With the sprawling, towering city at his back Samuel stared out from his spot on the windswept observation platform that jutted from the urban cocoon of the city. He was looking directly into the vast open space, the blue sky and the carpet of trees and plains that was The Edge. All that openness left Samuel feeling nothing but fear! His stomach curdled and he was only too aware of the beads of perspiration beginning to form on the smooth skin of his forehead. The thirty-storey height of the observation pathway, with its light-metal and low safety-railings meant nothing to him. After all, what did height matter to someone born into the magnificence of a metropolis, one of the great mega-cities, the bastions of modern civilisation. Samuel had lived his whole life suspended in the clouds, belonging to the world of interconnected skyscrapers and air-bridges, of rooftop gardens, and an age that had recognised the ascendancy of technology above all else. 

This side of the city faced The Edge though, or at least one of them. He knew there were other Edges on other continents across the sea. The places where the cities came to an end. Some people called the places beyond the cities ‘Reservations’, but anyone with any real sense knew that was too kind a term. In reality, where the cities ended, the world ended. 

Samuel’s heart beat an erratic tattoo in his chest, his meandering thoughts didn’t distract him enough to stall the ickiness of the pooling sweat, and he felt his legs turning to jelly as his stomach continued to somersault. Still he kept staring out, as he had done so many times before. He stared out beyond the edge of the world. He stared into that place where the ancient, ignorant mapmakers had always been wise enough to mark-off with the legend: ‘There be dragons’!

‘Perhaps I’m a masochist,’ Samuel laughed to himself under his breath. How else could he explain the weird compulsion that drew him time-after-time to come and stare out into the scary openness. To descend to the lower levels where he could even come outside, not even a pane of glass protecting him from the dangerous Edge. How did people live in so much space? It made so little sense, the dangers and uncertainties. Better to be warm, and indoors. Better to have all the comforts of life at one’s fingertips. To be where everything you could ever want was just a travelator ride away.

Samuel forced himself to look even further down. From this height he could just see the outline of the gates and fences below, with the customs sheds, and the long strip of scorched, flat earth that ran along the edge of the city in every direction, stretching out. No one could approach the fences without being seen well-beforehand. Not that he’d ever seen anyone cross the bare ground except via the one road; if that hard packed dirt track could really be called a road. 

He could see them now, trailing their way from the tree-line, along the path, swarming the chain link fences around the customs gates. They lived beyond The Edge, who knows why? There were always some of them coming or going, trying to gain admittance into the city to carry out some trade or another in the gutter levels. 

‘There go the dragons,’ Samuel smirked, looking with contempt on the specks below. Why do they come? He couldn’t understand it. These non-people, they didn’t belong to the world, they didn’t want to. They chose to live out in the wilderness, wild things, scratching their lives away in the unforgiving dirt. There was no logic to them, they insisted on their own ways, and their own beliefs. Not content to learn how to behave with other people, they refused to live the way all humans should, and they refused to conform to the state-sanctioned faith systems, or to the rule of private religion. Savages and radicals, barbarians, idiots, anarchists, and christians. Well let them have their dirt and their open spaces, who wants it, but why do they have to come near the cities?

That thought was what finally broke Samuel free from today’s crippling bout of nausea and fear that the sight of The Edge always stirred up within him. His irritation at the existence of the non-people who infested the outermost, lowermost foundations of his city, like maggots in a wound or bora finding its way into wood, that’s what brought him back to sober reality.

A snarl on his lips, he turned his eyes away from the source of his irritation, back towards the smooth lines, and sympathetic designs of safe, solid, city architecture. Two days ago a delegation had arrived from beyond The Edge, as sometimes happened. Representatives of whatever minor potentate claimed some level of authority over this particular patch of grass and trees and rocks outside the Megacity.

Samuel hated when delegations arrived. His father was one of the Senior Councillors who would be deputed to meet and greet the arriving party. He’d have to allow them into the upper-levels of the city and treat them like real people. What was even worse was that his father seemed to quite like the foreign dragons. Samuel had been made to endure the taunts his entire life, how his father loved the dirt-diggers, how maybe he was a christian or something. The filthy talk had followed him around and filled Samuel’s ears to the point where he wanted to scream as a child.

Nowadays Samuel wanted to scream for another reason, he was eighteen now, smart, and everyone always said how he heard everything. He had heard, he’d picked up how the taunts his classmates had thrown at him in school, were the same kind of taunts their parents whispered behind his father’s back. It was dangerous to consort with dragons, to be thought to be their friend, disastrous! Why didn’t his father understand, why didn’t he distance himself as much as possible from them, get away from The Edge, move government departments, stop being seen as a sympathiser. No matter how hard he tried to convince him, Samuel couldn’t get through to his father. The man should know better, his son already did. The dragons brought death, they burned up everyone that they came into contact with. 

Rival councillors wanted his father out of the way, Samuel knew that, they would burn him on the pyre of politics, the dragons would provide the flames. And just like that Samuel found himself melancholy and pensive as he thought about his father, a man he loved in spite of himself. He didn’t want his father to burn, but the man refused to be saved. So very many emotions in such a short span of time, Samuel was wrung out.