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Ambros eased out of the extra-wide bed and slipped on a pair of trousers, loose around the legs. He pulled the drawstrings tight and tied them off, shaking his hips to settle the waistband.
He pushed the sliding door aside, careful to make no noise. He glanced back at Kim and Jimmy, who had spooned together, still asleep.
He stepped out into the colonnade and leaned on the railing, looking over the City of Athino.
‘I might be looking at any City in the Greek World,’ he thought: ‘Especially from this vantage, one story up from street level.’
He hummed a little off-key as he gazed across the landscape. None of the great landmarks of ancient Athens were visible from that vantage: the General Quarters stoa stood near the Outer Wall, and faced southwest, toward the more open countryside, dotted with farmhouses and barns.
‘And greenhouses,’ he thought. He watched as a crew of Laborers began disassembling one of those, loading the modular panels onto a flatbed trailer.
“More than a tenday into Warming,” he murmured to himself: “and the Summer Solstice is about a month away in the US calendar. I guess it’s time to put away the glass—transparent aluminum, I mean...”
He wondered if Voukli had watched the movie he’d sent her.
“Whatever. It’s time to put the stuff away.”
He felt at peace: ‘I slept all night without grinding my teeth, my shoulders are relaxed, I even feel reasonably loose and mobile through the hips...’ He wiggled those, perceiving the small amount of tension still there, beyond what it took to keep a human upright.
He did nothing about that tension. He was content.
The City slowly woke up, as he watched. The Dawn Bell rang: “About six AM our time. The sun’s been up for a while, though.” He contemplated the way the Commonwealth had recalibrated their clocks when contact with the larger world demanded a global system: ‘In the 16thcentury, our calendar...’
His MPS lit up, buzzing in alarm. He tapped it and got a message: “Earthquake Drill! This is a Drill! Evacuate buildings, follow the holos!” A deep, almost gong-like bell rang over the City, a warning to anyone whose MPS—or “karpeto”, as they called it in Athino— might be disabled.
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