The Silver Dead: A Dark Post-Apocalyptic Thriller by Steven Savile

Author:Steven Savile [Savile, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

He was alone.

Temple stood on the deck of the prison hulk, his ruined shirt in his trembling hands. Inside it, the crown egg pulsed angrily, still hungry for life. He understood it now, but he still didn’t know what it was. It was obviously some kind of weapon? The crown was significant, too, but not in any way he understood yet. It was just another question to add to the list he already carried with him. The world was still full of things he didn’t understand once he scratched beneath the superficial surface. He felt its heat searing through the cloth. Why though, when he touched it, didn’t it unravel flesh from bone, offering release as it did with everyone else?

He was done with the damned thing.

It ends here, he thought as the heat became unbearable. He held the shirt out over the side, ready to tip the egg into the water and watch it sink without a trace, joining Pilgrim’s corpse beneath the surf.

But he couldn’t do it.

Hating himself, he closed his fist around the egg, and felt the crown brand itself into his palm.

The truth of the last words of the mimics haunted him.

He had had the world and he had thrown it away.

They could have rebuilt it around him, giving him back the man he had been.

But he didn’t want to become the man he had been, he wanted to know the man he was—there was a subtle difference. The cost was too great. Too selfish. Too destructive.

He would find his answers another way.

This was not the end of his long journey—indeed he suspected his pilgrimage had yet to truly begin. His hand closed around Pilgrim’s stolen cross. He would carry it with him until he found the truth, a new memory to join an old ghost. He held it so tightly the metal dug into his palm, imprinting its shape on his flesh.

“Goodbye, my friend,” he said, closing his eyes even as new tears streamed down his cheeks.

Temple turned his back on the cruel sea and saw Nina standing in the shadow of the hulk’s conning tower.

She was nothing like Melina, not as he remembered her, nor as the mimics had reconstructed her. She was only and always herself, and, he realised, he loved her for it. The fact of which scared him more than it had any right to—because he really did have something left to lose.

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