"Where will they take us now?" barely a whisper, the words rasped through Menda’s parched lips. Using the brick windowsill as a crutch, she surveyed the broken landscape. Spires of metal protruding from mounds of rubble spanned sprawling distances between a few surviving buildings. A thick layer of dust tinting the horizon in sickening shades of green and orange strengthened the air’s foul stench.
“That last quake was one of the worst I’ve felt,” her friend and fellow prisoner mumbled. Her dirt smudged hands slipped hopelessly down the bars separating them from the outside world, “I don’t even ca