13: The Vault
from Into the Blue Hosted by Robby Thomas
They come for Mary before the corridors are awake. Nobody says the word for what the morning is; she knows it anyway. A needle at the back of the neck, a dark room, and the city finally gets its look at the thing it has wanted since the arena — a strand of blue standing out of a sleeping girl, shedding light like snow, chilling the glass it is watched through. It gets seventeen minutes. Then the wall comes in. Something white takes Mary off the table and out through the morning city — over the freight levels, through the closing ring, up the hill of stairs, down past a hundred years of children's chalk to the room at the bottom of everything, where a name is said plainly through a sealed door, and the door finds a seam it never had. Inside: a block of sapphire the size of a standing tomb, and the man who has been waiting in it for two hundred years. The first thing he does is take. Mary wakes in a field forty miles north with a seam at the base of her skull, a friend she thought she'd lost sitting in the grass beside her, and a newly young god wiping blood from his mouth like it belongs to somebody else. Behind them, a man with a monitor and thirty years of grievance boards a shuttle — and at the walls of the last city, at the hour when the light goes long, a watchman sees a speck in the empty distance and cannot make it be a bird. It knows the city's name. It says it.
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