Klein called a parking lot) leads to a street. The concrete is cracked and some comes up in chunks. The four people pick their way along a path they seem to know from memory, barely pausing to catch their footing on the uneven ground. I’m much slower as I trudge along in my heavy boots. I don’t need to worry about staying far enough away; I need to worry about just keeping up. Houses, mostly small simple buildings, line the street. They feel warm to me. The brick, wood, and colors of them have texture and depth that the plastic and metal from the colony could never match. I try to imagine people living in them. Now they are husks, with sad broken-window eyes dripping rain like tears into the overgrown vegetation. New trees spring up close to the houses, and the grass is up to my waist. In another hundred years, this might be a forest with the houses crumbling to dust. It makes me sad. How many people are at the settlement that all these houses go to waste? It can’t be very large.
