“It’s time to go down to the surface.”
Mayli turned her face against the cabin wall. “I’m too tired.”
Tama took a breath. “I know you are. But you’ll like the surface, and it’s an easy transport.”
Mayli swiveled her head back to reveal a pale face, too thin, too creased for such a young age. “Easy?”
Of course nothing was easy for Mayli. The encroaching paralysis brought pain with every movement. But that was the point, wasn’t it?
Rain is pounding on the cobblestones of Place Luxembourg as people cluster to the bars around the square for an after work drink. Colorful umbrellas alternate with newspapers hastily turned into makeshift headgear and the occasional “Merde!” can be heard when a passing car splashes water on a pedestrian.
“Have we got any biscuits? I’m feeling a bit peckish”
“You’re not peckish, you’ve only just had lunch. You’re just bored; you know you don’t like it when it’s too quiet in the factory”
Well now here’s a favourite – Leila has been hi-jacked by Nik’s wonderful character Stormcrow – I reckon he either sweet-talked her or knocked her over with a feather – anyway this is what she said.
In the Archial, what some call the Little Light Library, it is always night. The distant ceiling is a night’s sky held by pillars, and connecting those pillars are shelves of books coated in leather and dust. The only light comes from lanterns. Inside steel cages, white fires flicker eternally, generated by a lost art. The lanterns are stars if anything. The lower one travels, the bluer those stars. Deep enough and there are no lights at all.
The lake was poison. It was a disease, its infectious purples and blacks seeping from the creek and onto the ground, flowing through the grass, withering it away and replacing its luscious greens and yellows with browns and oranges. The sun didn’t help. It was red, burning everything and only revealing the lumps of garbage that loftily drifted on the lake. That lake was horrible.
The last time Christine-Ann Corbin wore a dress was two months ago when she turned twelve. Her parents had a small birthday party and celebrated with a few friends and neighbors. The conversation quickly turned to the unrest in Europe.
