____________________________gothic: chapter two - by adire___

Hanging by threads of pain and silver
I could have stayed that way forever
Bad blood and ghosts wrap tight around me
Nothing could ever seem to touch me
I was what I love most
Did you know I was lost until you found me....
--Garbage, "A Stroke of Luck"

"Contact has been made with one of the other Cities."

The stern voice created an earthquake, and the universe shuddered. The dimly lit office, however, only sighed, as though weary. "Contact is forbidden between the Cities."

"One managed to make it through, sir." The second voice, thin and tremulous, reflected the fear of the cosmos in pitched vibrations of sickly yellow.

"Do we know who?"

Silence, to inhale a shaky, frightened breath, thicker than leaded gold. "No, sir. But we don't think he's a gunrunner. We're not sure why he's here."

"From where? How did he get in? And what is his exact location?"

"A-again....we're not sure. The Australian Continent is our most likely guess, through the aqueducts. His present location is unknown."

Silence was not golden. Silence was steel, cold and serrated, a sword sliding between the ribs of the messenger.

Whip crack. Words split the air again. Breaths of oxygen screamed, and fluttered to the floor to thrash in their dying throes.

"I see...."

Machine oil.

The smell never left him, and had he been easily stirred its constant permeation would have nauseated him.

Mild unease was his only response.

The lower end of the Iron District was home to what it called Industry. To Raze, it meant food. Thick buckwheat noodles dipped in small, salty bowls of spiced sauce and eaten quickly, little thought given to their flavor. Orient gourmet within the confines of a crumbling hulk of development.

In the back of his throat, he tasted the smell of processed petrol.

The side of his neck itched. Precisely held chopsticks scratched at it, and dribbles of brown liquid trickled over the minute red swelling.

"Ten don, please." Raze did not look up as a cheerful voice took a place on the stool next to his. He himself was not sure if he even took note of the new presence.

His right arm felt warm. The other was too close. No, that was not right. The other smelled of sunlight.

Raze did not know how he knew the scent of sunlight.

He radiated sunlight. His voice was bright silver and gold, and merry. Raze did not understand.

For the first time in his life he was curious, and it tasted of linseed.

He felt like a shadow. The other's shadow--boy, man, he did not know, for he did not think to look up. His feeling of the other's presence was enough for his perceptions.

He was a shadow. He always had been.

A City of shadows.

I will die someday. The thought was not his own, but sharp, coppery realization was. He would die someday, and shamble through the streets.

Something scratched behind his irises, and he twitched. He blinked, and in a clattering of chopsticks striking unglazed porcelain, the sunlit presence disappeared.

Raze ached. His body was desolation.

He blinked, and found himself lying on his dirty pallet on the floor of the ruined apartment. The corpse was gone, and more than likely nothing more than a collection of separated atoms and molecular compounds in holding bins by now.

Walking back to the apartment. Another memory lost.

He did not dream. He never dreamed after visiting the Doctor, that much he knew. Only blackness, and drifting greenblue orbs floating behind his eyelids.

The orbs, like the smell of machine oil, never left.

He awoke to the sound of sunlight, but there was no one there.

The synthetic moon had been repaired. Its feeble glimmer sputtered frequently, like a flickering torch. Pallid, sickly swollen, it was meant to bring night to a City that dwelled in eternal darkness.

From the fractured vantage point of Raze's window, it looked like the bloated eye of a fish. The streets of humming silence created their own Moonlight Sonata.

Beethoven would have been horrified.

He walked the streets, waiting for the pavement to buckle and roll beneath his feet like the shuddering back of some giant animal. It never happened.

Perhaps he was the animal that he sought.

The eastern area--fertile ground for the wire junkies and their passion for virtual sensation. A hive of insects, humans attempting to become one with the machines. Grotesque carapaces of thin cables and needles and gleaming protrusions. Inside, the deteriorating shell of the brain, plugged into an electric current. Joyous decay.

He walked like a corpse among them, eyes passing blindly over the rows of helmeted heads, their scents reminding him of blood and chamomile. He saw nothing in the smoky, cramped room. He watched the lights of fireflies extinguished by hungry spiders. He walked the tightrope of a sticky silken web.

The front room passed by unheeded. He thought that it had once been a bar.

Stairs, winding upwards forever. For three short stories, and then a ladder led the way upwards. A proverbial tunnel of light as diseased moonlight filtered through the opening at the end of the narrow passageway.

He was there. He was always there, on the rooftop. Raze did not know his name, just as he did not know anyone's name.

Blind white orbs of eyes like the moon turned towards him, and then looked back to the coils of smoke rising from a single stick of incense. Raze wondered if the old man thought that he could actually see.

Raze sat cross-legged upon the rooftop, opposite the old man. The stick of incense in its broken bottle cruelly divided the space between them, and faint strains of lilting koto and shaimsen drifting from an ancient CD player healed it.

In the City, it was the only music that he knew.

His fingers twitched and rippled. A black spider crawled under the skin of his left shoulder blade.

Together, they stared.

He felt like he was at home.

Black eyes crackled in the false light, and the shadowed figure bounded to yet another rooftop, half-expecting the cement and plassteel construction to give way beneath him.

So it was true. All of the Cities were alike.

The thick braid bounced against his back and then settled as he did. He was tense. That was not good. He would not be found, not here in the Iron District; it was unlikely that searches would reach this pit of abandoned humanity.

He was still tense.

Maybe this City was darker.

He thought the Iron District had once been called Japan.

His pupils dilated as he tried to peer through the icy light. A level field of squared-off cement stretched before him, but he did not see it. He saw only cat eyes in chemical-gold, and his fingers curled into fists.

On a rooftop, Raze waited.

Chapter One - Chapter Three

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