I was aware of the sensation that I was floating. One might think that this would be a happy feeling, or a liberating one, but that could not have been further from what I was experiencing. There was no sense of freedom in this. The sensation was not like floating through water, nor even floating through air. It was more like what I imagined floating through the vacuum of space might be. Was I in space? I didn’t think so. I had always thought that space was supposed to be very cold, and I didn’t feel even a little chilly. Nor, for that matter, did I feel warm. I felt no temperature. I didn’t feel at all.

I flailed around, trying to exert some control over this hollow void. It was pointless. There was no air, nothing to push against. There was also nothing to breathe. Did I need to breathe? I wasn’t sure. It felt like something I should be doing, but there was no pain coming from my lungs. I wasn’t even positive I had lungs at all. I couldn’t see anything, not even myself. I desperately wanted to see myself, to be able to make out my body in some way. Was I even there? Was there even a me? Had there ever been a me? I wanted there to be a me, but I wasn’t sure how I could prove it to myself, if indeed there was a self to prove it to. I had to do something. I had to find something. I had try to come into contact with anything, anything at all. I had to feel. Yet what could I do besides try to flail aimlessly with limbs that I wasn’t sure even existed? I tried and tried to find anything to come into contact with, even my own body. There was nothing. I could do nothing. I could feel nothing. This void was all there would ever be. Forever...

With a gasp like a diver coming up for air, I bolted upright in my bed. For one confused moment I thought that I was still in the dream, as it was so dark that it was impossible for me to see. I quickly realized, however, that all my other senses had returned to me. My sense of touch, for example, was telling me that there were no longer any covers on top of me, nor pillows under my head, and the bedspread had come off of one corner of my mattress and lay uncomfortably crumpled under my back. It would seem that all of that flailing I had been doing was not limited to the world of dreams. I lay still, listening for sounds from behind the door that separated my room of the suite from my mother’s. All was silent. I hadn’t woken her up with all of my commotion. That was good, at least.

I considered feeling around to locate my bedclothes, but I didn’t feel like getting up. I also didn’t feel like going back to sleep. The dream loomed large in my memory, dominating my thoughts. If I slept I feared it might return to me, and I didn’t think I had it in me to go through that again. Instead, I turned my head to the side of the room where I knew the window to be and waited, motionless, for the light of dawn to shine through. I lay there for what felt like an eternity, listening to the sound of my own breath and counting the beats of my heart, reminding myself that I still had a physical body that performed those functions. Finally, after what seemed like a lifetime, I was able to make out the faint outline of the window. It was reassuring, silly though the thought might seem, to know for sure that I wasn’t blind. All my senses were present and accounted for.

I kept my eyes fixed on the window. Its dim shape slowly became clearer. Just a little longer and maybe I’d be able to see through…

My heart caught in my throat.

Outside the window a silhouetted shape was moving. Something? Somebody? It was too dark to make out. I willed myself to be even more still than I already was. I didn’t blink. I didn’t breathe. The shape outside moved slowly, carefully, and then all of a sudden I heard the noise of a liquid being sprayed against the glass. I nearly jumped out of my skin, but then I realized what was happening and I immediately felt like an idiot.

A maintenance robot. It was just a maintenance robot cleaning the windows. There was a wiping sound as the bot squeegeed whatever solution it had sprayed off of the glass and then crawled across the vertical surface and out of sight as it went on to the next window, completely oblivious to my presence. I exhaled and finally decided to sit up. I needed to gather my wits and get out of my own head a bit. After all, if I was that startled by the window washer, I might well die of a heart attack if ever a housekeeping bot arrived.

I still didn’t hear anything coming from my mother’s room. I didn’t think it would be prudent to wake her up, since she was no doubt completely exhausted from yesterday, but I couldn’t help feeling a little impatient. I had already been hungry the day before, and my stomach was beginning to vociferously protest its neglect. I looked around the room. A pair of mints sat on a chest of drawers, taunting me. I had seen those when we arrived, but I ignored them now as I had then because I knew that they had expired long before I was born. The robots could do a lot to keep the city in its prestine stasis, but they couldn’t conjure replacement mints out of thin air. Still, looking at the mints only sharpened my hunger, I decided to go for a walk around the halls and get my mind off of things. I walked to the door, trying to keep my footfalls as quiet as possible for my mother’s sake, and pulled it open. I stepped into the hall, but as my foot met the floor I heard a light crunching noise and I looked down to see something trapped under my foot.

An envelope lay on the ground, slightly crumpled by my weight. I bent down and picked it up, my mind racing. This hadn’t been here the night before. Who might have left it? Was it the bots again? I wasn’t sure why bots would be leaving envelopes, but I had already made a fool of myself once today, so I half expected a stock letter, some pre-programmed thing that the bots left for guests to thank them for spending the night. Perhaps it was simply the automated system mistaking us for patrons and trying to give us the five-star experience.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Far from a stock letter printed out by a robot, the note that I pulled out from inside the envelope was clearly handwritten and penned in a quick and scratchy scrawl, messy but still legible. My eyes scanned across the page, and as I read I felt like my stomach was turning over. The letter went like this:

To the newcomer woman,

We have left you this letter to inform you that you are in the territory of the Black Talon. The Chief Elder has taken an interest in you, and would like to propose that you join our group, along with your son. The Black Talon is one of the most powerful of the five groups in the Hollow City, and as long as you are willing to comply with the wishes of the Chief Elder we can assure you a great quality of life here.

We would like to meet you at the building where our base of operations is located at 8:00 this evening. We will be awaiting your answer there.

As an extra incentive for you to talk with us, we have removed the tires from your vehicle. The squatter’s code does not allow us to force people into our group, so you may accept or reject us as you wish. However, we would not recommend braving the desert by foot. We await your decision.

All the best,

The Black Talon

It then showed a hand-drawn map to the location where our meeting was to take place.

I could scarcely believe what I was reading. I hadn’t seen a living soul since we parted with the members of the Red Crest, and from what I gathered the two groups weren’t friendly, so I doubted that they would have alerted the Black Talon to our presence. The only other possibility was that the Black Talon must have been spying on us from a distance. It was not a comforting thought. What’s more, they had sabotaged our one hope of leaving this city. Exhausted or not, my mother had to know about this posthaste.

“Mom! Mom!” I yelled frantically, rushing back to the suite and into her room, “You need to see this now!”

Stirred to action by the tone of my voice, she bolted upright. After vigorously rubbing the sleep out of her eyes she accepted the letter, which I was brandishing in front of her, and commenced reading, her face growing pale as the situation became clear to her.

“How could they do this?” she asked, “what makes them so interested in keeping us here?”

I didn’t have an answer, but I got the sense that the question was directed more towards the universe at large than specifically at me.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

My mother sat there silently, looking lost. Then, she set her jaw and looked at me. “Well, we’re not going to do what they want, that’s for sure.” she told me, “We can’t leave without tires, and we can’t get our tires back without agreeing to stay here, which would make them useless anyway. Since that’s the case, let’s forget the tires altogether and try to do something different. We’ll see if another one of the groups around here can help us out. Surely one of the other four will be kinder than these scumbags.”

With that, she marched out of the room. I followed behind her, doubting that she knew where we were going any more than I did. I had no idea where any of the other squatter groups might be, but they certainly seemed to have ways of finding us. Hopefully we could run into somebody who would be willing to help with our situation.

After a long journey down the many flight of stairs, we reached the street and set off in a random direction. As before, I didn’t like the sensation I had while walking around down here, but during the daytime the streets didn’t feel quite so threatening. As we walked I looked around, hoping to spot somebody who we could talk to. There was nobody. If I hadn’t known better I would think that the city was really as empty as it was supposed to be. Nothing was moving, save for a few bots here and there silently going about their business.

Then all of a sudden I spotted something. I caught the brief glimpse of a darting figure leaping between two balconies far above and behind us. I caught it only for a moment before it slipped behind a corner and out of sight. I grabbed my mother’s sleeve and shook it to get her attention, nodding silently in the direction of where I had seen the figure. She looked as well and soon we caught it again, closer this time. It was there one moment and gone the next, leaping over the road where two of the irregularly shaped buildings converged close together. Though we only saw it for a second, we could tell that it was a man wearing black clothing from head to toe. We waited and watched, but he did not reappear. Did he know we had spotted him? We strained our eyes, trying to get another look at him. Where had we gone?

The heavy force of a man’s hand fell on my shoulder from behind, and my heart constricted in my chest. My mother and I whipped around to see who was there. To my relief, it wasn’t the man in black. Instead, standing before us was Craig, the black-haired man from the Red Crest who we had met the day before.

“You need to come with me. Now.” he said.