The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

And further above still will be guards stationed on the watchtower—ten looking toward China, and ten toward the Wastelands. She knows they wear iron helmets over their masks, hammered into the faces of dragons and lions, to say to anything that approaches—We too have predators here.

It is said that so much had been taken from the land that it was always hungry. It had been feeding off the blood spilled by the empires, and by the bones of the animals and people they left behind. It gained a taste for death.

He tugs on her hand and she follows, reluctantly, to find his mother sitting on her bottom bunk, the detritus of the journey all around her.

She watches as they come apart, piece by piece, and she doesn’t move until there is nothing left of the Company men but a little collection of feathers and bones, of shining coins, of bright black stones, of the detritus that might be found in a long-abandoned nest.