There is no night or day for those that live beneath the spire. Only dark, wet and neon.
We follow a svelte step, one after the other, each drowned by the beat of a thousand laborers, a thousand deviants and a thousand lost souls. As she travels, a sea of people ebb and flow around her and with it the unmistakable smell of dung and rot intermixed with cooked meat and spices. Dancing precariously around the market place, ignoring the hecklers and the insane, she arrives at the foot of her apartment door. A tortured cold monolith of bare metal. Before entering she gazes up at the inner sanctum of the hive city through her goggled respo mask. She marvels at its polluted atmosphere, made ever the more clear by the artificial lights that litter the urban hell scape she calls home.
To this day she notes, it is still the second most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
Alisa Eisnor enters her apartment, a one room, one bathroom shack with bare metal flooring and cold florescent lighting like all the other apartments on her block. It had been made exceptional however with the addition of an air pollutant scrubber, a heating unit and a decontamination room at the entrance. A cloud of white smoke washes across her, destroying all manners of death in one quick burst.
"Alisa?"
A frail white haired boy greets her at the entrance. The air scrubber, the decontamination room, the mask was all for the sake of this child. They speak to each other through the glass of the small decontamination room.
"You shouldn't be out of bed" said Alisa. "You're going to make yourself feel worse".
"I'm feeling good today actually. I wanted to stretch my legs a little anyways" smiled the boy weakly.
Entering the room, Alisa hugs the boy closely. "I haven't got your medicine today, I'm sorry".
The boy smiles as he rests his head on her chest. "It's ok. I don't need it."
Alisa knew that was true, but it didn't make her feel any better. Her brother is afflicted with a disease that eats away at his body's natural defenses and makes him weak. Despite the precautions she had made to prevent any foreign sickness from entering his living space there are some that are inescapable due simply to the construction and materials used for the apartment.
Reluctantly, she pushes him away, walks back into the decontamination room and shuts the door. She can't risk being in the same room for too long. "Isaac, do we have caffeine?" she asks.
"We ran out a couple days ago, you had to sell it to-" Before he can finish he turns away, ashamed. She had to sell her supply of her favorite drink to buy medicine for him.
Alisa curls up in a corner of the small glass room and wraps herself with an ancient ragged blanket. "Don't worry. I'll just take a nap. We'll have money soon Isaac, just one last job and we can move to a better place... please wake me in an hour if I'm not awake by then...".
As Alisa drifts away into slumber Isaac gazes in wonder at his sister. Even at his young age of 10 he knew there was something unnatural about his relationship with his sister. He had seen through the pictographs, the slates and the holodrama's how adults acted and cared for their children and none have been more kind or sacrificed so much as his sister.
Isaac lowers himself to rest against the glass near his sister. It's only when he is this close to her that he remembers she is only 13.
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