Cerulean Blue

Kara removed her mask as she reached the peak of the mountain. Looking to the west, she could see now that the top of the mountain she had climbed was above the cloud of medium blue chemically-active smog that covered what had once been the Salt Lake Valley. The cold October winds she felt occasionally brushing against her green canvas coat did little, if anything, to the cloud in the valley below. A few wisps and tendrils of blue could be seen swirling around at the top, closer to the mountain and the winds but the rest was still.

As she surveyed the wasteland before her, Kara noticed that the only chirping birds she could hear were behind her. She certainly didn’t see any flying around in the valley below. Nor did she see much else. The tops of a few old skyscrapers that had survived the Second Reclamation War poked through the smog but there was no activity there either.

Though disappointing, the lack of motion and wildlife in the valley were not entirely unexpected. Like many other once-populous cities in the Old States, Salt Lake City had been hit with dirty bombs containing a psychoactive substance called “Cerulean Blue” that was capable of lingering in the air for decades under the right circumstances. Taking in a breath or two of Cerulean Blue was enough to make anyone light-headed and start having blurred vision. Much more exposure to the stuff beyond that tended to send people into a psychotic state that took days on clean air to recover from completely. “If you recovered at all,” Kara thought bitterly. Many people didn’t recover from their exposures to it and about half of the people who got over the physical symptoms of exposure never really recovered mentally.

Kara didn’t know what Salt Lake City – or any other major city for that matter – had been like before the wars but she thought it looked pretty bleak as she stared at the blue cloud lingering in the valley below. She vaguely remembered her father saying something about this valley effectively trapping air pollution and creating an inversion. Apparently that also applied to the Cerulean cloud that had been loosed on the city. It was no wonder most of the survivors had moved deeper into the Rocky Mountains and founded new settlements there instead.

Kara glanced around her briefly and walked over to a large gray rock nearby. Sitting down on the rock, Kara pulled a small golden heart-shaped locket from the left pocket of her canvas coat. She stared at it for a moment, stroking it briefly with her thumb before opening it. Her parents faces smiled at her from inside it. On the left side, her father’s familiar smile and bright green eyes were framed by the shoulder length hair he said that he had kept since his teenage years. On the right was her mother. She was pale with dark hair and a sharp nose that she and Kara shared.

She didn’t remember her mother at all but her father had often told her stories that made her sound like an amazing woman. Only about a year ago – on Kara’s twentieth birthday – had her father had finally told her the story behind her mother’s disappearance on an expedition to Salt Lake City for lithium power cells. Everyone in the settlement assumed that she and the other five people who had set out with her were dead and had agreed to leave the story at that. Except for her father. He told her what had really happened, at least as far as he knew. He had told her that her mother was alive.

Knowing this, Kara had been determined to eventually travel to Salt Lake City to try to find her mother. Her fathers death in the recent shaper storm had encouraged her to leave sooner than she had originally planned, contrary to the advice of the settlement council. Not that Kara or her father had ever put much stock in the opinion of the council to begin with – most of its members were too afraid of change, too afraid in general of the world outside of their little valley. Kara hoped that finding her mother might help change their outlook.

Closing the locket and sliding the chain around her neck, Kara stood up and began descending determinedly into the valley. She paused only once to readjust her backpack and check that the seal on her mask was complete and tight to her face just before disappearing into the blue haze below.