Chapter I | Monotony & Squander

Year 702 a.S., Summer | City Pyraleia, the Capital

Aiden held out a syringe for me. The glass barrel was filled with a reddish-brown fluid, and there was already a needle attached to the end. I could barely hear myself think in the crashing and pounding music. The dark spat out lights in RGB too, in laser lights and disco balls. My heart pounded, harder than ever and harder still with each beat of the synth. “It’s totally safe,” he said. “We switch out needles and everything.”

Hesitantly, I took the syringe from him and examined it. The glass glinted like crystal, like pretty diamond. I turned my arm over to expose the crook of my elbow. I regretted wearing a sleeveless dress. It felt like I could already see the vein.

❧☙

There was a little needle I kept in the cuff of my favorite sweater. A sewing needle my mom gave to me. My mother by blood, I mean. Whenever I got scared, it was there to keep me safe. Whenever I was safe, it would prick my skin and draw my blood. It would remind me that my past hadn’t vanished.

In the days of my life in the Midtown, I found myself pricking myself with it just to remember. It seemed the work of a Midtown lackey never really ended. Every day, I came home to an empty place with the lights shut off to parents who wouldn’t return for several hours longer. It was tough, but it was the only way to keep our spot in Layer 3. And while my foster parents worked their lives away, I attended school like usual in a place like a concrete prison.

It was true that there was a sullen beauty to Pyraleia with lights that glowed when they wanted to, but the mornings were always foggy, and the fog stayed into the afternoon. And no matter how beautiful the cityscape appeared at night, students weren’t allowed out past curfew.

School itself felt monotone. There were sometimes class periods where no one spoke a word at all. Every morning, thirty kids crammed themselves into a cramped computer room, sat in their individual booths with a monitor and keyboard and a daily lesson. Clack, clack, clack. Talkative kids were seen as socially defective. Like they couldn’t read a room. Like they ruined the vibe. To be honest, I’d liked it at first. It was calming. Lucky Lilies used to burst with energy every day with all the children, so I’d felt like silence was good for me.

As the years passed into my first year of high school, I stopped feeling that way. 

“You should try to live a little,” an old man said to me one day. I must’ve spent the hour nagging him with the mundanities of my life. It was the only time I ever spoke to him, but I still remember his name. An old name that wasn’t all too common anymore. John. He was a resident at the elder care facility that I worked at part-time on weekends. He looked young for his age, though he joked that he was almost already the age Finryd the Old had been back when he was born. John had a head full of hair, white though it was, and it gave him a glow that I didn’t often see in the other residents.

There was something about this place that I loved. It always seemed to be bathed in a warm evening glow, like a day about to set. Like a world about to end without a sound. There was an aroma to it as well. Some would call it a stench, that of a thousand old souls about to pass from this world into the next. This was my third year working at this place, and that stench became almost a comfort to me. I kept count of how many folks passed. I counted myself lucky. There had only been ten so far. The people who lived here were hardy. They may have had lost their homes and their families, but they kept their hearts. They kept their minds.

And John was no different. He almost had the energy of a man in his thirties, although parts of him would sometimes creak and groan to remind me otherwise. He regaled me with stories of his past, of the trouble he would often find himself in, the friends he lost, and the life he’d left behind. He had just been admitted, and we had just met, but he already felt like a close friend. Try to live a little, he told me. 

And the next day, he passed away in his sleep.

I was a girl who could never forget how death loomed over all. Everyone feared it. Many chose to shelve that truth and forget. Others turned to religion. I did neither, really. I thought about it constantly and, after a great deal of time had passed, found that it no longer bothered me. Or so I told myself.

But John’s final words dug into the back of my head. When he left my world, everything seemed to go just a little duller. School a little greyer. The way the keyboards in my wordless classes clacked bugged me just that much more. Live a little. I sat in my room, alone in the dark, and muttered aloud to myself.

“Yeah. Why shouldn’t I?”

My name was Annamarie Areille, and although I had a few friends at school, there was no one I could call myself truly close with. I never went out with anyone or had fun with them. We never played games and although our conversations were sometimes funny, they were mostly dull. I think that’s why when Aiden Pitt pulled me out of class by the hand, I didn’t resist. I think it’s why when he asked if he could be my boyfriend, I said yes.

I liked Aiden. He was handsome and funny, and actually sweet. He wanted to live a little, too. I liked him a lot, but for some reason, when we first kissed, the only thing I could think about was someone else. My autumn girl, together with me beneath that tree so many years ago. A girl whose face I couldn’t even remember. But her lips were on my mind while his were on mine.

After that, I couldn’t bring myself to kiss him again.

He never complained. Maybe that was something admirable about him. Something about us did change, though. He made sure to walk me home every day after school. He brought me food after work on the weekends. Looking back, you could say that he was almost something of a perfect boyfriend. Maybe because he didn’t want to lose me. Maybe because he realized that he could at any moment.

Yet somehow, we stayed together. For the rest of the school year until this single, vibrant moment on the cusp of summer, when he asked me a simple question. He asked if I wanted to go to a party with him.