It’s still early, Chel realised. The city’s night cycle was only just kicking in. Her shift wasn’t due to start for hours, but sleep wouldn’t return and the thought of lying here in the gathering darkness was intolerable. Besides, if she left now there was no chance of bumping into Lyle. He rarely turned up before nightfall, but sometimes he was too tired to go drinking after work. She’d been seeing too much of him lately.
Get moving!
With a groan, Chel threw aside her rumpled blanket and rolled into a sitting position, then perched on the bed’s edge, waiting for her spinning head to catch up. She’d been working nights almost four months now, but her body still hadn’t acclimatised. The apartment’s constant chill didn’t help with getting up either, but Lyle was against heating it.
‘We live under a dome, Chel,’ he’d explained in that slow, condescending tone she’d once taken for gravitas. ‘Our city regulates itself like a living body – light, heat and clean air filtered, cycled and recycled to keep things running smoothly, as our fore-founders intended. It’s not our place to interfere with The Balance.’
‘The Balance’ was always capitalised in Lyle’s speech, as much an article of faith as a matter of machinery and science. Chel suspected everyone in the Canopic Congregation felt the same way, from the army of labourers who kept the city’s vast dome patched up, to the tech magi who communed with its ailing spirit. Not that anyone would admit its spirit was ailing – at least not openly. The integrity of the dome was deemed beyond reproach. Voicing doubts bordered on heresy. After all, everyone’s life depended on The Balance.
‘As above, so below,’ Lyle was fond of saying. It was the credo of the Congregation. He always proclaimed it as if he were imparting some profound wisdom, though he’d never explained its meaning. Chel suspected he didn’t know either. He was just a minor functionary in the organisation, but he talked as though he were a full administrator, puffed up with pride and big ideas. She’d found that endearing once.
I thought he was a dreamer. Chel snorted at the notion. They had both been in their twenties when they met. Back then she had been a junior medicae, doing her internship in one of the civic hospitals. Lyle had been admitted with a bowel disorder, which Chel diagnosed as stress-related. The context couldn’t have been less romantic, but they’d found humour in it, which sparked things off. She’d liked his earnest manner and devotion to their city, mistaking servility for idealism. They had married within a year.
But that was all before…
Thrusting the memories aside, Chel rose and padded over to the room’s sanitation cubicle. It was so cold she was tempted to skip showering, but she was sticky with the nightmare’s residue. She needed to wash it away.
I wish I could.
She showered in the dark, unwilling to face the apparition that stared back from the cubicle’s mirror. Though she wasn’t yet forty her skin was ashen and her close-shorn hair peppered with white, as if age had reached a withered hand back from the future to clasp her prematurely. At this rate she’d be an old woman by fifty. Oddly the prospect didn’t much trouble her, just so long as she didn’t have to see it.
‘I won’t,’ Chel promised herself, unsure what the vow meant.
The water was a lukewarm drizzle with a faint chemical odour, but she relished it, delaying the moment when she’d have to step out into the cold again. Nothing better awaited her in the long night ahead.
Gonna be a good night, Skreech decided. Gonna be sharp!
He stepped back from the alley wall to gauge his handiwork. The painted words glowed neon pink in the gloom. It wasn’t a colour he’d have picked, but these days he used whatever he could scavenge. Besides, it didn’t blunt the credo’s edge. Emblazoned in the spikey script he’d perfected over the years, it had power. Bite.
ITZ A LY
Skreech chewed his lower lip, agonising over adding an exclamation mark. He raised his spray can then lowered it again. No, too much. It didn’t need to shout. Not this time. He’d painted the slogan plenty of times over the years, usually with a mark, but this was his best. Maybe pink worked after all.
‘It’s a lie,’ he read in a growl, reaching for the tidal hatred that had washed him onto this path. As always, he only found a trickle of that wave, but it was more lively than usual. He was getting closer. And the Night Below was getting stronger.
Growing! Skreech thought. Spreading right under the Sleepers’ noses.
He grinned at the notion, showing sharpened teeth. Filing them into points had been crazy painful, but the spidery tattoos covering his face had hurt far worse. He’d inked them himself, using a pilfered kit, without a clue how to do it right. The infection that followed had ruined his skin and forced him to hole up for weeks with a fever, but he’d hugged the pain close, knowing it would make him stronger.
‘It’s a lie,’ he repeated, his mantra addressed to the Sleepers. They were the dross who strolled, shambled or staggered through life without smelling its deceit – the blue bloods and worker drones who kept things rolling along, and all the dreggerz and dedhedz who fell between the cracks without fighting back – and worst of all, the priests and enforcers who kept all the rest in line. Kept ’em blind! Some of the lawmen probably smelled their world’s sickness – they waded through too much sin and shit not to – but they didn’t have the guts to taste it, let alone drink deep and run wild with it, as Skreech did.
‘All a lie…’ He placed a hand on the wall. Sometimes he could feel
