[A dream?]
Green braced himself on the table and straightened, his back aching slightly from lying hunched over for so long. His neck turned stiffly, like a hinge that hadn't been oiled in ages.
He must have fallen asleep at the table for quite a while. Wax had dripped from the soot-blackened candlestick and frozen in the cold draft, hanging upside down. The wick's last faint glow trembled on the verge of going out.
The letter spread before him bore the words "Recent Developments at the Clinic." He had just finished reading it: an oral medication said to be quite effective was being distributed by the clinic, though only on a small scale, and its formula was kept secret.
A few scattered drops of water drifted into the room with the damp night breeze, carrying a smell that seemed almost like background noise.
It was hard to define it as a stench. Green had visited other cities, and their rainy days usually carried the smell of metabolic waste. It was as if each city were a half-paralyzed giant made of crowds, wood, and stone, sprawled where it lay and gnawing on everything around it. The larger the body, the worse its bedsores.
Dunling was different. Anything that didn't belong on the surface of a city was carried, year after year, deep into the underground system by the running water.
Few residents thought about where it all went, what it looked like, or whether the space below might simply be endless.
During the rainy season, the rising water would lift a certain smell, which seeped out through every opening connecting the surface to the depths. It was stale and chill, bringing to mind bones buried in an underground cemetery.
A city built atop a vast tomb. The parts abandoned by time