[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 11] A Sky Without Rain
There was no floor beyond the Gate.
The instant Crono stepped through, he felt his body pitch forward. Marle's hand slipped between his fingers, and all three of them tumbled down a slope of cold metal. Their shoulders and backs struck the surface again and again before a twisted railing finally broke their fall.
The blue light contracted above them.
The last few raindrops to pass through scattered in midair. They evaporated over the heated metal before they ever reached the ground.
Crono pushed himself upright.
The air was dry and bitter, like an old coin. Every breath left dust clinging to the back of his throat. They had emerged inside an enormous domed building, but half its roof had collapsed, exposing a black sky. Walkways rose in tiers along the walls, broken in the middle, while shards of glass and metal lay across the floor like sand.
“Is everyone all right?”
Lucca checked her bag before anything else. The impact had left a hairline crack inside the crystal panel of the Gate Key, though its needle was still moving.
Marle pulled herself up by the railing. Her palms were scraped, and the fabric at one knee had torn.
“My father's soldiers couldn't have followed us, could they?”
Lucca looked up into the enclosed space.
“Not immediately, without a device like mine. But I need to see whether we can open this Gate again.”
She raised the Key. Its needle pointed toward the place where the Gate had vanished. A faint blue line appeared once and faded. The connection remained, but whether from the shock of their passage or damage to the device, the Key could not bring the Gate back at once.
“We can't go back?” Marle asked.
“I'm not saying we can't.”
Lucca pressed a thumb against the cracked crystal panel.
“I'm saying that if I force it open now, I might break the connection for good.”
Crono studied their surroundings.
An unnervingly precise order remained in the structure of the unfamiliar building: doors concealed within walls, lights set at regular intervals, transport platforms that seemed designed to move without anyone operating them. None of it worked. When Crono touched a black panel beside one door, it lit for an instant. Characters he could not read appeared, then vanished.
At the far end of the floor stood a door marked with a strange emblem, nothing like the royal crest. It showed a blue circle crossed by branching lines.
Lucca ran her hand along the seam and tapped the black panel beside it. The door was locked by a system unrelated to either the Telepod or the Gate. Marle took out her pendant, but its blue gem gave no response.
“We should remember the symbol.”
Lucca copied it onto a sheet of paper.
Marle tucked the pendant back beneath her clothes. For now, the direction of the wind outside mattered more than whatever lay behind the sealed door. The dust carried the faintest trace of something burned.
The passage leading outside opened high above the ground.
When the three climbed over the collapsed wall, Marle could not take another step.
There was no sun in the sky.
Thick gray clouds covered everything. Beneath them, the ruins of an immense city stretched without end. Towers stood severed halfway up, their black skeletons exposed, while rounded buildings had sunk halfway into the earth. Roads that had once crossed the sky now ended abruptly and hung over empty air. Whenever the wind blew, sheets of metal rang in the distance, but there were no birds and no insects.
The sky looked heavy with rain.
Yet no trace of running water marked the ground. Only a thin layer of black ash moved over the cracked earth.
“Could this be another country?” Marle asked.
Lucca stared at a fallen tower instead of answering. Neither Guardia's royal crest nor the mark of the Mystics appeared on its outer wall. Its machinery was far more intricate than anything in the Telepod, but she could not tell how long the years had been wearing it away.
“Another age is more likely.”
The words fell into the ruins.
Marle looked back at the domed building behind them.
“The past?”
“Unless there's evidence that our world once had technology like this and forgot it...” Lucca let the sentence trail away. Her face said she did not want her own reasoning to be right. “The future.”
Part of a number remained on a broken sign near the entrance. Most of the lettering had peeled away, but four digits were still legible: 2300. There was no way to know whether it was a year or merely a facility number.
Crono pointed northeast.
A tiny light was flickering beneath the gray horizon. It might have been lit by someone still alive, or it might have been a signal repeated by a broken machine. Either possibility was better than waiting where they were.
The three descended into the ruins.
The road had once been paved with something smoother than stone, but deep cracks now divided it. Through the gaps, they could see several levels of empty space below. Crono crossed first and tested each metal plate with his weight before Marle followed. Whenever the weight of her bag threw Lucca off balance, she needed both their hands to steady her.
The wind never stopped.
If they stood still for even a moment, ash collected in the folds of their clothes and between strands of hair. Marle covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve. Lucca lowered her goggles to protect her eyes. Crono rested a hand on his sword, but the memory of the crack running through the blade kept him from drawing it.
Once, a metallic cry came from beneath the wreckage of a transport platform.
Crono stopped the others. A small creature with round eyes crawled out from between the debris. It resembled a rat, but a hard shell covered its back, and blue saliva ran between its incisors. The sight of people did not make it attack. Instead, it went straight for Lucca's bag.
Lucca threw a stone, and the creature vanished into the wreckage with unbelievable speed.
“I think it smelled food.”
She drew two loaves wrapped in cloth from her bag. She had taken them from Taban's workshop before entering the castle prison.
Marle looked from the bread to the ruins around them.
“How long will that last if the three of us share it?”
“It has to last long enough for me to repair our way home.”
Lucca's answer sounded more like hope than calculation.
The building with the flickering light still bore the words TRANN DOME above its entrance.
As soon as the three appeared in the doorway, a rusted metal door slammed shut. Sunken eyes studied them through a small viewing slit.
“Put down your weapons.”
The man's voice was cracked and dry.
Crono set his damaged sword on the floor. Lucca slowly put down her launcher as well. When Marle raised her empty hands, the locks were released one by one.
About twenty people were gathered inside.
They looked less like people living than people conserving every movement to keep death at a distance. Their clothes had been made by stitching together layers of cloth and plastic. Exhaustion had settled so deeply into their faces that it was difficult to tell their ages. Even the children did not cry. As though they had learned that crying only made hunger worse, they merely bit their lips.
Without thinking, Marle hid her pendant beneath her clothes.
“Is this Truce?”
The people exchanged glances.
“Truce?” the man at the door repeated. “This is Trann Dome.”
“What about the Kingdom of Guardia?”
This time no one understood the question.
Lucca examined a terminal built into the wall. She connected an auxiliary wire to the dead screen, and a dim map and date appeared. The number was the same as the one on the sign outside.
A.D. 2300.
Marle touched the display.
“Thirteen hundred years...”
She could not finish.
Crono looked again at the people inside the dome. The disappearance of Guardia felt less immediate than the way they smelled the bread and tried not to look at it.
Lucca took out the loaves she had brought.
“Please. Share these.”
The man did not accept them.
“They're yours.”
“We can find a way back.”
Lucca said it firmly, but her grip tightened around the Gate Key.
Marle placed one loaf on a piece of cloth beside the children. The youngest looked up at his mother and reached for it only after she nodded. The bread was cut into thin slices and passed from person to person. No one ate an entire piece at once.
Farther inside the dome stood a glass chamber tall enough for a person. The man called it an Enertron. Close the door and press a button, he explained, and it eased exhaustion and injuries.
Crono went in first.
A faint light passed over his body, quieting the pain in his side and the heat in his palm. The weight of three sleepless days vanished as well. Yet the moment he stepped outside, the emptiness in his stomach was sharper than before.
“It can sleep for you, but it can't eat for you,” the man said. “A machine that reminds us we're still human.”
After hearing that, Marle refused to enter. Only when Lucca pointed to her injured knee did she give in.
While they rested, the survivors told them of a food store beneath Arris Dome to the northeast. The problem was Lab 16, which lay between the two domes. Mutated creatures and broken machines had overrun the way, and neither swords nor bullets could easily drive them off.
“If food is still there, why doesn't anyone go?” Marle asked.
A woman held out one withered hand.
“Because those who went never came back.”
Crono looked at the one remaining loaf and at Lucca's bag. If they were to repair the Gate, they needed food and water. But if there was food in Arris Dome, it could mean more than the three of them finding their way home.
When he picked up his sword, Marle was already on her feet.
“I'm coming.”
Lucca sighed and checked the ammunition in her launcher.
“When no one disagrees with me, I start feeling like the cautious one.”
The man from Trann Dome gave them an old canteen and strips of cloth to cover their faces. Instead of thanking them, he warned them not to run in Lab 16. The fast creatures stole whatever they could carry first, and if anyone chased them, they lured their pursuer deeper inside.
The entrance to the ruins resembled a black ravine split between two fallen towers.
Once they entered, the wind weakened. Somewhere in the darkness, drops of liquid struck the ground. The damp smell came not from water, but from old oil and rotting cloth. The wreckage of cars and machines lay piled in layers, forming a path.
Creatures with round shells moved among the shadows.
Without drawing his sword, Crono threw a fragment of stone in the opposite direction. Three creatures darted toward the sound at once. While they were distracted, Marle went first through a low passage, with Lucca behind her.
The second group was not fooled.
One creature climbed onto Lucca's shoulder and sank its teeth into the strap of her bag. As she twisted around, another rushed in from below and tore away a small pouch.
“My tools!”
Lucca started after it on instinct, but Crono caught her arm.
The floor ahead ended completely in darkness. One more step would have sent her plunging to the level below.
Marle picked up a piece of metal and struck it against the wall. The sharp ringing spread through the entire ruin. The creatures abandoned the tool pouch and scattered into their holes. Marle waited, then went back and dragged the pouch toward herself with one foot.
“They told us not to run.”
“I know. My body moved before my brain did.”
Lucca tucked the pouch inside her coat and fell silent. It was the same habit that had made her reach for the Telepod to find the cause even as her invention swallowed a person.
At the eastern end of the ruins, an enormous mutant blocked the passage. It had two forelegs as long as arms, and its eyes were buried in its flesh, responding only to light. Crono remembered the warning that neither gunfire nor a blade would easily bring it down.
They did not fight it.
Lucca connected a battery in a wrecked transport and switched on a light across the passage. While the creature turned toward it, Marle dragged a chain across the ground and secured it low on one side of the path. Crono approached and kicked a heap of wreckage. The creature charged after the sound.
Its forelegs caught on the chain, and its massive body crashed down.
The three squeezed through the narrow opening before it could rise. The sound of metal buckling continued behind them for a long time, but none of them looked back.
Outside the ruins, the sky was still the same gray.
There was no way to tell how much time had passed. The sun did not seem to move at all.
Arris Dome stood to the northeast. It was more intact than the other buildings, though one side of the roof sagged deeply inward. The light over its entrance flickered as though on the edge of death.
Several pairs of eyes appeared inside when the three knocked on the door.
“You crossed the ruins to the west?”
An old man stared at them in disbelief.
Before answering, Marle looked back. Beyond Lab 16, the tiny light of Trann Dome was nowhere to be seen.
“There are people over there too,” she said.
“And every one of them is hungry.”
The door opened a little wider.
The people gathered inside looked not at their faces, but at their empty hands and bags, searching for signs that they had brought food.
Crono noticed a child standing among them.
The child looked up at the strangers with the face of someone who had never learned what hope was.
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