A Keepsake to Cherish

It always amazes me how beautiful the horizon looks when the sun is setting, even after the Fall. Maybe even because of it.

Sure, I’ve seen photos and videos of how beautiful the world was before. With rolling hills of green grass, cities of near-perfect symmetra, et cetera, yadda, yadda. It’s something I’ve never seen for myself and something I’ve never formed an attachment to. But this view, I have. With the sun glinting between the broken and warped beams of iron; the remaining skeleton-structure of a building that had collapsed years if not decades ago. The jagged, rocky terrain peeking through the rubble and debris scattered down the streets and allies of the city that hadn’t survived.

But I’m not here for the view.

Hooking my iron onto the metal beam I’d been using as a seat, I threw my legs over the side, letting the cable hold my weight as the device around my waist slowly lowered me to the floor of the ruined building. Once my feet were firmly planted on the ground, I flipped the switch that ejected the iron from around the beam and caught its screw-nut-shaped head in my hands. I made sure it was once again fastened securely to my hip and checked to make sure my barrette was still holding back my hair.

It was about the eighth time I’d felt for it since putting it in, despite constantly being aware of its weight upon my head. But who could blame me? After all, it was the only thing I had of my mother’s. It wasn’t valuable or rare or worth anything beyond sentiment; in fact, it was nothing more than a concave stirling bead. Scratched up and dented, the only notable marking it bore was the engraved, stylized “a” at its center. But it was all I had and, call me paranoid, the last thing I wanted was to lose it after it happened to fall out of my hair.

Well, okay, I lied. It’s not the only thing Mama gave me. She also gave me the story of her grandmother. A woman who’d been born before the Fall, and the one who I’d been named after.

Great-Granny Abigail had witnessed the Fall first hand. More than that, she’d been smart enough to know what came next. She, alongside her closest family, had overrun and taken one of the old Banks as theirs, not just looting it but turning it into their own personal vault. Granny Abigail had divvied up all its valuable contents among her family but she’d kept the vault for herself. Then, she used it to store every valuable item she’d managed to procure, barter for, and steal in the days after. As the building had begun to collapse and her neighbors grew jealous, she removed the whole vault itself from the foundation and moved it.

She never told anyone where she’d hidden it, never outright. But she gave my own Grams clues on how to find it in the way she spoke; and Grams gave the clues to Mama when she’d deemed her old enough, until Mama told me.

The story of my great-grandmother, who robbed every soul she saw blind and who had a hidden vault of treasure and wealth somewhere out in the world. A family inheritance she’d kept spirited away for her daughter and her daughter’s daughter’s daughter. It was a hard thing to believe is real but the way Mama told it, I knew there had to be something to it.

That story is what brought me to this relic of the old world. Thing was, Banks nowadays are a bit different than banks from before the Fall. They were more like the treasuries of kingdoms in the ancient histories. A collection of wealth and desired objects held by a single person, someone who used that wealth to build whole districts in their name whereupon people flocked to and lived. But Mama said Granny Abigail never used the right words for things. The rest of her family had just thought she wasn’t right in the head or had some problem talking. But Grams suspected maybe that wasn’t the case. It took me forever to follow my Great-Granny’s story and replace the words Mama told me with their post-Fall counterpart.

That was what led me to a grave. That thing people used to call a subway. Nobody uses them anymore, of course. That’s why they’re called graves, only good for throwing out the things that don’t live anymore. It’d taken a while to decipher where I should look; Grams had said Granny had essentially told her she’d buried it in the subway of the city she’d called home. With no name for the place after the Fall, I’d had to retrace my family’s history by foot.

I was lucky enough to be right. After trekking deep enough into the grave, and avoiding some of the more vile and rank alcoves tucked in the corners, I came across the vault. But finding the vault was where my lug ran out.

For a moment, all I could do was stand there as the sight of the large metal block, and its fallen door and gaping entrance, washed over me. The first thing I did was check the door. There was a vain, wistful voice of hope in my head that maybe the door had just fallen off with age; but, no, it had been cut clean away by its hinges. It only took stepping inside to confirm the worst case scenario: some person or persons had already looted it long before I’d arrived.

A good number of the containers inside lay open or left pulled completely from their nooks. The floor was littered with piles of old, green paper abandoned and forgotten. Anything that might’ve held some kind of value in the world was long gone. Here at last was the evidence of my great-grandmother’s legacy and all that was left was a hollowed out safe covered in dirt and dust.

I nearly jumped clean out of my skin when a loud crack split the silence of my artificial bereavement. Looking down, I noticed there was something under the papers on the floor. I crouched down and brushed them away, staring at the old frame that had been discarded to the floor. Any thieves that came here looking for treasure wouldn’t see anything of value in a photograph taken before the Fall.

And yet, as I stared at the photo behind the broken glass, I couldn’t help but marvel at the girl who looked so remarkably like my own reflection.

She was very young, about my age. Unlike my own mane, her dark hair fell over her shoulder in a tight braid. She was standing in front of and between two older folks who must’ve been her parents, with a big, bright smile lighting up her face. What immediately caught my eye after her face was the locket hanging from her neck; it was set in the shape of a heart and I could just barely make out the words “My Heart” engraved on it.

Upon seeing that, I began searching every space and crevice I could find. I wanted that locket more than anything, at that moment. No matter where I looked or how hard I dug through the vault, I didn’t find anything. Deciding that whoever had discovered the vault must’ve taken it along with the rest of the valuables, I folded up the photo of Great-Granny Abigail and tucked it in my pocket.

For the twelfth time that day, I reached up with my hand to check that my barrette was still stuck in my hair, running my finger over its little worn bead.

It was about time I headed home.