The Neon Tempest
94: Chapter Thirty-One, Part Three
Previously…
93: Chapter Thirty-One, Part Two
“Why here?” Mer asks. “Why now?”
She stands beneath a white birch, its limbs moonlight-silvered, in the front yard of Calico Carnifex’s ruined home. Even in MetroMem, trees remain a fair common sight, especially river birch. The unhealthy things clustered like weeds along the river’s muddy banks, and were the only place outside of the local zoo to see and hear native songbirds, however sickly and stunted. Mer always thought it sad, people from all the city who’d never known anything but glass and metal and cold, urban angles oohing and ahhing at the short-lived, flightless little things hopping from limb to limb, warbling at each other.
People accept so little, she thinks.
“Where else? Sprite coos in her head, like an idle thought coming and going. “When else?”
She remembers bits and bobs of the hike from downtown to the Mound, darting between parked cars and growing shadows in the dwindling day, avoiding eye contact with people she’d been unable to avoid, keeping her head bowed and short, lank hair hiding her face from the ubiquitous public cameras. The less they saw of them, she thinks, and stops, corrects herself. The less they saw of her, the better. Beyond those fragments and flashes, and flowing, shadowed recollections of anxiety blossoming in her guts, the rest of the day seemed a dream stretched taut, beyond grasping.
Mer tells herself their mind had been on other things, like not getting caught, or letting her father send more men they had to put down. What was there to recall, anyway, they reckon; they were over there and now they’re right here.
Her bare feet bow the water swollen basement steps leading down into the hole beneath house. Her breath came quick, harsh, felt a raw jag burning in and out of her chest.
Sprite whispers in her brain like a shushing breeze. “This is where they took you.”
Mer stops on the steps, eyes wide to the pitch black beneath the collapsed house. It reminds her of the darkness when she tries to remember the time before the basement, the deep spaces between mnemonic childhood fragments, a black so fuligin-deep that it swims before her questing, stretching pupils like pooling ink. Pieces come and go, but few ever remain for very long, all since the illness. So many pieces, she thinks, so far apart, and more all the time. She seems to gather them, she feels, and wonders if it’s her, or just the way the world feels for everyone, like deep gulfs between isolated moments of crystal clarity.
“This is where everything changed,” Sprite says.
Mer traces her finger down the stairwell wall, goes the rest of the way down the moisture swollen steps. One bows and cracks loud, but holds its shape. She stops at the bottom. “This is where we were born.”
To be continued…