shiver (FEATURED) | ✓

o43

Nothing will let me sleep tonight, and I know it. The moment the door closes behind Evanna, I open my briefcase.

My hands are sweating, fumbling with the zipper- the stupid zipper, that slips from my fingers. I'm in. I reach into a small side pocket and draw out a small plastic bag, crumpled up around the edges. There are five pills in there; blue and triangular, just like the ones Adamik saw, just like the ones I tossed into the rubbish bin, thinking I was too good for them. I'm I deep, I think, as I take one out, roll it between my damp fingers until its surface turns sticky and unappetising. I place it down on the surface of the dining room table. Take a deep breath.

The chip. Right, the chip. I reach into the front pocket and draw out my work chip; it's my everything, it's me, enclosed in a small piece of plastic and metal, no bigger than my left thumbnail. The words enclosed within this practical piece of technology that projects a touchscreen could tell them everything. Every word, every phrase, shaped subtly by my subconscious, an evil trickster that will betray me if looked at under menacing eyes, eyes that know exactly what they're looking for. A drone flies past my living room, and I freeze, momentarily, but it doesn't stop, nor does it linger. I follow it with a watchful gaze, and make out the letters P.C. Project Chrysalis. I thought it would be my making, my greatest achievement, the epitome of my professional career. Instead, it will become my demise. I'm sure of it. I can't go back now. Not after what I've agreed to- I don't think I'd be able to so much as look my Father in the eyes should I return to work tomorrow. I can't.

I can't even tell Adamík what he deserves to know. He's my friend, dammit, and I trust him- but perhaps I don't trust myself to predict his reaction if I tell him.

Decidedly, I place the chip into my breast pocket, pull my coat on, and take my keys. Perhaps a stroll outside will help me calm down, get these thoughts off my mind. I feel sick to the stomach as the cold breeze from outside bathes my face in ice. One of the buttons along the front of my coat is loose. It's a trivial thing to worry about, but it helps. There's only so much one can worry about at a time, and right now, I'll pick a loose button over my life. I Puah both hands deep into the pockets of my coat, but soon the site around them turns hot and stuffy, and I take them back out to let the frozen wind gnaw them to the bone. Somewhere inside me, I knew under my Father, I wouldn't amount to much, have much power, but I've often somewhere - and yet it's not enough. In Tetrahmon's 'democratic' hierarchy, I'm above the three million citizens that live here. I stand on the shoulders of my doctors, the guards that patrol every street, those that keep watch over the Wall. And yet... all it takes is one man to take any control I have over my fate. If he wanted me dead, I'd already be pulverised, and those who knew me as a friend would watch me die as nothing more than a traitor.

Because that's what I am, ultimately. Somehow, the word liberates me from the crushing fist of our President, the man who can change the names of seasons or people with the bat of an eyelash. Who can reduce people to a number and a letter, classify them as one would sheep. His influence is like a slab of marble, pressing down on my chest, crushing my airways, making breathing painful.

I turn a corner. A walk around the block should do it- ten minutes tops.

A whole lot can happen in ten minutes.

▿

The first thing I hear is the smash of china plates against the glass floor of the apartment. It's musical, and it's beautiful in a twisted way. It's beauty only art can produce.

Even the way I think about people pulling crockery from my shelves is wrong, illegal. I race up the stairs to my apartment, and through the front door I see white. White uniforms, white helmets that mask the face. White gloves and boots. The place I know as home, with its tidiness that's broken only with an unmade bed, turns to a blur of blue and white, but the colours don't mix properly into one shade, and I'm left with fragments. Every plate that falls to the floor; a memory. I take a step backwards, away from the door, a film of perspiration across my forehead, despite the bitter cold that's drifted into the stairwell. I feel the heel of my foot sag on the side of a step. It's a cue and it's a warning.

As long as they don't have my chip, they don't own me. It's all I care about. I turn around and run down. I don't stop running until my ribs ache and I'm several blocks away from disaster. All I need to get are my bearings, and then I can don the true uniform of a traitor, a liar. Time has gotten the better of me. It's warped my mind, convinced me to take bad and regrettable decisions, but it is what it is.

I can't be a saint if I know which way I have to go.

▿

The last time I was led here, I saw the doorframe of this building, right at the edge of its sector, through the holes of a blindfold folded so tightly across my eyes and cheeks that my face felt swollen, the flesh pushed downwards to the corners of my mouth. Now, I see it clearly in the daylight, the new glass, and through it, the rusty scaffolding, the crumbling concrete of an incomplete building, a black sheep in the white flock of the city, built to impose a purpose, a purpose that mirrors that of the wall. It's seen as forbidden to enter, but really, it isn't. It embellishes the old world, the one we've risen above as a people, the strong, the intelligent, the good genes. The Storm was natural selection at its finest. It was artificial, but everything about it weeding out the good from the bad was natural, based off a theory centuries old.

Waking, walking, walking. With each step I take towards my different life, the lead weighing my heart and my heels down lifts just a little bit. Fraction by fraction. Freedom built up, fraction by fraction. The light around me changes - white, black, now yellow, the glow of a thousand lightbulbs, strung up in an underground world, a cavern formed years and years ago from the pummelling of running water against rock, water that ate away at stone and dirt, water that no longer exists.

"I'm glad you decided to come, Vance."

I turn my head, and there, in the shadows stands a figure, a man, taller than me, bulkier than me, stronger than me. And when he step into the light, I recognise him as the man who stood in my shower to hide from a camera, who stood there and hammered me with questions. It's Bernard.

"Please follow me."

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