When the world ended in ice it caught a lot of people by surprise. It's been nearly one hundred years now, and the world doesn't seem to warm. Most of the civilized world reorganized under the Catholic Church and moved to the equator. There they remained biding their time; trying to rebuild society so that humans could one day reclaim the planet.
Eventually the missionaries were sent out. Small expeditions were slated to bring mankind back into the loving embrace of its protectors. Many a man and woman left the safety of the green zone to go out into the wastes. Places of lawlessness, people who killed and pillaged. The habitats of countless warlords, fiefdoms, and communities all trying to eke out a sustainable form of life from the ice ball Earth had become. That's where I met my master.
My name is Temperance. I was a product of the Church. One of the countless orphans left over from the Crises when the comet hit Earth and knocked our planet ever so slightly into a colder rotation. I still remember the cloisters and the vows; the prayers and the windy temperate plains the equator had become. It's not my home now, but I still remember the humidity of the greenhouse gardens and vegetable farms.
I was twenty when I left Fort St. Constantine. I had just received my commission by the church to go up into the badlands of what had once been New York City. You'd never recognize it now. Maybe you'd spot the odd ancient landmark, but most of the buildings and streets were stripped bare. Still, the Jesuit scouts decided that there would still be frozen supplies and people aplenty to warrant even this most dangerous of missions.
They would only take volunteers, so I placed my name into the ring. I never had any family to speak of, and my last mentor died six months prior to my twentieth birthday. I could have stayed and had a family, for I was not really part of the clergy. I was what you would call a laywoman.
We set out into Mexico from our base in the Yucatan. We were set up in old Mayan and Aztec ruins, but you wouldn't see much jungle anymore. Most of the lush trees had given way to scrub and rippling brown grass. It was, by the accounts of elders, eerie. However, it was all I ever knew. We had a small convoy for the mission. Two trucks, twelve men, and me; we drove in Humvees. It wasn't an uneventful trip. We passed the border outposts. They were little more than hamlets and shantytowns, but they represented the reclamation of our world from ice and snow.
We stopped over in New Eden for a time. I don't want to sound blasphemous, but the town was anything but. Eventually, we passed the town's outer perimeter, and then we were officially in no-man's land. The Jesuit troops with me became very structured and alert. Patrols and watches were posted. They never bothered me to do anything, and it left me bored. I was their charge after all. It was my duty to bring civilization back to New York.
We didn't reach New York for a month. It was slow going. We ran into wild animals and men, but never anything more than a harassing threat. The great hollow bones of one of civilization's greatest cities loomed above us. Where godly mirrors were said to rise up forever there was only the decrepit façade of thousands of lifeless eyes looking down at us. It was as if they were saying, "You don't belong here, get out."
We were attacked at noon while clearing a way into the bare edge of the once-great metropolis. There were dozens of them. They were wild feral people, howling at us as they charged the convoy. My protectors fought to the man, but they threw Molotov cocktails at the head and rear vehicles creating a kill box. I had crawled out and hid under one of the supply trucks. My hands over my ears as men screamed and died around me. One of the soldiers died clutching a live grenade. It never came close to me, but it was enough to blow up one of the Humvees. I was thrown in the air by the explosion and knocked out when my head smashed into the top of the truck I was under.
