. I wasn’t enough, could never be enough, and that hurt, cutting through my soul like a knife heated to a thousand degrees.
Soon, as her heavy thoughts drew to a close, she returned to the moment, to us. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, a small smile falling across her lips. It was a lying smile. She had put it on just for me. That was all she had left, and I smiled back all the same.
We sat there for a while, silent yet close. I found we could talk for hours about this and that, but even when silence fell, and we stayed in each other’s company, the peace of her existence was beautiful.
As all things did in the city, that peace soon slipped away as I looked up and up, my neck aching from the effort to see the top of the wall that caged us in like rats. The one-and-a-half-thousand-foot monstrosity that kept us safe from the world outside, from the wasteland that would poison anyone who remained. It towered over me like a threat, reminding me that my insignificance was my defining feature.
We were the last, as far as we knew. The last of humanity. After decades of war and environmental damage, the Earth finally packed in, and all life ceased. As a last, fragile hope of keeping something alive, this wall was built around a new city, designed to survive the ashes that fell when the world died. We were the survivors.
It’s been ten years since the gates shut. I was young then, only fifteen, but I still remember what the world was like before. There was war, and the planet was dying, yet there was so much space, so much free air to breathe.
The sound of crowded voices bounced through the tightly packed walls of the skyscrapers, as a group of people, dressed in loose clothing and carrying handcrafted backpacks, wandered past. Those people felt even more strongly about it than I did. They were a group of fanatics who called themselves ‘Wanderers’. I only learned about them from a morning news report. They had spent months petitioning the government to allow them to leave the city, to go beyond the walls and into the wasteland beyond. Apparently, they believed the outside held something more for us, that there was hope out there.
I didn’t see it the way they did. Hope had been lost when humanity continued to wage war, fully aware that it would destroy the planet. Any hope that remained, however meagre, was within those walls.
‘Can you believe it?’ I said to Elowen, rolling my eyes at the Wanderers as they turned down the next street. ‘There’s nothing out there. Surely they know they’re going straight to their deaths.’
She didn’t speak, resting her heavy head on my shoulder.
‘We were given this chance, this life. We are the lucky ones. How can they just throw it away?’
With a start, Elowen shot up and pushed herself away from me so fast that dust from the wall dashed into the air around us.
‘Elowen?’
Her eyes shimmered in the false light as tears began to well. ‘I’m going with them, Arlo—with the Wanderers. I need to go, to see what I can find out there, because whatever it is I’m looking for, it’s not inside these walls.’
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