Chapter 1
I remember the day he first came to me. He’d looked me up in the database. It had been a long time since anyone had been interested in the knowledge I keep. I found a dusty brown suit in the back of my closet that matched the occasion.
We agreed to meet in a dingy old cafe on the surface. That was early sign to me that he was serious. His generation prefers staying underground, or otherwise up in some sterile tower-and-skywalk network all their days. Some are so genuinely terrified of the sun (harsher these days, granted, than it once was) that they’ve never been directly exposed.
As for my generation? We are a lost one. We are the last with any memories of the ways things were before. We are dwindling as it is, and then there’s me: bonafide born-and-raised here, in this place that was once just a plain old city, barely starting to make a name for itself. My mother had me in the year 2012, and I was eight years old when the pandemic hit. He was reelected that year. Some claim that was the beginning of the end. Others say there were a million other causes, all working together in a creeping swarm. Whatever the case, by the time I came of age, the world I knew as a child was gone.
Everyone came here because of the water. The old aquifer was said to suit no more than two million people. But sixty years ago, another was dicovered beneath it, the largest in the world, larger than all the science at the time could explain. Once the supply began to dwindle in major global centers, they started coming. They came first by the ten-thousands, then the millions. Then by the ten-millions. They didn’t much care how small or large of a speck on the map we were. All they cared about was the water. And now, the place where I grew up, even though it shared this land, exists only in my memories.
On the day I met him, I had just turned eighty. He walked across the vacated courtyard with no hat, not overly tall but still lanky, hands stuffed in his pockets, long thin sucker on his lip, which he politely discarded before entering.
He approached. He was only twenty then, but looked even younger, saddled with a boyish lightness of skin and hair that is uncommon on young people these days.
He sat down wordlessly and faced me. I asked him for his pronouns and he gave them.
“You’re a hunter, is that right?” I asked him.
“Want to be,” he replied.
“You sought me out—“
“On the advice of Dr. Barlow.”
“The academy’s sending people my way now?”
“No. He didn’t mention your name specifically. And he called me into his office to speak privately. I—“ He flicked his screen open and closed idly, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t think the advice was meant for anyone else but me.”
I could feel myself leaning in. “And what did he tell you?”
The fiddling with his screen grew mad. “That I was special. But that very best hunters only got to where they are through acquired knowledge of the old world.”
“Do you think you’re special?”
“I don’t think that’s something a person of my years can tell about themselves.”
I could tell, just as clearly as I could tell he was faking the gruffness in his voice—an artificiality that suited him, and would no doubt turn real after a few more years spent out in the unfiltered air. “I can only teach someone with a natural interest.”
“I have one,” he insisted. “I’ve watched more than a thousand old movies. I watch them every day.”
“How did you find them?”
“Underground. A stall in mid market. And others.”
“It’s a start.”
The law goes like this: You can’t write about the old times. You can’t view old films or read old books outside of a strangled list of heavily redacted titles. There are a dozen-or-so official rationalizations for such draconian policy that range from bureaucratic to downright dangerous, but I won’t get into all that now. All anyone needs to know is this: he came to me because he needed me. For I am a window through which one has a clear view of the world before. There are windows closing all around us, all the time, and someday soon my time will come. Thank god he found me when he did.
