GOLDEN AGE | ON HIATUS

VI | SASHA

[ 06 ]

EASTERN SEMPER was where Sasha should've belonged, with scum and street rats and cheap perfume. Fake jewellery, languages the real residents, from the Northside and the Southside didn't understand apart from a few words, and Westerns were too proud to bother learning.

Eastern Semper was cheap and dirty, building work around every corner that never seemed to actually do anything other than provide its residents with noise that their smashed windows couldn't block out.

Eastern Semper was a place where people could live their lives without much input from anyone that mattered to them. A bad thing as much as a good one - it was a hotspot for anarchists and troublemakers, teenagers doing dumb stuff to try and "summon" a hero, or a Crux operative that could deal with the things the police couldn't.

Eastern Semper was not where Sasha belonged, as much as she tried to convince herself to the contrary.

For the four years she'd been with Crux, she'd waited every day to escape to Eastern Semper, where other Usnayans had taken up residence, living in a thriving community. She'd wished every night to join them, live amongst them, but now as she walked the streets, she was no longer as sure of herself.

Truth be told, walking through the tightly-packed buildings, some new and sleek and others so old that they were physically crumbling, windows shattered and doors ajar, their residents not even caring about safety anymore, Sasha couldn't have felt more out of place.

It wasn't the appearance - no, that was exactly what she'd anticipated - but the energy she could feel in a cool night air that brushed against her face. She felt almost as left out as Wildfire had looked at the Usnayan festival, and a fresh wave of guilt washed over Sasha for making him go with her.

She could feel him now, his liquid brown eyes flickering over her every so often, his warm breath tingling against the back of her neck. There was nothing she wanted more than to open her mouth and speak, but she knew that now was not the time for idle chatter, not when they were so close. No paper was hidden in her pocket, no address typed up on a phone.

In her mind however, it had been tattooed, so many times that the words had carved themselves a home in her skull. It was unlikely that Sasha would forget, anyway - not when this was the moment she'd been waiting for for so long. During the past year, she'd been tracking the servers and slowly disabling connections from Crux, trying to find any mentions of a family member in Semper.

She hadn't necessarily wanted to escape to them, but rather to simply know that there was someone there, that she wasn't alone, as much as it felt like it at times. Mostly, she wasn't lonely, with Wildfire by her side and Finn always near, that too-perfect people-pleasing smile on his too-perfect people-pleasing face.