For fans of Station Eleven and The Last of Us, an apocalyptic tale of a young woman fighting for life and justice in the tyrannical Phoenix City—the only place in Ireland yet to be overrun by the flesh-eating skrake.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Sarah Davis-Goff’s Silent City, which is out now.
Outside the walls of Phoenix City, where the plague has overrun Ireland, one bite from the savage skrake means death or infection. Inside, Orpen and the other survivors of the plague gather in meager numbers. They are protected from disease and death, but the city is by no means a refuge.
Phoenix City is ruled with an oppressive hand, with even the best of the leadership power hungry and ruthless. Orpen and the banshees—a fierce, all-women force of fighters—keep the peace, or shatter it, depending on their orders. But when two women are publicly executed, Orpen knows she must make a choice between guaranteed survival within a cruel society or treacherous freedom beyond the walls.
A story of friendship, justice, and belonging, Silent City is a feminist, voice-driven take on leadership in dire times.
Another glorious day in Phoenix City.
Another night done of fitful sleep, waking in the dark, thinking I hear my mother crying for me to come home.
The banshees are up with the sun, the vapors of our dirty breaths mingling together in the shitty air. We dress, as best we can, in various shades of black, the best and darkest clothes on the oldest and wiliest of us. Layers, where we can find them; wraps for our wrists and ankles and breasts. Feet stay bare for the most part; we’ve shoes, but they’re only for missions, and for the latrines. Dressing is ritual, for banshees. There’s an art to the way styles are mixed, there’s ingenuity and guile. We check each other, encourage, edit.
Agata is finishing wrapping her hands, shaking her head at me. “Bad bitch,” she sighs quietly. We put our foreheads together for a moment, letting our breaths mingle, then we’re going.
Our dorm is three stories up, and the noise of the morning is our bare feet on the stone blocks of the stairs, a slapping smooth sound, sending aches into our already cold flesh. There’s something about that building, with its echoes and smells and the broken windows.
There’s a rhythm I can nearly make out every morning, a patter of us working together, working toward something forever just out of reach while whatever is coming up behind us—famine, disease, the skrake—inches closer.
There are worse ways to wake up, so there are. I’ve seen them.
This building was once a hospital. There’s the name of it outside the front on a sign, the letters carved deep into stone. I try to see it as it might have been when it was meant to bring comfort and help to people. The little rooms with the painfullooking equipment, the long, echoing corridors.
Nothing in this building heals now. Banshees do not save anything; we do not bring succor. This is what I have learned.
Whatever whispers of conversation were starting up, warming us into the day, they are cut short on the threshold of the dorms. The city is silent. They’d cut the tongues out of the very dogs. If there were any dogs left. No talking in-house unless it can’t be helped, no talking at all when we’re under the sky, no clanging, no messing, no slipping.
That slapping of our own feet against the ground when we’re out running is the only noise a person who is not a banshee will hear out of us some days. If they’re lucky.
We don’t need to talk to each other anyway. We know each other’s thoughts, we know what jokes Aoife wants to make, which direction Mare will turn us next, we know where Lin’s appraising eye will fall.
Out the back is where we are. The building looms up around on four sides and I can’t help but Beware.
Beware tall . . .
I’m shrugging it off, my shoulders the same slippery stone of the dorm stairs. The voices of my mothers, warnings from a lifetime ago. I keep trying to leave them behind. Beware tall buildings in case they fall down on you is the learning they drilled into me. One piece among many.
The buildings around us make a box, a place for our morning stretches and afternoon sparring sessions. This area houses nearly all the banshees, except those few high enough to have made management, or to be protecting management, over in Government Buildings. Real beds over there is what I’ve heard. Someone told me there’s taps you can turn on and water will run out, clean and cold. You can bathe in the stuff.
As we file out, the night watch start in. Red-eyed but alert still, silent on their feet, cold as hell despite the extra rations of clothes. I nod at Saoirse, Sanchez, Yen, and the rest of B-Troop. Ahead of me, Agata has her hand out to touch them home in a friendly manner, but Saoirse goes to dig her instead and Agata lets her hand drop. I go for her—I can’t help it. A great leap in the air, a powerful spin kick going straight for Saoirse’s smug little face, but Mare, out of nowhere, throws one of her long legs out to rein me in.
Awful pricks, B-Troop.
Agata’s hand is on my shoulder. I glance at her and she gives a wink. She doesn’t let it bother her. Tough and relaxed and I love her. It annoys me, though. There’s no need to let these pricks push us around.
We’re getting going, together and correct, a team. First in the troop leads, and second enforces, but Mare and Sene don’t need to tell us anything. Stretches done, but we’re only getting cooler in the still morning air. We get them over quick and easy, and we get moving.
We’re running.
We move in our twos, headed out of the hospital complex for the north face of the wall. The limbs are slow and solid-feeling. It’s difficult to move for the first klick or so but we work at it. Getting our feet to hit the ground light, we work on our silence and our speed. We’re running and, beside me, Agata, familiar as my own skin, coughs, hucks up something and spits it elegantly off to her left.
There’s a great brick wall still surrounding the city. On this side of the wall, the city side, there is a trench thirty foot deep and nearly as wide. The earth is taken and used to build up a tall bank, shadowing the wall and reinforcing it, the whole way around the city. The sides are soft with grass. Plants have done their best to grow up out of the earth on either side, and I look at them, thinking: me too. Farmers try to get crops out of it, sorghum and potatoes but, for all their effort, there are children starving in the city. The bank of the wall is so thick on top you can use it to look over the other side, down at the skrake if you want to, or run on it, the full twelve-klick circumference of the city. Every day we run it.
Sometimes we run the wall counterclockwise to try keep things fresher in our stagnant little training pool. When we reach the wall, we turn left, six of us moving together soft and quick in the cold early morning. Behind us another troop follows on. There’s something in the way Mare and Sene move this morning, I think. We’re on a run but we’re going somewhere. There’s some little mission to be done. My heart sinks.
I watch my feet; the top here is uneven. This wall is a monument to the hundreds of thousands that’ve worked these city barriers since Phoenix became what it is now—refuge, last stand. Open wound. The last remnants of everything that was wrong before the Emergency, as well as those few bits that were right and worth hanging on to.
The skrake are out there, over the other side, or the shrayke, shriek, Z or Zee, as they were known back when. Slugs, monsters, the Emergency, the ruin, gnashers, plain old fuckface. Nearly as many monsters in here as there are out there, is what Agata tells me. She’s right, I’d say.
Even with the quiet of the city, they can hear us, or smell us. All the quiet in the world doesn’t matter much when we’re all here together, stinking up the air so deliciously, with management throwing them a live one every few months. And us helping.
To my right, over the wall, they stand three deep. Four or more in places, pressing in, jostling against each other to get close. Mostly naked now, the people they once were are flayed away till there’s nothing left but mouth and teeth and slugproboscis-tongue. Reaching for us. Just one could end it all. They’ve got in before, though not in living memory. Stories passed down: lessons. We’ve all lost someone to the skrake.
Our troop comes upon the wallers about two klicks into our run. We meet them every day at some part of the wall, depending on our route and theirs. They’re never resting, but every day working like their lives depend on it, even the children. You can see their bones through whatever threadbare clothing they wear, held together by stitches we can nearly count as we go past. Some of them have shovels, some are using smaller tools or just pointed sticks to help break up the hard-packed earth. The children use their hands on the muck, their little fingers cold. It hurts to watch, and the city solves that by never looking at them.
The wallers dig the trench deeper, make it neater, constantly reinforcing the wall. They work day and night, looked over by a few pairs of banshees, watching and swinging their sticks lazily. A gang leader for each section keeps them at it. One shift from the rising of the sun to its going down gets you one day’s rations. You’d eat three times what they give you working that wall. This, while management are red in the face exerting themselves with nonsense about how nobody starves in this city as long as they’re willing to “contribute.”
I glance back at Aoife under cover of spitting, and she’s watching the wallers too, her eyes soft. She’d better not let anyone else see her eyes like that, so she’d not. I click my teeth quietly and she comes to, glances up at me and away again, her expression blank again.
A few of the wallers look up at us running by, eyes huge in their pinched faces, shining, and you could nearly cod yourself they’re looking at you in admiration. In others, the women maybe especially, it’s just plain fear.
There’s a special stink you get down here, distinct from our own, and at whatever bit of the wall they’re working on. The skrake are six deep instead of three. That’s what you get when you don’t pause in your work, when a little noise is a necessary part of what you do. Apart from us, the wallers get closer to the skrake than anyone else in this dark city, in their unending work to put more soil and more wall and more bricks and stones between us and the outside. At the end of each shift—a day or a night—they’re told to go home as if they have homes to go to. Dwellings in the shanties, maybe, some of them. Others not even that, and all with hungry bellies. The hardest work in the city, though the farmers think it is theirs. The banshees even think we have it the worst, and the breeders and everything in between. Management—I can’t get into what management might be thinking.
We’re warming up, anyway. That first klick, the scramble up to the wall, the getting out on top of it and falling into line, that’s always the worst, but we’re all right now, we’re awake and alert. Once we’re past the wallers, Mare and Sene will ease up a little.
Stories are still told of the last time the wall came down—a part of it, anyway. Most of the wallers were killed, and killed first. By the time they’d a handle on it, hundreds were dead, a good part of the city population. The few that survived were those lucky enough to have stairs to run up and doors to close. Banshees died along with the rest, and some of the older ones are still sore with the wallers about it, as if they opened a door for the skrake.
Management blamed wallers too. There aren’t many ways worse to go than getting bit, but I’d say they’d have gone looking if the wallers weren’t all dead already. It’s a dangerous job even without the fear of the skrake getting on top of you. There’s the heat in the day and the cold at night. There’re even stories of kids drowning in the ditches after a big rain. You’d think they’d look out for each other better down there.
I check myself.
They’re pure exhausted. If anyone should be watching out for them, finding ways to protect, it should be us. It should be, and it isn’t. When management say we’re for “security,” they do not mean security for everyone. They mean security against everyone.
On we run, going a good pace now, and we’re out to a long blank stretch of wall where we can ease into ourselves. A little over four klicks down and just the eight now ahead of us. This is where I really start to think about the thirst. I swallow thickly against my breath and keep on going. There’s something about moving in this way, the methodical clean functioning of tired but obedient limbs, about training past tiredness, that feels like home to me. It takes the long line between the present and my past, growing up on an island far to the west, with only my mother who bore me and Maeve who trained me, and it balls it right up, makes it nothing.
Up ahead of us now to the Broken Finger and on we keep. That uncomfortable little twinge in my side starts up again and I’ve an urge to pause and rub it, but there’s no pausing on morning runs and nothing I can do but keep on, not let the team down. It’ll ease up.
I should mention it to Agata. I don’t want secrets building up between us. I should tell her about the dreams calling me home. It’ll ease up.
A person could injure herself unnecessarily and there are other ways to show toughness, to get them to see the grit you have, but these ways are not up to me. Stiff and all as I am, I’m grateful not to be the one to have to try and figure out our futures. I’ve no love for management but there they are, running the city. I wince and feel Agata beside me stiffen up a little and watch me, but on we go. Nothing to be done. Plenty worse things going on in the city.
More people milling around now as the day begins to age. I see a lumbering shape, moving in an odd, slow way. It’s management. You can tell because of the good clothes and the haughtiness of him, even from here. He’s got sticks under both arms and he’s using them to move his legs along, which seem nearly useless to him. Not the first one I’ve seen moving around like this.
Up a little and then relief as we slow to a jog and then a walk. Here are the great doors of the city, half as tall as the buildings at our base. Closed for eons. Thick wood, and only room for one banshee to go over them at a time, so we make a little line on the thick catwalk of planks, hands lightly on the guardrails, to wait for each other on the other side before running on again in formation.
Downhill now a little toward the shanties.
There is a gate here too, a working one with a lock and a key. Above the gate in thick stone lettering it says DUBLIN ZOO, but mostly it’s called the shanties because of the types of dwelling that people use here—sheets of whatever is to hand put up against each other at right angles. The zoo is big, and we aren’t called down there much. There, they’re expected to make their own way, unless they’re caught for something in Phoenix proper. We’ve been there, our troop, to serve the city’s justice, but I never learned my way around. It’s twisty, there are buildings, big pools of mud, huge plastic screens, intact still, despite everything. For the animals that were kept.
We run on by, following the great city wall. The farther south we get, the more wretched people look, and the shanties are the most southern spot in the city. Here, there are skinnier, dirtier people crammed around the cook-fires: those that can’t work, can’t find a place for themselves, or so management would have it.
Still they try and live, and are allowed to do so, for the most part. For a city apparently so interested in protecting life, they don’t mind when it’s lost down here. No water or food rations at the end of the day for belonging to such and such house, unless you go to the wall or maybe get work as a runner, which is only for the young and healthy and determined, or maybe as a cleaner or cook. They’d still have to come to sleep and survive down here at the end of the day.
I try to imagine it the way it was before I came. The city walls were fit to burst with people, but the breeders were working full-time to make more, the whip of the hopes of the management on them.
Then the sickness. The way the banshees whisper about it, the stillness in their faces, tells how bad it was. It took a while to notice maybe, the shits being so common here. But people started not being able to make it even to these trenches. They’d shit themselves in the streets, in their beds. They wouldn’t be able get up from where they lay. Everything they ate, whatever they could get to drink, ran right out of them, dark and hot, streaming their lives away. They faded out of the world, the last with no one to look after them or hold their hands or fight for something to drink for them. I can imagine it well. You’d know from the look people get when they talk about it. They’re frightened of times like them coming again.
The shanties were blamed and cordoned off: the great metal fence—made to keep in the animals they used to show off, surrounding the whole of the shanties—was mended, and the huge gates—with ZOO written over the top still—closed and bolted. Till then, the command had been, and is now, that the gate stay open to facilitate the banshees coming and going to guard the entrance to the tunnel, the only way out of the city. And then, banshees stood guard to try and protect the better-offs up the hill. Who is to say it even started down there? They won’t speak at all about the cleanup, so they won’t. I try to imagine it, taking the bodies, caked in their own shit still, whatever friends or family, their children, left crying after them, their own bellies like fire. And then going through whatever belongings they’d amassed. That’s what I’d do, I know that for sure. You learn all kinds of things about yourself here.
The bodies were not permitted to remain in the city, so the banshees carried them over to the finger and threw them off. Wearing, as usual, whatever protections they could get hold of against the corpses, which were not even wrapped. Winter always on its way.
It’s here we’re headed, I realize now: a change in the camber ahead of us and we veer down, off the wall and toward the huge gates.
They’re closed.
These gates are meant to stay open. There’s nowhere in the city we should be barred from, unless management say so.
We pull up and Mare doesn’t need to tell us what to do. Aoife and Lin take a side each and pull. When the gates don’t give, Agata and I give a hand, Sene and Mare too. I watch as I strain against the weight of them, the bulk of Mare’s smooth dark biceps curving beautifully beside me. The gates take a minute to give and I look up, trying to think how hard it’d be to scale them. Then there’s the squeal of metal on metal and they open; we pull till they’re wide.
I’m hoping we can just turn around now and head back, but that’s not how these things go. The twang in my side pinches dramatically and I twitch against the pain. Agata glances at me and I think of her, again, holding me back off fighting that gobshite Saoirse. Her and Mare. Protecting me, not against getting beat but against the wrath of management for dealing one out.
I’ll tell her. I can tell her anything.
We are heading into the shanties and it’s the same old shit: metal sheets, planks of wood, previous bits of plastic, placed at right angles till they might help cover you from cold. The elderly, the sick. Children. How they survive down here with few to work, nobody fit enough to wall or farm or skiv—and then us, and banshees like us, coming down to make things more difficult.
I harden myself. They made things more difficult for themselves.
We go for the center, but it doesn’t really matter where we’re aiming for. We’re here to send a message, and as long as it’s clear enough, everyone down here will see it.
Mare and Sene make for a gathering of hovels and, with a nod, Agata and I are set loose. I take a metal sheet and pull, kicking to make it harder to use again. Inside the dwelling is a woman, her arms wide and her eyes full of terror—but she clamps her mouth tight to keep in any shouts of fear or alarm or anger.
Together we pull and wreck till the place is flattened, Agata going maybe hardest of all.
I block my mind against it all, feeling nothing, thinking nothing.
Once we have done enough ruining, once the punishment is big enough, Mare gives the signal and we go to leave. I follow on, giving the place a final lookabout, satisfying myself there’s nothing handy we can bring off with us. Used be you could loot some useful bits down here.
I give a final glance back to see the woman crouch over a gathering of rubbish and fabric, exposed now to the elements. Inside is a girl, just a few years old, scrawny and wild-haired. She watches us leave, her skinny arms wrapped around the neck of her mother. Her eyes huge.
I linger. It’s a mistake.
“Help,” the mother says, her dark hair plastered against her scalp, the scar of a burn on one cheek.
I look around: the other banshees making their way out toward the gate again, the ruins of this woman’s home forgotten.
The mother crying silently, her eyes entreating me, while the girl shivers in her arms.
I open my mouth to say something but the words lodge in my throat. All I can do is go.
Near the gate, looking around numbly, I see an odd, very old thing: a poster, rigged up to a stick like a flag. An image of banshees on it, faceless, dressed in black, moving in twos. FIGHTING FOR YOU, it says.
EXCERPTED FROM SILENT CITY. COPYRIGHT © 2023 BY SARAH DAVIS-GOFF. EXCERPTED BY PERMISSION OF FLATIRON BOOKS, A DIVISION OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS. NO PART OF THIS EXCERPT MAY BE REPRODUCED OR REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.
