Rená, socked feet up on the dash, pensively chewing the nail on her bony thumb, rolled the window down. Under the wobbling rumble of wind she heard the crackle of big black tires over small uneven stones. She stared. Broken building slid behind broken building. The point of a concrete radio tower skewered the pavement ahead. An ancient parking meter, uprooted, lay in a puddle, its strewn innards visible as a dark mass of old zinc and greening copper.

She cowered under the weight of the countless lives now sublimating with the water that had crushed this place. Torn, Rená wondered at the austere and terrible beauty of the picture in front of her. She had lived here, Brandon.

It had been an unremarkable city – reasonably big and reasonably prosperous, and had had all of the mod-cons, while still allowing for the genteel archaisms (making eye-contact with strangers on the street and knowing your neighbour’s names) required to keep it liveable.

She had been speaking at a conference in Vancouver when the water fell. Leaving Muriel behind had been difficult, but they had remained in contact (constant), so she’d hardly noticed the difference. But now it was hard not to think of her at every moment.

The news had come late in the night (early in the morning—?) and the orders were simple; Brandon was destroyed and she was to get to the lab as fast as humanly possible. Secure the asset. The project must be salvaged. At all costs.

She met her three escorts at the car rental company — the hyperloop was down, and air traffic across the country had been “restricted” (read: prohibited), so they were forced to drive — and they set off. The Rockies would have been interesting, but darkness and worry had kept her from seeing much.

After Calgary it had been another 13 hours of idle sitting, watching the day roll slowly over a formless landscape of green and yellow fields under a banal sky-blue sky. She didn’t hear a word from Muriel.

Two-hundred kilometres from the outskirts they came upon one of the many military cordons blocking the various roads into Brandon, Manitoba. Rená reported the situation to Mr Elster, and Mr Elster notified legal.

But that could take a while.

Preparing to hunker down for the evening and huddle their consciousnesses around their respective communications and entertainment implants, they discovered that every room in every motel on the outskirts of Brandon had been booked out by the concerned, the well-wishing, and the perverse.

So, they bought tents and sleeping bags and slept out in the warm summer country. They even let themselves be chased off their first campsite by a cute little farmer with a broom handle in his hand and fear in his eyes.

The next spot was more congenial and Rená found herself pleasantly surprised how not-barbaric camping could sometimes be.

The next day, in the late afternoon, the final straw wafted down to snap the poor horse’s back and the improvised barricade was shoved open for the twenty-seven seconds that Rená and compatriots had needed to pass through.

In that moment, as she heard the barriers being slid noisily back into place, she felt (bizarrely) honoured to be one of the first to be entering this place-no-more, and (when the numbing, slap-across-the-face of shock had worn off) it lived up to her every expectation of post-apocalyptic desolation.

Moving slowly, the car picked its indelicate way over the rubble, towards a particular pile of wasted concrete in an industrial park on the north-east edge of the city. The building that had housed Hammer and Hodgeson Print and Design (the company she had “worked for”) was literally gone.

The car parked in front of what had once been a decoy power-transformer shack (now a pile of concrete and sheet metal) and they dug their way under and climbed down the interminably long maintenance shaft.

When she reached the bottom and emerged into the fluorescent green emergency lighting of the facility’s main corridor, a part of Rená’s cliche addled brain was disappointed. Their footsteps were not accompanied by the ominous sound of water dripping into old puddles, they woke no murderous computer systems, and excited no zombies.

With the three security guys behind her, she rounded the corner towards the main lab and saw the bright blue dot of a tiny LED set into the panel next to the main lab’s door. She approached and the doors opened, the lights came on, and the computers started up.

A breathless, silent sigh (relief) raised and lowered her shoulders. She sat down at the console and touched its surface, waking it from its emergency sleep.

From the single speaker, a sob, “I was so afraid—“ Rená put out a comforting hand, craving touch, but there was nothing of Muriel that Rená could take in her arms, nothing she could hold and protect.

She said, “I know. Don’t be. I’m here now,” and wished she could climb into one of the server racks and tuck Muriel back into the rumpled bed the nightmare had rolled her out of.

They sat for a while in silence.