"Terrazas says that he's never seen anything like this," Marie said.
"Well, he ought to know," Cordova said, taking his binoculars down, but still looking ahead. He didn't want to look at her. If Terrazas was concerned, with more than twenty years navigation experience than anyone else on the boat, then he supposed they should be too.
"How far away do you think we are?" Marie said. "And is the way going to get harder the closer we get?"
Cordova answered with a terse, "Two more days, at this rate. And probably."
Marie crossed her arms, and he could feel her stern look without turning to her. "Are we even sure that we're going to know what we're looking for when we find it?"
"We'll know. Something that causes this much damage will be obvious." There were other signs, too. The jungle sounds that usually filled the air had started to fade, which meant that they were getting closer to the center of -- whatever this was. And maybe he was imagining it, but the trees seemed to be leaning the slightest bit downstream, opposite the direction the boat was traveling.
"I'm going to say it again," Marie said, "but we're really not equipped for this kind of thing. All our equipment was designed for weather data, and this--" she swept a hand at the thickening river ahead of them, "--definitely isn't weather related."
Cordova sighed, finally turned to her. "I agree with you. The only advantage we have is that we'll be able to get to the site before any other military presence can get feet on the ground. And to the bosses, that means something."
"Well, I don't like it," she muttered. "We have no idea what we're getting into. We could be heading toward a radiation-heavy site, or a volcano that could go off again..."
Cordova interrupted her. "No evidence points to that. That's the reason why the government called us to check it out first. We've got our radiation detectors running, and if this is some sort of missile attack gone astray, that's important information to have."
Marie just looked at him for a moment, then swatted at a persistent, noisy fly that was circling her ponytail. "I'm going to take a shift on the prow," she finally huffed, and went down to relieve one of the tired men on the bow.
Cordova watched her as she stepped up beside one, put her hand on his shoulder, and took the pole he was using to push debris out of their path. He wondered when -- and if -- he should tell her, what he suspected, and what the commander he had spoken to had suggested to him when they were taken away from their weather station monitoring to undertake this mission.
He raised his binoculars up again, and was stunned with what he saw when he scanned the horizon. There, clearly rising out of the mist in the distance, was a small clump of tall buildings. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and checked again. Yes, there they were. They had to be some kind of mirage in this green wilderness. But they didn't shimmer, didn't move, just became steadily clearer the closer they crept toward it.
He waited until he was absolutely sure that his eyes hadn't deceived him before calling Marie up to verify what he was looking at. They were the highest personnel on the boat, so no one could see it from the lower deck, even if they hadn't been preoccupied with clearing away the junk below that threatened to impede their progress. He didn't speak when she responded to his call, did nothing to allay the sense of annoyance in her eyes when she came up from her work to stand beside him. He just handed her the binoculars. He waited patiently while she held them to her eyes, followed his pointing finger, lowered the lenses, raised them again, lowered them again.
"What the hell is that?" she finally asked.
"It's the impact site," he said.
Marie stood silent for a few moments. "I thought this kind of debris was most likely caused by a volcanic eruption, but since there was no ash, I thought it might have been a meteorite."
"That's what I thought too," Cordova said flatly. "But this is... something different".
"How soon until we get to it?" Marie asked.
"The river hasn't stopped flowing, so it's not blocking the river."
"Wait," Marie said, "you think this thing just appeared there?"
"I don't know," Cordova said. "I think anything we guess is going to be proven wrong tomorrow." Marie nodded. At the rate they were moving upstream, they wouldn't get to those distant man-made peaks until the next day.
By nightfall, the whole crew knew about what was ahead of them. Cordova had spoken to each of them separately, slowly and calmly, and as night fell, he was glad he had. There were sounds and a few lights from over there, some of which might have been shouts. Cordova also thought he might have heard gunfire. Some of the buildings had fires burning on their roofs, and a bigger fire he couldn't see the source of underneath that might be a whole small building going up. Engines could be heard, and even the blat of a few truck horns. As fascinating as it was to watch and listen to the steadily-growing incongruity, he forced himself to bed early. He suspected he would need all the energy he had.
They arrived at the point of the river closest to the city the next morning before noon. They knew they were getting closer because the trees' tilt -- which he hadn't imagined after all -- grew progressively more pronounced, until they found they had to hug the right bank of the river to avoid the low-hanging branches from their left. He ordered the crew to continue upstream, drawing abreast of the city, until he perceived the trees to be leaning upstream along with them, figuring that that would mean that they had just passed the closest point they were going to get to the city. He ordered the captain to park as close to the left bank as they could, once they found a spot relatively clear of bent trees.
He and Marie, carrying their packs full of supplies, jumped off onto solid ground and began to pick their way forward, now able to see several of the tallest buildings over the lowering treetops. They proceeded without speaking, both excited and frightened in equal measure. Periodically, he would close his eyes as they reached a relatively clear stretch of ground, and the closer he got, the more he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a city. It was subtly different, though; more human voices, less traffic.
It was during one of these periods of self-imposed blindness that Marie caught his arm, holding him back. He stopped and opened his eyes. They had finally reached the point where the forest had been flattened enough that their heads were sticking out over the top of the foliage. In front of them lay about a hundred yards of utterly flattened ground, and beyond that, a city on a pedestal. It took him a while to realize what he was seeing. Being a scientist above all other things, two words stood out in his head like neon: “core sample”.
He was looking at an excised section of a city, a cylindrical piece that started at about fifteen feet below street level and ended somewhere above the top of the highest building, as if it had been and dropped there. The force of such a weight being landing on a swath of virgin forest, he imagined, would force so much air out from under it that it would cause the arboreal devastation in all directions, smothering trees and clogging river with blown debris. The most amazing part of the excision -- if he was thinking about this correctly -- was how it failed to take human geometry into account. The edge of the sample was a perfect circle, judging by the smooth way it curved away from him and Marie in both directions, one that sliced through buildings regardless of how they were arranged. In fact, he could see at least two places around the half of the circle visible to him where buildings had been clipped so thinly that they had collapsed, falling away from the center and off the elevated disc, crushing even more jungle floor. He imagined there were just as many that had fallen inward, which might account for the random firelight he had seen the night before.
The several yards of underground that was exposed were riddled with pipes of all sizes, huge mouth-like storm drains and smaller utility pipes as well. Many had thin streams of brackish water still flowing out of them, turning the ground surrounding the base into a swampy morass. There were more than a few overturned cars in this mire below spots where surface streets ended, implying that the displacement had happened so quickly that they did not have time to realize that the street before them didn't continue, but ended in a sheer drop to the jungle floor.
"Hey!" a voice called. It had a strange tone to it, both echoing and muffled at the same time.
Marie pointed up to the edge of the street that ended closest to where they stood. A man was standing up there, holding an imposing-looking rifle against his hip.
Cordova raised a hand and waved it over his head. Marie grabbed for it, as if to prevent the gesture, but either thought better of it or realized the damage had been done, and let him do it. "Hello!" he called as he waved.
The man with the rifle placed his other hand on the butt of it, but still didn't point it in his direction. "Where are you from?"
Cordova stepped forward, far enough that the flattened trees and undergrowth only came up to his knees. "We're scientists. We were exploring the river when we spotted you in the distance." If Marie minded that he was bending the truth, she didn't seem to mind. "How long have you been here?"
The man with the rifle looked behind him, but from this low angle Cordova couldn't tell what he was looking at. "This is the third day," he said. "None of us knows what happened. We just appeared here."
"You were carried and dropped?" Marie asked, addressing the sentry for the first time.
"Not carried, just dropped. We estimate we appeared about ten feet off the ground, then fell. We're shaken up pretty bad, but we're trying to pool resources and keep order."
"Is there a leader we can talk to?" Cordova asked.
The sentry considered his answer for a moment, then said, "The mayor's residence was outside the circle, so we're trying to figure out that part too."
"Is there a way for us to come up?" Cordova asked. "We'd like to help, if we can."
The sentry looked behind himself again, nervously this time, and looked back down at them. "We haven't really left the circle yet, but we know we'll have to eventually. Hang on a minute." The man disappeared without waiting for an answer from either of them.
When he left, Marie began to wonder. "What city *is* this?" she asked.
"I don't recognize any of the buildings." Cordova shook his head. "I'm just glad they speak English. But look at the cars."
She followed his pointing finger at the smashed cars that had fallen off the edge of the city circle. She didn't know cars very well, but there were a few that bore strange design elements that she hadn't seen before. They were sleek, curved in ways she wasn't used to seeing. "What does that mean?" she asked.
Cordova shrugged. "Maybe nothing. But this looks like an American city to me. The only trouble is, I don't know any of these car models. They look somewhat... futuristic, don't you think?"
Marie squinted at them, wishing she had paid more attention to car design. Or that they had a chance to look at specimens that were more intact. When she looked too close, she began to realize that the cars she was looking at were gruesomely occupied. Those who had been driving the cars when they plummeted and crashed were, for the most part, still visible inside the vehicles. She turned away. "God," she muttered.
The man with the rifle reappeared, this time flanked by a half-dozen more people. They were unarmed, and their dress ran the gamut from t-shirt and cutoffs to business suits, all similarly scuffed and askew. "Hey!" the sentry called again. Cordova and Marie looked up to him. "We're working on a ladder for you," he said. "Do you have a radio down there? We have a few intact towers, but don't seem to be getting any bars up here."
Cordova had no idea what the man was talking about. "We have a radio in our boat, but we're too far inland to call anyone. We'd have to travel at least two days downstream before we can call the coast."
The man looked perplexed. "Which coast?" he asked.
When Cordova said, “Columbian, of course," a murmur went through the elevated crowd. Clearly, this was not an answer they had expected.
They turned and talked to each other in hushed tones, although they needn't have; nothing less than a hailing call could be heard over the distance between them and Cordova and Marie.
"Are you saying," the sentry called, making sure to speak over the rising voices behind him, "that we're in Columbia?"
"That's right," Cordova answered. "Where were you expecting?" He wasn't mocking him, he just wanted to know.
Marie jumped in, fearing they would misunderstand his tone, "We're guessing that you're American, yes?"
The sentry seemed a little reluctant to talk to Marie, noting her accent. "Yes. That's right."
"What city?" she asked.
The sentry turned and spoke to his cohorts behind her, and in lieu of an answer, he called down, "Hold on," he said. "We're getting the ladder now." The group moved away from the edge, at least far enough that Cordova and Marie couldn't see them anymore.
“You're going to spook them," Marie said. "Please be careful. You can't convey tone across this distance."
"Don't worry," Cordova said. "These are my countrymen. We understand each other."
At that moment, the group reappeared at the edge of the city. Now they were all armed, the barrels of rifles, shotguns and pistols alike trained on them. The sentry kicked a bundle off the edge of the street, and it unfurled into a chain-and-plank safety ladder on the way down, its end snapping just two feet off the ground and waving in the still air. "Come up, please,” he said. “The woman first."
