The sky rained regret.
Heavy, viscous and salty.
Adia pulled the collar of her oilskin coat up past her nose. The leather hissed. A droplet of concentrated Grief struck her shoulder, heavy as a ball bearing. It slid down the sleeve, leaving a trail of dark, sticky residue. She didn't wipe it off. Touching it meant feeling it and she had enough feeling to drown the whole damn sector.
She moved fast. Boots on wet cobblestone.
SPLASH, SPLASH, SPLASH.
The District was drowning. Sector 4. The Sinks. Gravity worked harder here. The air pressure was a hand pressing down on the skull, grinding the teeth together.
The Grief Storm had been raging for three days. A High Yield Extraction uptown, the news feeds said. The Elite were shedding their sorrow so they could enjoy the gala season.
Their trash was Adia's weather.
She ducked into an alleyway. Narrow. Stinking of unwashed bodies. The walls sweated grey slime.
A shadow detached itself from a doorway.
"You're late!" it hissed. A woman. Edala. Her skin was the color of old newspaper.
"Weather's heavy." Adia whispered. Her voice was low, a vibrato hum that seemed to push the cold air away. "Keep your voice down! The mist has ears."
"You have it?" Edala's hands shook from the withdrawal. The tremor of a soul running on fumes. "I can't… I can't see him anymore, Adia. I try to close my eyes and picture his face, but it's just… It's just grey noise."
Adia stepped closer, checking the alley mouth. Empty. Just the relentless stinging rain hammering the trash cans.
"The item!" Adia said.
Edala fumbled in her pockets, pulling out a ribbon. Blue satin, frayed at the edges, cheap synthetic material.
But to Edala, it was a holy relic, belongs to a son who died six months ago. A son she was forgetting because she'd sold her Grief to pay for his funeral.
Now she had nothing, no pain, no love, just the void.
"Give it here!"
Adia took the ribbon.
Even through her gloves, she felt the vacuum of the object. It was cold and lifeless. A dead thing.
"Glove!" Edala begged. "Take off the glove. Please! Just a second. Let me see the light!"
"Risky!" Adia said. But she was already doing it.
She peeled back the leather of her right glove.
The alley changed.
Her skin was bioluminescent. A soft, pulsing gold ran through her veins, visible beneath the dermis.
It was a raw unrefined warmth. The air around her hand instantly grew ten degrees hotter. The rain droplets vaporizing before they could touch her skin.
She was a reactor. A walking, breathing sun in a world of ice.
Adia concentrated. She needed to bleed. So, she closed her eyes and found the emotion of her own mother's hand. The texture of it, the smell of baked bread and safety. The feeling of being held.
She pushed that feeling down her arm, into her fingertips and squeezed the blue ribbon.
The fabric gasped. Literally, the fibers expanded, soaking up the golden runoff from Adia's skin.
The blue satin began to glow, a faint, rhythmic thrumming of amber light bleeding into the thread.
Edala whimpered. The sound was hungry.
"Easy!" Adia snapped. She pulled her hand and snapped the glove back into place. The light vanished, hidden behind the leather. But the ribbon… the ribbon remained warm. It hummed with a synthetic heartbeat.
"Take it!"
Edala snatched the ribbon, pressing it to her cheek.
The grey in Edala's eyes cracked. Her pupils dilated. A flush of pink rushed into her cheeks. Tears welled up, fresh and hot.
"Erick..." Edala sobbed, crumpling against the wet brick wall, clutching the ribbon. "Oh god, Erick. I can see him. I... I can feel his hair."
She looked up at Adia, her face twisted in a beautiful, agonizing mask of sorrow. "It hurts. God, it hurts. Thank you."
"Five minutes!" Adia said, her voice tight, breathless. Discharging emotion was exhausting, like sprinting a mile. "It'll fade in five. Don't waste it!"
"Here." Edala tried to shove a ration bar into Adia's pocket. "Food. Take it!"
"Keep it! Eat! You'll need the energy for the crying."
Adia turned and walked away. The raw gratitude radiating off Edala was too loud. It tugged at Adia's own sensors, threatening to pull her into a feedback loop.
She hit the main street.
[HEART RATE: 110]
[ADRENALINE: HIGH]
She adjusted her coat. The glow under her clothes was brighter now. That was the problem with usage. It agitated the supply. Using her power woke the beast up. Her skin felt tight, buzzing with the static of a thousand unspent laughs and a million unscrubbed terrors.
The rain fell harder. A Grief Micro-Burst. The streetlights flickered and died, the filaments unable to burn in the heavy atmosphere.
Adia kept her head down. She had to get back to the basement. To the lead-lined box she called a room.
She passed a beggar. A man with no legs, sitting on a hover-sled that had no battery. He was a Hollow. Eyes entirely white, mouth hanging open. He was begging for sensation, written on a sign around his neck,
WILL BLEED FOR ANGER.
He wanted someone to hit him, just to feel the spike of the pain.
Adia gave him a wide berth. If she touched him, even by accident, the transfer would kill him. Her voltage was too high, like a lightning, and he was just a 12-volt battery, he'd explode for sure.
Keep moving! Don't look! Don't feel!
A low hum vibrated the water in the puddles.
HUMM, HUMM, HUMM.
Adia froze.
Above her, a Mint Patrol Drone.
She didn't look up. Looking up was an act of defiance. Defiance was an emotion, and would trigger the sensors.
She went limp, forcing her mind to think of math. Simple arithmetic. Two plus two is four. Four plus four is eight. She visualized a brick wall, grey, boring, empty.
The drone hovered. A black teardrop shape against the weeping sky. Its searchlight swept the street, like a Resonance Scanner, looking for Heat. For the thermal signature of Joy, or the jagged frequency of Rage.
The blue beam passed over the Hollow beggar.
It passed over the puddle.
It shot Adia.
Two plus two is four. I am a stone. I am a puddle. I am nothing.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. Her skin burned. The glow wanted out, to scream at the drone, to flare up like a flare in the night, building the pressure inside her skull.
Don't slip. Please, hold the seal.
The scanner lingered. It felt like ants crawling under her scalp, whirring, its internal gyros calculating. It sensed... something. A variance. An anomaly in the background radiation.
Adia bit her tongue hard. The sharp sting of pain helped ground her, masking the emotional radiation. Pain was common and cheap.
The hum faded. The drone moved on, drifting down the street toward the screams coming from a bar fight three blocks away. Rage was easier to harvest.
Adia exhaled, a cloud of white steam.
She started running, cut through the Leftover Zone, an abandoned construction site where the unfinished skeletons of luxury condos stood like rusted ribs.
The Elite had run out of Ambition Silk halfway through the project, so the buildings just sat there, half-dreamed and forgotten.
She reached her building, a tenement block that leaned precariously to the left. The front door was gone, replaced by a sheet of corrugated plastic.
She slipped inside.
...
The air here was stale, smelling of boiled cabbage and apathy.
Stairs. Up. Four flights. Her legs burned, but she liked it because it was real, and it was hers.
Apartment 4B.
She unlocked the three deadbolts.
Inside was dark. The only light came from the Sorrow Lamp in the corner, a cheap device that burned slow-release melancholy oil to produce a dim blue light.
"I'm home." she whispered.
No answer.
Her father sat in the armchair. He was facing the wall with eyes opened, blinking once every forty seconds. He was a Grey. Not a full Hollow yet, but close. He had traded his Pride ten years ago to pay for Adia's schooling. Then he traded his Curiosity to keep the heat on. Then his Anger to pay off a debt.
Now, he just sat, existing.
Adia walked to him, then kneeling.
"Papa?"
He turned his head slowly. "Adia. You're... back."
"I got food." She pulled a protein brick from her pocket. "Eat!"
He looked at it. "I'm not... hungry."
"Eat anyway!"
She unwrapped it and placed it in his hand. He stared at it. He didn't have the Desire to eat. He would starve to death with food in his hand because the concept of wanting to survive had been extracted.
Adia's chest tightened like a dangerous spike of Pity. She shoved it down. Pity was heavy and could trigger the storms.
She reached out, taking his cold, dry hand.
"Papa. Look at me!"
She pulled the glove off again.
She didn't give him a spark. She didn't have enough control to give him a complex emotion like Hunger or Love without breaking him. Instead, she gave him a micro-dose of Comfort.
Just a tint, a low-frequency hum.
Her hand glowed soft orange with the warmth bled into his skin.
His eyes widened slightly. The pupils contracted. He took a breath, dropping His shoulders. The rigid tension of the void left him for a second.
"Warm," he whispered. "It feels... like summer."
"Yeah," Adia whispered. "It's summer. Eat the brick, Papa! For summer."
He took a bite and chewed.
Adia pulled her hand back quickly, couldn't afford to give more. She had to save the charge for the market tomorrow. If she didn't sell, they didn't pay the rent. If they didn't pay the rent, they went to the Sinks. The Sinks killed Greys in a week.
She stood up, her knees cracking.
She walked to the window. The glass was taped over with lead foil to keep the scanners out, but she had peeled back a tiny corner, for a peephole.
She looked out at the city.
The Sinks were black and bruised. But far away, across the river, the High District pierced the clouds. The spires of the Mint were made of crystal and diamond-glass. They glowed with an obscene, shifting light, pink, gold and violet.
They were having a party. She could see the Ecstasy Aurora shimmering above the towers. The excess joy of the rich refracting in the stratosphere.
It was beautiful, but somehow hateful.
Adia touched her chest, beneath the sternum, deep in the bone, she felt it. The Well.
It wasn't just that she had emotions, but she generated them. The Mint taught that sentiment was finite. That for one to be happy, another must be sad. Conservation of Sentiment.
But Adia was a violation of physics. She was a fountain in a desert and she was always full.
The charging with Edala hadn't lowered her pressure, but had spiked it. The pity for her father was churning with the fear of the drone and the adrenaline of the run. It was mixing into a cocktail of volatile, like a high-octane Yearning.
She gripped the windowsill. The wood began to smoke under her fingers.
Control it! Lock it down, Adia!
She breathed in. One.
She breathed out. Two.
The smoke stopped.
She needed to offload, some of a bigger buyer. The ribbons weren't enough. She needed to sell a Memory. A big one. Maybe a First Kiss simulation or a Victory scream.
Tomorrow, she'd go to the deep market tomorrow.
...
Suddenly, a sound cut through the drone of the rain.
A siren, lower and deeper, like a bass note that vibrated the fillings in her teeth.
The Atmospheric Warning System.
WHIING, WHIING, WHIING.
A mechanical voice boomed from the street speakers, distorted by the water.
"WARNING. LOCALIZED ANOMALY DETECTED IN SECTOR 4. SEVERE EMOTIONAL TURBULENCE IMMINENT. CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO ADMINISTER CALMATIVES. STAY INDOORS! DO NOT FEEL! REPEAT! DO NOT FEEL!"
Adia stiffened.
She looked at her hands. The glow was pulsing fast, like a strobe light.
PULSE, PULSE, PULSE.
It wasn't the city. It was her.
She had leaked. The Comfort she gave her father... she hadn't sealed the connection fast enough, or maybe… the charging with Edala, she didn't know.
The drone might had seen her as well.
She looked out the peephole.
Down on the street, the rain had stopped falling down.
The droplets were hovering, floating mid-air. Frozen by a massive static charge.
Then, they started going up.
Anti-gravity. The sign of a massive polarity shift.
The air outside her window turned a violent, bruising purple, like the color of bruises, or Panic.
"Papa," Adia said, her voice trembling. "Get under the table!"
"Summer?" he mumbled, chewing his brick.
"Now!" she screamed.
She grabbed him and shoved him under the heavy oak table. She threw a lead blanket over him.
Then she ran to the door. She had to leave. If the hounds were coming, she couldn't be here. She couldn't let them find The Well.
She threw open the door.
The hallway wasn't empty.
The air in the corridor was twisting, like warping. As if heat waves were rising from the concrete.
At the end of the hall, standing in the shadows of the stairwell, was a figure.
Not a drone, nor a man, nor a local.
He wore a suit of matte-black armor, sleek and faceless. No insignia. But Adia knew the silhouette. Everyone knew the silhouette.
A Hound.
The Hound raised a hand. He held a glass vial and crushed it in his palm.
Red smoke exploded from his hand, Rage Silk.
The Hound inhaled the smoke through his helmet. Then, his posture shifted. He grew, muscles bunched. A low, animalistic growl ripped from his throat. He was high on pure distilled Fury.
He turned his helmet toward Adia, screaming a sound of pure, chemically induced hatred, then he charged.
Adia slammed back the door, throwing the deadbolt. A second later, the wood splintered as a fist punched through the door, three inches of solid oak shattered like balsa wood.
A gauntleted hand grabbed the frame. The wood groaned. The door was being ripped off its hinges.
Adia backed up. Her back hit the window.
She was trapped, four stories up, with a rage-monster at the door.
She looked at her hands. They were blinding white-hot.
She had never used it as a weapon and she didn't know if she could.
The door flew off its hinges, crashing into the room.
The Hound stepped in, eyes glowing red through his visor.
Adia raised her hand.
She was afraid and she knew she could never back down again once she tried it.
"Burn..."
She whispered.
...