Wiped by Nicola Claire

mistakes, all in the name of keeping Wánměi safe. Keeping what he perceived as a perfect city-state intact. He’d lied to us. He’d drugged us. He’d ruled us with a hard hand and a harder regime.
    But he’d done it all because the past was damaging. Because to know it, in his eyes, was to relive it. And he did not want the same mistakes for Wánměi.
    No, we’d made new ones. But we’d come full circle again.
    Chew-wen was dead. Wánměi was free. And none of us had consumed our rations in several long weeks.
    The old man returned to his seat and the table, laying out a series of magazines and news articles; the paper was yellowed with time, the photos curled at the edges, spots of wear dotted here and there, a rip across a headline, words in Old Anglisc sprawled over the lot.
    I recognised the river. Like ours but not. I saw the large wheel. Like ours but not. The cathedrals and domed churches. The tree lined avenues and deep window ledges. I recognised them even though they were not whole. And as the pictures progressed and the headings became bigger, bolder, more frantic, a story was told.
    “Some say Angland started it,” the old man said, voice soft. “Some say Merrika. Some say smaller nations in the middle east. Desert nations like D’awa. It is irrelevant. Because only one nation stopped it.”
    “Urip,” I whispered.
    “For a while, we kept on fighting,” he went on in a dream-like tone. “Fighting for our right to survive. But nature wasn’t on our side. We’d hurt her. We’d poisoned the groundwater with bombs. We’d polluted the ozone layer with bombs. We’d disrupted the tectonic plates with bombs. Earthquakes followed. The ocean rose. Drinkable water became an expensive commodity.
    “D’awa died slowly. We didn’t see it coming, although we’d heard the bombs. First M’byh. Then M’duryh. Then later D’elhi. When nothing was left… we left. But the world outside our nation was already dead.
    “We followed the beacon. If someone had set it, then there were survivors. We had not realised that those who survived would be the victors. The dead world their spoils. Scraping together their plunder wherever they could find it.
    “The u-Pol we met in Lunnon are not the same u-Pol we face now. Their technology has advanced. Their ruthlessness along with it. They have taken for so many years now, they know no different. It is their right. Or so they say. We are mere goods stolen by the stronger fighter.”
    He turned his attention back to the room, away from a history that still managed to inflict heartache. His eyes scanned out across the vast space the remaining D’awan had made their home. Their last chance at a place to call their own.
    But it wasn’t. Not if the Uripeans kept stealing their strongest. Not if they stayed, waiting for a miracle that wouldn’t happen.
    “They won’t return your Lost,” I said carefully. “You know this, yet you stay.”
    His eyes found mine again; such depth of sorrow. Right there. For all to see. Wánměi may not remember, but one look in this man’s eyes and we’d never forget again.
    My heart ached for him. For them. For the men we’d killed on arrival. I wanted to apologise again. But forgiveness, even if given, would not bring them back. Would not absolve our sins.
    “We have been waiting,” the old man said. “The wait is over.”
    I held his steady gaze, forcing myself to face that ancient knowledge. The memories that still held him fast with barbed wire. I knew their technology was limited; only what they could piece together out of a broken city. I knew their ability to see the wider world was non-existent. They had no Net that I could see. There was no way these people could have known we were coming.
    And yet they’d stayed.
    I didn’t understand that kind of faith in the face of such devastation. I didn’t understand that kind of blind hope, when all else was long lost but not forgotten.
    I didn’t understand these people.
    But