GOLDEN AGE | ON HIATUS

X | NARCISSA

[ 10 ]

THE FIRST TIME that Narcissa remembered being in a car was during the journey to a UN meeting. Crux mostly liked to stick to planes, finding them safer and more efficient, along with being a way of showcasing where Semper City's taxes were going, for those who bothered to pay.

Not many people, she'd learnt later on, did bother, those who did being mostly from the west side of the island that the city was built on. Some of them were rich men from the bordering Louisiana, searching for the thrill of Vegas, but closer to home. Those who paid from the South were poor country boys from Arkansas, oblivious to the city's darkness, running to Semper with open arms and empty wallets.

The South was a dump, really, but more underfunded than dangerous. The East was both - starving, stealing and strangling, in the comfort of vaguely nice houses for those who could afford them, and slums for those who couldn't. It was where the moneyless immigrants resided, those who'd arrived in Semper with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Petra Sperova, Narcissa considered, watching the skinny young woman take a heaving breath, was one of them. She could tell from the emptiness in her grey eyes and the sickly tint to her already pale skin that Semper City was the belly of the beast for her, leaving nothing for the Usnayan. Narcissa watched her comb her bony fingers through her hair, which was a colour that might've once been dark brown but now had become so faded that it was almost purple, and felt a surge of pity over how wretched Petra looked.

On the other side of the table, the Siren looked sick. When her sister's skin was silvery and translucent, Sasha's looked nearly luminescent, greenish, as if it would glow in the dark. It was the colour of what someone would find if they looked too deep under the water, glow worms plastered to the ceiling of a cave, or fireflies crowding around a streetlamp.

She didn't look like the same girl that Narcissa had seen on broadcasts for the past few years, caught glimpses of before the static stole her voice away and the broken satellite outside whichever apartment she was renting at the time stole her face. That face, she saw in the grim light that passed through the curtain-covered windows of Nakamura Manor, was typically Usnayan.

Narcissa hadn't met many in her days, but when she had, there were often a few defining characteristics - pale skin, often weathered away into a tan marred with freckles, light eyes and dark hair. That combination made those who'd avoided manual labour appear almost ghostlike, the ones who'd escaped to Semper before the summer droughts and the civil war. It was easy to tell between Sasha and Petra which of the two had been more fortunate - though now Petra's tan had long since faded.

At last, Finn found the words to speak, tearing Narcissa's eyes away from the Usnayans for a long enough time to listen.

"I'm going to...get some of my stuff."