Wind-Scarred (The Will of the Elements, Book 1) by Sky Corbelli Read Free Book Online Page B

the Great War and created Sanctuary as
a safe haven for mankind to live in peace. Only, after the war,
there was no-one left. There was nothing left. They put up the
barrier to protect themselves and try to preserve as much of
humanity as they could.”
    “ That's very good, exactly what they teach in the history
classes.”
    “ But,” Ezra took a deep breath, “but it's not like that
anymore. There are people outside. I saw them! Healthy people! The
world is healthy again! There's no reason for us to be stuck here,
hiding in our city like... like hermits or some kind
of-”
    “ Prisoners?” Mr. Blair gave Ezra a sad little smile and took
off his glasses, setting them on the table. His light brown eyes
initially seemed unimpressive, much like everything else about him,
but on a second glance Ezra glimpsed a hard, fierce intelligence
behind them. “Unfortunately, Ezra, prisoners are exactly what we
are. What we've been since the beginning.”
    “ What do you mean?” Ezra's voice wavered
uncertainly.
    “ There was a Great War, Ezra. We lost.”

Chapter
8
Visions of the Past
    Ezra took a moment to try
digesting what he had heard. Surely he's
joking, or trying to trick me , he thought
to himself. How could they be prisoners? The barrier didn't prevent
them from leaving. They had the greatest technology the world had
ever seen at their disposal. They had left the planet, built a
colossal space station. They had more freedom at their disposal
than they knew what to do with. “That doesn't make any sense,” he
said, “even if there was something to actually keep us in here,
which there isn't, we could get up and leave to space whenever we
wanted.”
    “ Perhaps prisoners isn't quite the word, although I assure you,
we are that. Maybe 'quarantined' better describes it. Not many
records survived the Great War, and the Founders of Sanctuary began
changing history the moment they had a history to write. All that
we know is this. We are the zero point zero zero zero one percent
of the human population that decided to cling to technology in the
face of an enemy who had overcome us. We do not know who this enemy
was, but we know what they were capable of.”
    He inserted a small card into the table.
Ezra raised his eyebrows. Not much was kept on external data, off
the net, these days. He shot a discreet glance at the man, and
mentally opened a private program to record whatever he was about
to see. The program failed to initialize, blocked somehow. Ezra
blinked at this in surprise, as a two dimensional video began to
play. “This is one of the last recovered recordings from before the
dark years of the Great War, during which nearly all technology on
the planet ceased to function.” Ezra quickly engaged another
program to check for signs of file manipulation with what he was
seeing. There was an image of a city, glimmering under the sun,
surrounded by more water than he had ever seen up close. Two
bridges reached out to it, gracefully connecting the peninsula to
the land on either side. “The city you're looking at,” Mr. Blair
stated, “was called San Francisco. It was one of the first to be
wiped out during the War.”
    Ezra watched in fascination as the camera
zoomed in to the closer of the two bridges, a monstrous red
construction suspended from steel cables. The frame wobbled back
and forth as it adjusted, and Ezra realized that this was an
amateur filming. There was a low buzzing that must have been
narration, but whatever he was saying had clearly been lost long
ago. On the bridge were people. Ezra quickly estimated that there
must be close to a million of them. About as many as lived in
Sanctuary.
    They were all walking away from the city,
but something looked... off about how they were moving. Then he
realized what it was. Every single one of them was stepping
completely in sync. His eyes darted to the program, but it had
detected no video tampering. Most of the people struggled against
it, some tried to catch