Rosario didn’t expect the guard to have a motorcycle. After all, vehicles and decay batteries were a rare commodity.

Leonie’s bike was heavy one and looked as if it had been through a lot. The paint was scratched, and some parts had been repaired using improvised means, yet it seemed to work flawlessly. Strapped on each side were a saddlebag and a metal rod.

Leonie signaled, and the van followed her through what, twenty years ago, would have been the suburbs of the city; first a neighborhood of apartment buildings, and then between rows of single-family homes. The apartments and houses were now abandoned, although some of the tallest constructions were being used as watch posts. They also noticed a more recent electrical installation running through the derelict streets, and more of the ring-shaped crystals placed all around.

After they crossed over some well-maintained train tracks, the drive became slightly uphill, along with more abandoned houses and the tracks on their right. This continued until they reached an old train station, a wide three-story building with a still working analog clock above the main entrance. To their left, Lake Thun was now visible not far in the distance.

Leonie signaled them to pull over near a warehouse. They could hear voices and the sound of machinery from the inside.

“I’ll go get someone,” said the guard.

Rosario then directed her attention to her apprentices and pointed at the two containers they had filled with crystals. “Get those and the bag with the measuring instruments and wait outside.”

The siblings nodded and followed her directions. Moments later, a man in a coverall waved from the workshop and Rosario drove inside.

“I wanted to see the workshop,” said Franziska.

Stefan agreed. “Yeah, me too. But when it comes to the camper, she only gets angry.”

“Just like you when someone wants to use your tools.”

“Not someone, just you. You’ll only break them.”

“No, I won’t!”

“Come, let’s go see the lake!”

They crossed the street towards a balustrade on the opposite side of the station. From there, they noticed the train station stood at the tallest point above a bay, closed on its western side by a peninsula over which sat a medieval castle. The keep and residential building were visible from the distance, and imposing stone walls with a sloping face towards the bottom surrounded it. Right below the castle, and occupying the entire bay, concrete and wooden piers stretched into the lake. Both the port and the streets around it were buzzing with activity as fisher boats came and departed, and people walked around the nearby market.

The town itself began at the port, tightly covering the terrain towards the castle walls and all the way up to a double wall below from where the siblings watched. Rows of houses zigzagged, leaving narrow streets between them. In addition to the roads, a cable car line started from the port and made several stops along the way before ending in front of the train station.

But instead of the town and the lake, the sibling’s attention was on the double wall right behind the balustrade they were leaning on, and the pit that separated the two walls. It was deep, and the camper could probably fit inside it. It was also filled with barbed wire and a chain linked fence parallel to the furthest wall. Set up at close intervals were high voltage warning signs, confirming that the trench was an electrified trap.

“That’s… scary. And kind of cool,” said Franziska, who then focused on the activity in the lower part of the town, which contrasted starkly with the relative quietness of the area around the station. “The town looks fun.”

“It does,” Stefan admitted. “I want to go to the market. Someone could be selling resistant fabrics.”

“Or books! And I want to see the castle,” she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Maybe they need some days to fix the camper and we can visit the town in the meantime. Rosario said the swarm crawlers were not coming out yet, right?”

Stefan thought about it for a moment; the creature that attacked them looked developed, but it had been forced to hatch due to the proximity of the crystals. Besides, when they inspected the forest, no other crawler had left its cocoon yet. “Yeah, I think so too. And also, this town looks prepared. They have a perimeter of crystal bombs and there is this pit, too.”

“I think they’ve been attacked by monsters before.”

Her brother nodded in response. “It sure looks like it.”

*****

Meanwhile, inside the workshop, a mechanic finished analyzing the status of the camper and looked at Rosario.

“You asked if I can fix it, and the answer is yes. But it’ll take a week at minimum.”

“That long?” she said unwantedly, and immediately regretted it when she caught a curious expression on Leonie’s face. One week was a more than reasonable time.

“Ma’am, your vehicle is old. I don’t want to use the word ancient, but it was built before standardized parts became mandatory. It must be at least forty years old.” The mechanic took off his greasy gloves and looked annoyed at his client’s impatience.

“Thirty-seven years,” corrected Rosario, feeling insulted on behalf of her vehicle.

The mechanic ignored her and continued. “You’re lucky some of its parts are standardized and the cooling unit that’s busted is one of them. I don’t have any spares, but I can get one from another place. If I send out word on tomorrow’s train, maybe I’ll even get one on the next arrival.” The man shrugged. “If you’re in a hurry, sure, I can fix the rest with what we have here and you can take it tomorrow. It won’t overheat, but you’ll be running with one cooling unit less, so you might be faster going on a bicycle.”

She bit her lips, still unsure about the whole situation. Staying could mean potential danger, but having a functioning vehicle meant freedom to go wherever they wanted, and having an independent means of transportation twenty years into the collapse was close to a luxury.

In the end, Rosario agreed to the repairs, and the two women left the workshop. Outside, the children were still chatting near the balustrade, and Franziska waved at them to come closer.

“Miss Leonie, has the town been attacked by monsters before?” the girl asked the guard, who was standing behind Rosario.

Leonie leaned against the handrail. “Yeah, quite a lot in the past, but it has been calm for what, three years now? The monsters must have realized it was pointless to attack us after we finished our defense lines.” She finished with a smirk.

“You mean the crystal bombs we passed on the way here?” asked Rosario.

“That’s the first line. We have a wide buffer zone around the town, but if a monster were to make it past that, they’d have to get over this pit.” She pointed at the trench below them. “It circles around the town, and in case of an attack, it can be raised and electrified. Even if the monster can jump, that’s where it would end.”

As Leonie spoke, Franziska had pushed herself above the balustrade. “And what about the wall down there?” She pointed at a semicircular wall that separate the town into an upper and a lower section. A cable car was just passing over it on its way up.

“That’s how small our town got to be after the collapse,” Leonie’s expression softened, as if recalling old times. “Back then, monsters could make it all the way to that wall and we’d repel them like a medieval town under siege. The wall is still in operation, and it’s a last line of defense in case the buffer zone and the pit fail. If worse comes to worst, everyone knows to run to the docks and escape by boat.”

“And the people from the upper town? Where do they go if they close the gates?”

“Well, hopefully by the time the gates have to be closed, everyone made it to the lower town and escaped.”

Franzi nodded, glancing at the town once more. It was her first time seeing it, but it felt so homely already. She wished no monsters would ever come.

During their conversation, the mountains and the clouds had become yellow and orange, and the sun gave its brightest rays before hiding behind the snow-covered peaks. At the same time, lights in the town below began shining like fireflies; first in some windows, then the streetlights, and finally, the castle walls became illuminated. The lake, with its calm waters, reflected some of the light as well. It was an expected sight in the past, but it was far from the norm these days. It even caught Rosario by surprise, who found herself staring and feeling she had traveled back in time.

“That’s quite the view,” she said after a moment. “You’re not worried about your decay sources running out?”

“We have decay batteries and such, but we keep those reserved for emergencies. Our town runs on hydroelectric power. See over there, behind the castle?” she pointed at a blocky structure on the western side of the peninsula, on the upper part of the town and below the double wall. From under the construction emerged a small river, channeled all its way down to the lake and with bridges crossing over it. “That facility is our primary power source; it’s fed by a redirected branch of the Simme and some other smaller creeks, all channeled underground.” She explained, with pride in her voice. “It took us ten years to finish the whole thing; the tunneling, building, and recovering machinery from abandoned places around here. And besides this one, we also have some other smaller power plants running outside the town.”

“That’s incredible…” Rosario felt genuinely impressed; during her travels, she had visited cities where people had come up with all sorts of creative feats to live and thrive under the constant threat of extinction. But those were always large settlements, with more population and resources, and closer to other towns in case they needed external help. Leonie’s last words also confirmed her suspicion that it had been people from this town working at the power plant where she found the monster. It was logical to assume they were the same people who attacked her and the children. “And you also keep places outside the town? You’re not afraid of monsters?”

“The facilities can operate on their own most of the time. And when someone has to be there, we have an excellent team of crystalsmiths that can give us items to defend ourselves,” the guard stretched her back. “And speaking of which, let’s go see them.”

*****