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The Kovalic House, Company Row

R ory’s eyes fluttered open to darkness again. The air was still and stale. Pain radiated through her abdomen in waves, each one more intense than the last.

She tried to orient herself, making out vague shapes in the gloom—a chair, a rough-hewn table, a stone fireplace. Moonlight filtered through dirt-streaked windows, casting weak silver beams across the wooden floor where she lay.

This place felt familiar. A memory flickered through the confusion: an old man on a porch, light striping his weathered face, an excavator reflected in the window behind him.

“Edward Kovalic,” she breathed.

She was in the last house standing on Company Row.

How had she gotten here? The last thing she remembered was turning to see Evan in mouth of the cave. Then pain slicing through her middle as she fell.

More fragmented memories flashed in her mind. Dragging herself through undergrowth to the trail, drawn to this doomed structure—a symbol of resistance, this last man standing against the tide of so-called progress.

Another wave of pain crashed through her, and she curled into herself, gasping. Barbed wire ripped through her intestines, tearing her apart from the inside. Her muscles spasmed and tremors ran.

Seizure incoming.

The tremors intensified, and darkness began to close in from the edges of her vision. Somewhere in the distance, voices called her name. Auditory hallucinations, she thought.

As she slipped out of consciousness, Rory’s last coherent thought was that she, like the homes being demolished, would return to dust.