Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

The archives were in the cellar under the clinic building in the middle of town. One of the few surviving structures from before the Fall, it seemed incongruous next to the other buildings, which were all stucco and plank boards. The clinic was made of smooth concrete and metal, austere and oddly geometric, like a piece that had fallen out of a puzzle. An array of solar collectors covered the roof except where skylights peered through, and drainpipes fed into a cistern. The windows were tall and narrow, unadorned. A porch had been added, and orange and lemon trees edged the walkway.

Most of the space around the clinic was taken up with the town square, which hosted once-a-month markets and communal herb gardens. A couple of nearby households worked to maintain the gardens and process the herbs, drying them for cooking, preparing them for medicinal and household use. This late in the summer, the air in this part of tow

n smelled heady, almost overpowering, with mint and sage and lavender and a dozen other scents rising up and becoming rich and languorous. The air was hot and sticky; Enid’s hat kept the sun off.

The packed dirt of the main road through town had once been asphalt. It had decayed decades ago, so folk tore it out. This was way before Enid’s time, but when she was young, Auntie Kath told stories about it, about the bones of the world from before and what they had to do to survive. The shadow of that world remained, the streets in the same places and the foundations of buildings still visible. But a new skin had been put over it. This was all Enid had known, but Auntie Kath used to sit on the shaded porch of the clinic and look out, murmuring, It’s so different now.

Tomas waited for her at the cellar’s slanted wooden doors. She nodded at him, and he opened one of the doors and gestured her down.

Down a set of concrete stairs, the clinic’s cellar opened up. A switch turned on a string of lights, powered by the solar panels on the clinic roof. The ceiling was low—so much so Tomas had to slouch—but the space was wide and filled with shelves, trunks, wooden crates, and plastic bins. Much of it was like a museum—odds and ends from before the Fall that folk thought might be useful someday . . . or might never be useful again but someone had thought worth saving, keeping dry and safe. The place had a musty, disused air that tickled the nose.

Books—hundreds of them—comprised the bulk of the collection. The founders of Haven had looted a couple of libraries, so the stories went. Practical books on farming, food preservation, irrigation, medicine—everything they thought they might need. But also an odd collection of novels, commentary, magazines, and newspapers—things that would have been disposable back then. Now, they seemed like a time capsule. Artifacts of a lost world. And then the diaries, the journals, the accounts and letters written by people who lived through the Fall. History, now. During their training, investigators were required to read the extant diaries and journals, to understand people, to understand where their world came from and why their rules existed. To try to keep all that from ever happening again.

A small desk in the corner served the investigators as an office, where they could review evidence and keep accounts of previous cases. Their collective knowledge. Committee records were kept here as well, pages bound into simple books with leather covers recording harvests, births, deaths, storms, local happenings, events of note. Local histories, local portraits.

There wasn’t much. Various committees and investigators had only been keeping records for about twenty years or so; the notes didn’t go all the way back to the Fall. Folk then had more important things to worry about; paper had been scarce, and they weren’t convinced there’d be anyone around in the future to look at records. At some point, though, someone decided that writing things down might be useful. Planning resources and crops and babies and everything was easier if you could see the patterns. So, now they had records.

Enid and Tomas found the relevant volumes; each took half to read, and the tedious work began. They’d only been at it twenty minutes or so when Tomas asked, “Do you remember Auntie Kath?”

“Of course I do.”

“She talked about how they didn’t know what they needed to save. They couldn’t save it all, so they had to choose. How later she wished there were things people in the early days of Haven had saved.”

“Like cameras. Or latex gloves.” Enid not only remembered—she could almost hear the old woman’s low, rough voice going on about it.

“Plastic wrap,” Tomas added, and they both chuckled. Plastic wrap had been an obsession with Auntie Kath, who insisted the item had a million uses, and she brought it up every time one of those uses occurred to her. No one had ever really understood what she was talking about.

“Someday we’ll dig into an undisturbed cellar or an old archive and find some plastic wrap,” Enid said.

He shrugged. “We’ve gone this long without it. No one’s missed it since Kath died. But I wonder if this is how they felt. Trying to learn it all because we don’t know what we need to know. But it isn’t possible. We’ll miss something but have to hope we won’t.”

They studied the records, hoping to get a picture of the town of Pasadan, to guess what they might find when they got there. But they couldn’t predict, not really. Columns were labeled, lists of numbers written carefully in different hands, in fading ink. Names of Pasadan’s committee members, short descriptions of them that in the end didn’t say anything at all. This might have been any of a dozen small settlements on the Coast Road. But this was the one requesting investigation of a death.

They wouldn’t really know a thing about the town until they got there.

CHAPTER TWO • HAVEN

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Fifteen Years Earlier

The Worst Storm

The storm started with gusts that threatened to throw Enid across the yard at Plenty household. She had the job of putting away tools and tying down tomato plants and squash vines, hoping they wouldn’t get too torn up. The sudden blasting wind turned what should have been an ordinary chore into an emergency. Some of the plants in the garden were already flattened. Enid’s fingers shook, trying to get a last piece of twine knotted. She’d seen storms before; this felt like something else, electric and ominous, black clouds on the horizon expanding to fill the sky.

Peri, her mother and one of the town’s medics, shouted at her from the door of Plenty’s cellar. “Enid! Leave it! Come in now!”

Rain started, huge drops driving into the ground and into Enid. They actually hurt, icy slaps on her skin. Sheets of it would soon follow, soaking everything. She ran to the cellar along with the last few straggling household folk. The wind howled.

One of these last was Tomas, who still held the hammer he’d been using to help to secure doors and windows. He was a lithe man with brown hair in a tail, his tunic stained with sweat and dirt.

“This is some fun, yeah?” he said, grinning. He had to put down the hammer and use both hands to haul the cellar door shut.

“What?” Wide-eyed, she gaped at him. It hadn’t occurred to her that on some level this might be fun.

“Get in, you, come on.” Peri patted his shoulder, urging him down the thin wooden stairs, and put her arm around Enid. Her hair was coming loose from her headband; sweat matted strands of it to her face. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Enid said, but she wasn’t sure. The adults had this pensive air, brows furrowed, biting their lips and looking up at the ceiling as if they might see through wood and dirt to what was happening in the sky overhead. Hanging on to their children just like Peri was doing.