Dissolution

Chapter 8 - A Starless Sky

The water hit me like a hovercar. It folded me backward and slammed into me like something solid. I lost consciousness for a brief moment. When I stole it back my head was ringing and I felt something warm—blood?—running down my face before it was whisked away by the river.

Moments later, everything started to burn.

Everything: my eyes, the insides of my nose, the back of my throat where I must have screamed . . . . I choked. I flailed up to the surface. It was like swimming through amniotic fluid, thick and sticky. My lungs were on fire. I sucked in a desperate breath and was pulled back down again.

I clamped my mouth shut just in time. The poison swirled around my nose, my ears, my face, trying to get in. All around me was movement and the sheer density of the water underneath me, like riding a mountain in the grip of an earthquake. I remembered my mother taking me to see the river when I was young. I remembered it glowing under the flashing lights as people took pictures with their UConns. I remembered it looking beautiful, placid, as it ran through the city.

Now I felt it underneath me, all around me, like some immense, swelling monster. How could Unilox ever have thought that this was something they could tame? I was lucky I even knew how to swim. But there was no point in swimming against this.

The water threw me down. Swirled over my head. Carried me far away from people and their crushable bones, their hovercars and their useless technology. Nothing could keep up with this, this force of nature.

At some point, caught in its grip, I lost consciousness again.

An image; a dream. No, a memory. Our third anniversary. I'd looked at my bank account, double-checked Jake's rates, and then booked him for a whole Saturday. After a morning lazing around in his family's apartment and an afternoon of shopping, we'd taken a picnic out to the river. We'd lounged on the ledge, our backs to Unilox. I'd wanted to sit next to the water, but Jake had been worried about the fumes. He always worried about things like that.

We'd installed PERCO's taste program together and feasted on chicken sandwiches and berries. It had been a pretty good program. The burn of salt was still in my mouth as we lay back on our pile of blankets. We'd gone in the evening, and after everyone who had clamored to watch the sun set on the river's surface had gone, it had been quiet. I'd lain in the circle of his arms as he tucked the blanket around us, staring up at the black, black sky. This close to the river, the air smelled sharp, like something forgotten.

"Can you imagine what it would have been like," he asked softly, "to see the stars?"

I knew about stars, vaguely. Ads mentioned them sometimes. They were rare things, like diamonds. Getting a glimpse of one when the endless smog lifted and you were far enough away from the CBD lights meant that you could wish for something and it would come true. But not many people bothered to look anymore.

I shrugged. "Not really," I said. "But what would you wish for, if you saw one?"

He was silent for a long, long time. I was surprised. My own answer was waiting already, lurking in the cavern of my mouth. I tucked it away because he already knew: to be sold to MERCE in the Auctioning. To become the best paid mech-head in all of Unilox. But him? We'd been dating for years, and I suddenly felt awful that I didn't know.

So I waited. Jake kissed my hair and breathed deeply. "I'd want to make a difference," he said at last. I blinked. What did that even mean?

"I'd want to make a difference," he repeated. "I'd want to change things."

There was something in his whisper that made the city around us fall silent. That made another world shiver gently into being. A secretive world: a world for confessions.