They had spent two weeks in a tidy cabin just off the beach where the ocean’s roar was only a slowly pulsing rasp. By night, the air was cool and crisp, the antithesis of the taxing brightness of day.

It must have been four or five days into the trip, the only one Dustin could remember taking with both his parents at once. Moats and ramparts took shape under his hands while a lime green blanket draped over four wooden poles defended him against the blazing sun.

A team of Finders had come home only days before he left for the coast. Among the bounty were several mostly intact books, the most Dustin had ever seen come in at once. One of these was filled only with pictures of giant buildings from Before. The ancient brick structures filled him with an awe that echoed as he recreated them from his mind’s eye.

A gull, one of few birds that had begun to return to this region after The Fall, screeched and wheeled towards the water where his parents stood arm in arm, staring out across the sea.