Each step forward lessened the crawling on Lara’s skin, still gripped by the morbid visage of humanity’s undoing. Yet, her trepidation slipped to excitement as she soaked in the thriving wreckage of the living populace around her.

  The pair steered down the block, vendors lining the fronts of beaten skyscrapers. The novelties of the society about her slowed Lara’s pace as she began to inspect the wares more closely. She stopped at the bent cart of a self-pronounced grocer. His apples, yellowed in varying tones on the hills and valleys of their misshapen forms both bothered and intrigued her, yet the scene called to something within her that she couldn’t quite remember at the moment.

  “I see the apples have caught your eyes, young miss.”

  Lara peered up at the grocer, chin slighted. Looking back at them, Lara noticed that none had developed into a remote resemblance of their ideals.

  “Is this all from radiation?” She inquired.

  “My good girl,” He laughed, “I didn’t realize they still opened schools.”

  Lara cringed internally.

  “Everything is the product of the earth’s new atmosphere.” He picked at one such fruit, his dirtied nails even more apparent as he took a heavy bite.

  “I’ll let you in on a secret: these have actually been grown in prime territory. Un-scouted! – Exclusively by yours truly. The radiation levels--” He paused, his speech garbled by the building foam of his spit mucking the mush in his mouth. He took a rushed gulp. “The radiation levels of this orchard are well above anything you’d find anywhere else - in a good way - so the flavor has multiplied exponentially!” He waved his hands around in emphasis.

    It seemed Lara’s widened eyes had been duly noted, however, as the grocer returned his arms to his sides, a smirk on his face. “Don’t worry, kiddo; they still pass Circa’s regulation standards-“

  “Circa?” Lara interrupted.

  He sighed in response, “Yes, of course we’d never even think of selling anything not in tow with their – ah, what’s the word – oh! – legislation.” He took another obnoxious bite of an excessively large section of the apple. “The health and safety of our customers comes first.” The grocer laughed once more, chunks of fruit flying onto the cart.

  Repelled by the exchange, Lara made her way past the peddler and after Auras. The glint of light across ragged windows still perched on ruptured buildings attempted to distract her from the muddy mess that was steadily spreading up the legs of her trousers.

  “If you have no intention of cleaning those any time soon, you’d be better off treading lightly.” Auras remarked when she caught up to him.

  Frowning, she wiped at the dirt. You didn’t exactly give me any time to scavenge for clothing before your very sudden arrival, Lara mentally mulled.

  “That was a little discomforting,” she said, disregarding her discontent at his suggestion and penetrating the silence that had grown between them as the street-side market faded behind them.

  “The people?”

  “Well, no, just the vendor.” Lara explained.

  “You appeared to be fine socializing.”

  “Sometimes I feel like you put too much faith in my survival skills, and other times too little,” she chided as they crossed a street with purposeless traffic lights hanging overhead.

  “It was different,” she added.

  His brief hesitation before responding shifted her, provoking the sense that he was searching for the right words to say.

  “I would hope,” he began, “That after this excursion, you might feel better around more people.”

  Though his eyes remained focused on the path ahead, the kindness in his voice left a lingering sting with the twinge of guilt it betrayed. It was his frequent give-away that Lara had long wanted to explore deeper yet never really knew how to begin and, thus, had often led her from awkward conversations to dead ends.

  But sometimes – rare times – she corrected, he would provide her with a spontaneous influx of information. Those moments were speckled through the majority of the time he spent seemingly searching for the appropriate way to nanny her.

  Am I upset? She perplexed; upset that she required a supervisor? That he seemed to have the whole story, yet withheld so much of it from her?

  Lara regarded the back of his figure, tightly curled black hair at the nape of his neck, which was barely visible behind the slightly upturned collar of a trench sizable enough to fit his massive frame. Though she was taller than both Sammi and Pavlov, even she paled beside him.

  Regardless of her restlessness, over the past year she had reconciled herself that Auras’ prevarication was probably more of a comfort than an insult. Times did pass when anger conquered the numbness she’d succumbed to regarding her situation. But, more often than not, she felt…

  Lara abandoned her thoughts as she took in the structure they had approached. Similar to the original street they’d passed when they’d emerged from the station, a number of vendors and millers lined the outskirts of the facility. Awed by its size and shape, her eyes darted about to take in the sight, while the growing rumble of voices drowned out her question.

  “A stadium,” Auras motioned her in as he held one of the doors open. “This one in particular is a race track.”

  Lara stepped aside for him to pass so she could follow, all the while marveling at the sheer size and design. It was filled with the buzz of plentiful conversation.

  “For horses?” She asked, eyeing the number of worn out rows they passed.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Auras chuckled, “More on the mechanical side: automobiles.”

  He cut through spaces in the aisles left by missing chairs, maneuvering around makeshift living spaces and tents. As they approached a nook behind some of the main stands, he slowed to a halt and turned to face her. Lara stumbled back to remit more room.

  “There was a large-scale event held here each year – the Indie 500.” He gestured briefly around the stadium.

  Lara took a breath, regarding the surroundings. “Hard to imagine all the rusted hunks of junk racing one another.”

  “Hard to catch on pages,” he poked, prompting Lara to roll her eyes. “Someone spent more time in that library reading than doing her job.”

  She ignored his chiding.

  He only smiled in response before gesturing towards the large, oval lawn a few meters away from the stands ahead of them. There were a large number of people engaging in various activities.

  “I recommend you explore, sight-see.”

  “Because that worked out so well with the apples,” she mocked.

  Lara was sure she’d almost made him laugh that time before he responded. “Hopefully someone else can take the brunt of your snide remarks. You’re always asking questions – go learn something while I find the safest way out of the city.”

  “Safest?” She crossed her arms to shield her anxiety at the thought of more discomforting experiences. But she also felt the hair on her arms raise in excitement at the thought of how dangerous the departure from her monotonous routine had become.

  With the shoo of his hand, she looked at him for a few seconds longer before she gave in to her apparent status as a child and began wandering down the nearest aisle between the stands.

  When she was closer to the grounds, Lara noticed an odd variation in people. Too many of them occupied the worn lawn where sprinkles of surviving grass huddled about its weeds. A few individuals relaxed on the south-most end of the field, with little clothing covering their dirtied skin.

  In the center, numerous makeshift stalls consumed the majority of the available space. Lara kept her arms crossed as she traversed into the sea of bodies.

  The marketplace had seemed simple enough on the outside, but Lara realized she’d underestimated the mass of bodies and structures as she faced the challenge of moving through the people around her. The raucousness of merchants drowned out her initial attempts to excuse herself, and her mood quickly soured in response to her constant collisions with the elbows and shoulders of others.

  The smell alone filtered through her nostrils and down her throat, allowing her to taste the panicked frenzy about her.

  A number of stalls exhibited overhead signs which detailed their wares and acceptable forms of payment. The more popular vendors featured a variety of foods rather than the constant staple of “Beans!” every stall-owner seemed to provide.

  Stalls with products minimally affected by radioactivity had obviously won the loyalty and interest of shoppers, and generated enough trade to maintain soundly built structures larger and sturdier than their rag-tag counterparts.

  A woman that Lara had ended up beside called out, aggressively grabbing at the air that faced a more poorly constructed shop. Lara was shifting her weight towards the tips of her toes to better regard the interest of the woman’s fervor when she felt a blunt force atop her head.

  She yelped, immediately applying pressure to the phantom outline of the bludgeon on her scalp.

  The woman anxiously felt at the ground beside her and retrieved the object that had collided with Lara’s head: a misshapen onion somewhat grayed in color. “Get out of the way when you see somebody trying to buy!”

  Lara’s brows furrowed, agitatedly. She began to retort, but the woman had managed to push past her and disappeared from sight.

  Thoroughly heated, Lara began pushing people aside, struggling to create a path herself, when she was suddenly swept by the crowd in the wrong direction.

  She cursed, shouting as she lost footing with the ground. She was swept away by the wave of people until her shoes felt earth and she stumbled away in surprise.

  Lara felt a hard knee to her back, forcing her face into the mud. An array of feet then traversed over her, stomping her further into the ground.

  Her lips parted, gasping -- the fear of being trampled to death flooding her tongue.

  The urge to get up played through her head, willing her on until she rolled over. Her hands grasped at the legs around her, using whomever she could for leverage and ignoring their shouts as she pulled them to the ground. Gripping onto a passerby’s shirt, she heaved herself up, narrowly escaping the attention of its owner as he mistook another person as the culprit.

  “You’ve got something to say?” He instigated, calling out the man who happened to wind up next to him.

  “Oh go get off’n someone el--” spat the man, interrupted by the blow of a swing.

  A brawl erupted, halting the flow of traffic and giving Lara enough time to gain some distance from the crowds. The surroundings transitioned from chaotic and overwhelming, to somber as the number of people thinned out towards the north-end of the field.

  A line of men stood silently in front of her. Each individual was lost in their own contemplation until it was their turn to be called up to the sturdiest stall she’d seen thus far.

  If anyone can even call it that, she thought. It looked much more modern, with its uniform metal. It took her a moment to realize that it reminded her of the metal used for the revolver.

  Enlistment, its sign read.

  “Lady Luck!” A man exclaimed, calling out to her.

  Lara turned to see the man standing a few meters away, his blonde hair slicked back.

  “I saw you escape from your little predicament, there.”

  Lara responded quickly, still jittery with adrenaline, “I was shoved.”

  “We’re all exposed, at one point or another,” he replied in a manner that made it difficult for Lara to connect the subject of their conversation.

  He walked up to her with his accent was tidier than everyone she’d met thus far, seemingly unaffected by the disarray of the world around them. As he came closer, Lara noticed just how clean he was -- and dressed in what appeared to be brand new clothing. Nothing like the scavenged third-hand pieces she’d seen thus far.

  He stopped a polite-yet-professional distance away, “You act as though you’ve never been to the Mid-Indies.”

  Lara shifted her posture, feeling uncomfortably observed. “Mid-Indies?” She inquired.

  Her response was met with a chuckle, “Thank you for answering my question.”

  Lara tried to smother her awkwardness by attempting to ask about the line of men ahead of them. But he spoke first.

  “And where exactly are you from?”

  She crossed her arms in defense, attempting to encourage some confidence rather than give in to her discomfort. “Around. Yourself?”

  The man scoffed, “Not only have you never been to the Mid-Indies but Circa, as well.” His eyes brushed her figure. “My, we’d be quite fortunate to have an outsider like you enlist.”

  “Enlist?” Lara said in an attempt to gauge him for information. “Hard decision to make when I don’t know what exactly I’m enlisting for.”

  Auras sending me out here was a mistake, she concluded, fully recognizing how easy it would be for someone to take advantage of her if she said the wrong thing and gave away too much about just how little she knew or understood.

  A smirk grew on his face, seemingly reading her mind, “The enlistment prospects, you see.” In the air, his finger traced the line of people ahead of her answering her unspoken question. Finally, he came to the front of the stall she had originally noticed. The blueish gray of its metal reflected like ice, too out of place with its pristine glory in the bowl of slum around it.

  "Obviously,” she muttered, ignoring his dumbed-down explanation.

    He slipped his hands in his pockets, leaning back coolly, “So it’s safe to say I won’t be seeing your name in the pile, then?”

  Lara only looked back at his sly image, unwilling to reveal any further information.

  “Shame,” he said in response to her silence. “You’re quite quick. Consider it; you’d be one of the more notable additions from the lot.”

  She turned her head back to the crowd, connecting the subject of his ill-review to that of the populace. But upon returning her attention to the man, she found him gone.

  The strange novelties of the interaction lingered over her as she mentally reviewed them.

  Outsiders, he had suggested, were uncommon.

  She walked off the lawn, now feeling very exposed.