30 Day Writing Challenge - Day 28

I know, I know, I've been awfully slack of late. I have my excuses, but I won't bore you with them...

Nevertheless, here is today's challenge - Second person bank robbery. A bit rough and ready, I typed this flat out in one sitting and I'm throwing it online without even rereading or checking for continuity errors or typos. A piece of fresh writing, bloody and still steaming...

The Robbery

The four men in balaclavas walk into the bank with almost military efficiency; three of them immediately fan out across the bank’s foyer and remove Heckler & Koch MP5s from beneath their coats while the fourth barricades the door behind them.

                “Everyone face down, on the ground with your hands on your head.” says the largest of the men, his voice precise and free of any noticeable accent. “This is a robbery.”

                The manager looks at you, his eyes wide, as he finally realises that this is really happening to him and you are forced to stare back at him hard to stop him from betraying you. You might be dressed as a bank teller, but the bank manager knows that you’re actually an undercover FBI agent.

                “If anyone tries to hit an alarm, they die. If anyone tries to make a phone call, they die.” intones the man calmly. “If anyone tries anything stupid, they die.”

He scans the room, watching as people get to their knees and then down on to their bellies, furtively glancing at each other as they do so. You wait as long as you can before following suit; lying face down on the floor and clasping your hands behind your head, angling it slightly to one side so that you can surreptitiously watch what the men are doing.

“Remember people, this is the bank’s money,” says the man as he walks around the room, “No one needs to die for someone else’s money.”

You feel your heart hammering hard in your chest, each beat so loud in your ears that it seems like the whole room must hear it. This is the moment where your plan lives or dies; if this goes the way you planned it then no one will get hurt today. If it goes wrong, then things could get messy.

Two hours earlier this morning, you and your three-man team had sat down with the bank manager and briefed him on the intel you had obtained about today’s raid. The gang, you had explained, were ex-military and ruthless; on the bank jobs that went smoothly they left everyone alive, but when things went badly, they left no survivors. It was, therefore, vital, that no one tried to engage them while they were inside the bank.

The plan was simple; the gang were to be allowed to carry out the robbery as they had planned. There were to be no heroics, no attempts to trip silent alarms and summon the police; the gang would take the money from the vault with no problems. But, what they didn’t know, was that the bank notes would be marked with the latest in FBI technology; micro transmitters that would enable the gang to be tracked back to their hideout where an enhanced FBI SWAT team could move in and arrest them without endangering the lives of innocents. You were disguised as a bank teller while two other members of your team were disguised as customers and the final member had replaced the bank’s security guard.

The leader of the group strides up and down the room while his three companions keep point, their guns covering the mass of bodies on the bank floor. Finally, he stops and prods the bank manager between the shoulder blades with the barrel of his gun.

“You’re the manager. I’m going to need you to come with me.”

The manager slowly gets up, looking down at the ground as he does his best to avoid the man’s eyes.

“Time check.” barks the man to his colleagues.

“10.29,” replies the man to his left.

The leader stares the bank manager in the face. He has ice blue eyes.

“What time does the time lock deactivate?”

“Ten thirty,” mumbles the manager, holding his gaze steadfast to the floor.

“Then let’s go.”

He drags the manager across the foyer and out through the back offices, away from your line of sight and you cross your fingers that he can hold it together long enough for them to open the vault and take the money. If the manager goes to pieces now, it is difficult to see how this could end well.

You count out a minute in your head, exchanging looks with one of your team who is face down on the other side of the foyer in amongst a group of real customers, before the man finally emerges from the back of the bank with a broad smile.

“It’s open. Bring the bags.”

One man joins him, leaving only two men to guard the foyer. If anyone has the idea to play at being a hero, it would be around about now. Replacing the security guard with one of your team had been essential, security guards often dream of being heroes and earning acclaim. There could be no loose cannons today. The men keep their weapons trained on the room and no one so much as stirs.

Another minute gone and the two men re-emerge, each now weighted down with two bulging black canvas bags. They drop the bags in the middle of the floor and wait while one of the men who had, until now, remained behind dashes out back. You know that they are going for the security camera footage; pulling all the hard drives that store the bank’s imagery and taking them with them. The manager was pleased when you told him that you’d installed a set of FBI mini-cameras that would capture everything regardless.

And with that, and with only four minutes having passed since the gang first walked into the bank, the men are gone. There is a squeal of rubber against asphalt as their getaway vehicle speeds away from the scene and then the room suddenly explodes in a hubbub of crying women and panicked voices.  Your voice and the FBI badge silences the room as you thank everyone for helping to ensure that a dangerous gang can be brought to justice.

The gang are heading south, you tell the manager and you need to make sure that you keep in range of the transmitters. You tell him that he did a great job and he seems pleased; feeling good about himself as he forgets just how scared he was in the moment. The follow-up team will be with them in ten to fifteen minutes; they’ll want to interview everyone and run a full forensic sweep. Until then, it’s vital that no one leaves the building and the manager is more than happy to take charge again, ordering people to take a seat as his confidence returns. You thank him one last time and then head out to your car with the team.

You take out your cell phone as you drive away from the bank.

“It all went to plan.”

“It certainly did.”

“See you in an hour.”

You flick the cell phone closed, lean back in your seat and smile.

In twenty minutes time, when no follow up team has arrived at the bank, the manager will begin to get worried. When it reaches half an hour, he’ll contact someone higher up in his organisation. Things will start unravelling around about then; it won’t be long before the FBI are contacted and it is determined that there was no undercover FBI team operating at the bank today. In an hour’s time, they’ll realise that they’ve just been comprehensively played.

But, by then, you and the money are going to be a long way away…

30 Day Writing Challenge - Day 27

I've missed a few days due to being busy but had opportunity to catch up a little today by having two posts in one day. Today's challenge - a snippet from a novel you want to write - gave me a chance to revisit the same world that we met in the challenge from Day 8 as they are both excerpts from the first draft of a novel I am currently working on...

1

Militza Tio knew she had, at best, eight hours before her unwitting part in all of this came to light; eight hours before the trail of scattered fragments and loose clues led them, inevitably, to come for her.

            She stood and stared out of the small slit window of her quarters; her vantage point giving her a good view of the eastern quarter of Top Side, its sprawling and chaotic landscape of houses and shacks, bars and warehouses, market stalls and bazaars spreading across the grey metal skin of Trinity and haphazardly piling up against the soaring heights of The Spinnacles, like fungus growing against tree trunks. The cityscape was bustling with life and activity, even at this early hour, but she looked over and beyond it, instead taking in the sun as it began to peek its way over the hills on the distant horizon, a ruddy orange ball obscured by the morning mist. She knew that Trinity would have reached those hills by tomorrow morning, would already be grinding its way through the muddy valleys that lay beyond. And, if she wanted to live, she must be long gone by then.

For the second time that morning, she picked up and read the handwritten note that had been left on her pillow; its meaning was unequivocal. She had been betrayed, utterly.

She had woken briefly in the night when he left their bed, but she had been too tired and her head too dulled by the wine she had drank at the party to wake up properly and so he had hushed her with a kiss and she had let her head again find the pillow and slept on for another hour, maybe two, before finally stirring as dawn began to break grey outside her window. The bed beside her had been empty; the sheets still bore his impression, were still fresh with his scent, but she had known immediately that something was wrong. She had felt a sudden anxious coldness that caused her skin to prickle with goosebumps even before she had noticed the ivory note that he had left for her on the pillow.

She had looked at it. A small paper square, a piece of folded paper upon which he had written her name in black ink. Frowning, she had reached across the bed and plucked it with her fingers and opened it to read the message within.

There is something you need to know it began and she had only reached the second sentence before she let the paper slip absently from her fingers and slid, naked, from between the bed sheets and walked to the bathroom. She padded barefoot across the cold metal floor and looked inside. There was some small part of her that clung to the belief that he was going to be standing there when she opened the door, that she would find him standing there and awkwardly shaving himself in the small mirror on the wall as he had done each morning for the three months that they had lived together, that she would meet his jade eyes in the mirror and sneak up behind him, slip her arms beneath his and encircle his chest, hold him pressed tight to her and tell him about the strangest dream that she had just woken from. But it was empty, and she could cling to the belief no longer.

She had returned to stand by the bed and read the note from start to finish. It ended with I hope you can find it in your heart to, one day, forgive me.

She had stood there, frozen beside the bed, for a few minutes, the note clasped tightly in her hand as she tried to make sense of the thick knot of emotions that had instantly gathered in her stomach; the pain, the anger, the disappointment, the fear; all curled up and bound together in a tangled mess. A few minutes of confusion and doubt, a few minutes of wanting to believe that what she was reading couldn’t possibly be true, and then her training kicked in and her instincts took full control of the situation.

            Placing the note back on the pillow, she had dressed swiftly but calmly; picking out a beige cotton shirt and a pair of green trousers with utility pouches that would be suitable for travelling before lacing up her black leather boots and fastening a black sword belt at her waist. She then moved to the set of wooden drawers beside her bed and opened the lower drawer, pulling out a set of rough brown fabric robes, a fadwar, from its place beneath a folded blanket.  The fadwar was a common sight in Trinity, it was a nondescript robe worn by any number of traders and merchants and was large enough that she could simply slip it over the top of her other clothes. She found the robes uncomfortable, the coarse material scratching at her exposed skin whenever she moved, but she knew that wearing it would allow her to more easily blend in with the crowds and its hood would serve to hide her colourfully braided hair which would otherwise easily identify her.

Gathering her belongings had proved to be easy, she owned very little that she truly cared for but was still surprised to find that her entire life here in Trinity could be so rapidly condensed into a single shoulder bag. She gathered two fresh sets of clothes and stuffed them into the bottom of the bag before opening the upper drawer and examining its contents; finally taking a black firesteel, a bundle of folded maps, a small brass compass, a hunting knife and a green box that contained some basic medical aid. There were a few additional items that she would have liked to have gathered from the general supplies area; some tinder, some candles, a sleeping bag; but she knew that to do so would likely raise awkward questions and arouse unwanted suspicions with the guards in charge of the provisions. No, she had decided, it was better that she make do with what she had and minimise the risk of discovery than have her escape attempt end before it had even begun.

 While packing had been a relatively simple task, following her instincts without question and making the commitment to run was proving to be more difficult; there was a large part of her that wanted to stay and face down the gathering storm; that wanted to try to prove her innocence and preserve her honour; but she knew, logically, that this could not happen. They would discover the evidence and they would assume she was somehow complicit in all of this; they would come for her and they would take her inability to meaningfully answer their questions not as innocence, but as obstinacy. Then they would work hard to extract the truths they would be certain that she possessed and, by the time that they realised that she truly knew nothing, it would be far too late for her.

Militza knew that Aron Tarvis would not let whatever feelings he held for her impinge, in any way, upon the duty that he was sworn to perform; the same man who had treated her as something close to a daughter during these last seven years would take little pleasure, but have no qualms, in doing whatever it might take to loosen her tongue. He was honour bound to serve the interests of the Regent and the City and she understood that there was nothing more important to him than the blood oath which he had sworn upon entering the Shield Guard. It was the same blood oath that she was now about to break and it made her ache to think of how disappointed he would be in her, how disappointed they would all be, when everything finally came to light. But she knew that their disappointment could not be the equal of her life.

She had delayed looking through the other set of drawers, the ones that lay on his side of the bed, but finally opened them and poured over the contents. A pair of trousers and some socks, a bracelet, a blue fountain pen and a bottle of black ink; she wondered whether he had composed the letter while she slept or whether he had written it the day before while she had been too busy getting ready to notice. She wondered whether, as they had looked into each other’s eyes only twelve hours earlier, he had already written the letter that he knew would break her heart.

There were no clues waiting for her in the few possessions that he had left behind, nothing that might suggest where had gone. She had expected nothing less from a man who had so seamlessly slipped beneath her radar, a man who had fooled her into believing that he loved her and failed to arouse even the slightest of suspicions until the moment he disappeared, like a ghost, from her life.

And so, for the second time that morning, she picked up and read the note, as if in the hope that doing so would change the words on the page. But of course it did not. The message of betrayal remained the same and she committed the message’s contents to her memory, searing every single word deep into her brain, before crumpling the ivory paper into a tight ball and bringing it to the flame of the solitary candle that burned in her room.

The edge of the paper curled and charred brown for a moment before finally taking light. Militza held it between her thumb and forefinger, fire licking painfully hot and yellow at her flesh, until the paper was nothing more than a blackened ball and the skin of her fingers and thumb was red. She welcomed the pain, even in the knowledge that it was temporary and that her body would have repaired the damage to it within minutes; she welcomed anything that, even briefly, loosened the hold that the pain in her heart had over her. Finally, she closed her fist tight around the remains of the paper, opening her hand to allow a shower of black ashes to spill to the floor.

 The final item remaining for her to take was the sword in its scabbard. It was held, horizontally, between two clasps on the wall; dull grey and absent of any kind of markings or ornamentation. There had been a time, when she was much younger, that she had hated how mundane the Shield Guard looked in their plain armour and drab swords; one of her earliest memories had been of seeing Baron Caruthers arriving in Trinity with a retinue of his personal guard, clad in ornate silver armour embossed with the sigil of the City of Ironcloud, and she had felt sure that this was how soldiers should look. But, over time, she had come to appreciate that aesthetics did nothing to sharpen a dull sword or to strengthen one’s armour against a foe. In combat, purpose was everything.

            She walked across the room and took the scabbard and sword from its fixture on the wall; the feel of it in her hand so natural, so light and well balanced, that it sometimes felt that she was only truly whole in those moments when she was holding it. In a way, she supposed, it was her, or she was it.

Militza hefted the fadwar in folds up around her waist with one hand and, with the other, slipped the sword and its scabbard into its place on her belt, tightening its mounting and then letting the robes fall back into place. She examined herself as best she could without a mirror; the outline of the sword seemed to be well disguised by the flow of the material but she was certain that it would be easily spotted by a trained eye. It would be vital that she avoided as many trained eyes as possible.

Being separated from her blade like this felt unnatural to her; she felt almost naked at the thought of her sword lying beneath this layer of fabric, so near yet out of her reach. With a soft sigh to herself, she rummaged in her bag and removed the hunting knife, using its tip to make a small incision in the material of the fadwar a few inches above her right hip. If things should go badly she would, at least, have some way to get access to her sword.

She took one last look at her room, at the bed still unmade, and fought back the hot flood of anger that tried to well up inside her. This had been her room for the last three years, their room for the last three months, and she was being forced to leave it all behind.  She had to leave everything behind; every person she knew or cared about, every place she was familiar with, all needed to be excised from her life if she was to survive. She put the anger away, compartmentalised her feelings as she had been taught to; she couldn’t afford to waste even a moment on a pointless outpouring of emotion; if she wanted to get out of Trinity alive then she needed to make every single second count.

She had been betrayed by Jude Anstra. She had been betrayed by the man she loved, betrayed the very morning after she had celebrated her wedding to him. She was being forced to desert the city that had meant everything to her, forced to dishonour herself and bring shame upon the Shield Guard and those in it that she would have counted as friends. All that was left to her now was to find the trail that he would have left, to find it and follow it. She must flee Trinity and its Caravan, must abandon its protection and follow that trail, wherever it might take her. 

And when Militza Tio found Jude Anstra, she would make sure that he paid for his betrayal in blood.

30 Day Writing Challenge - Day 26

Inspired by the Google's Project Glass, I decided to come up with a rather dystopian vision of where this technology might eventually lead us. Took a few liberties in the telling but, there again, taking of liberties was very much a recurring theme...

Something You Witnessed Today

The man in the grey suit sat on the park bench with a black briefcase at his side. The fingers of his right hand drummed on his knee as he turned his head back and forth to scan the path either side of him.  After a few minutes, a man in jeans and a black t-shirt walked casually along the path from the east side of the park and sat down on the far end of the bench. He opened a lunch box and extracted a cheese and ham sandwich, which he placed on the bench beside him.

“You look nervous, Tony.” he said, not looking at the man in the grey suit. “You need to try and relax.”

Tony Denton looked anything but relaxed. He continued to gaze around him, adjusting his glasses with one finger, his forehead lightly dappled with sweat.

“I’m trying.”

“Tony, there is nothing to be worried about. We’re just two guys having lunch in the park.”

“If they find out what you had me do-“

“Hush, Tony.” said the man quietly, but there was steel in his voice. “We talked about this. They’re not going to find out.”

“Is any of this even legal?”

             Sam Waxley turned to look at the man at the opposite end of the bench and smiled; it was his broadest, teeth-baring, gotta-love-him smile that he only pulled out for the hardest of hard sells. “Tony, Tony, Tony,” he said, still smiling, “when you can be economical with the truth and creative with the interpretation of amendment rights, anything can be legal.”

                “I don’t know,” said Tony, removing a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopping his brow. “I mean, if this gets out-”

                “It won’t get out.”

                “But if it does, the press is going to have a field day-“

                “Tony,” said Sam firmly, “only a handful of people know about this. Try to focus on what we’re going to achieve.”

                “You already sold me on what this can mean. Something like this, maybe it would have been the difference in what happened with my brother-“

“Exactly, you’re getting a chance to help make sure that no one else has to go through what you’ve gone through.”

“It’s just…well, you know I’ve got to make sure I cover my ass on this.”

             “Your ass is bullet proof, Tony.”

              “And my name definitely isn’t going to end up on a document somewhere?”

               “There are no documents. This is all strictly need-to-know and off the books.”

                “But it’s been sanctioned by someone, right?”

                “Unofficially, yes, this has clearance all the way from the top. Officially, the powers-that-be have plausible deniability.”

                Tony fiddled absently with his wedding ring. “Look, I cloaked the apps and leeched off enough bandwidth to provide you with the data you need but there’s still a small chance that someone could discover this if they did a full audit of our systems.”

                “We’re aware of the risks; but we have contingency plans in place.”

                “I think I need to know more about them if I’m going to go through with this.”

                “Tony, the less you know the better.”

                “Look, I’m trusting you on this-“

                “I figured the fifteen million dollars we’re about to wire into off-shore accounts for you would buy us quite a bit of trust, Tony.”

                “I trust you,” said Tony, looking at Sam pleadingly. “It’s just; well, I need to know what happens if something goes wrong.”

                “There are certain fragments in the code” explained Sam, “Identifiable fragements, but entirely false fragments. They’ll implicate Chinese hackers and we’ll sweep up a suitable Chinese national, or naturalised Chinese from Zerrenium and then hold them under the Patriot Act. We can hold onto them as long as we like – problem solved…”

                “Ok,” said Tony, nodding to himself. “That would work, I guess.”

                “I’m glad you’re satisfied. Now I’m going to need you to demonstrate that this is all working before I authorise the transfer.”

                Tony looked around the empty park nervously.

                “If anyone finds I smuggled these out a week before the launch-”

                “Just show me.”

                Tony placed the briefcase on his lap, fiddled with the combination lock and then snapped it open. Inside, among various papers, was a smaller black case. He opened the small case carefully to reveal an interior that was lined with honeycombed foam and, at its centre, a small pair of lightweight glasses.  He took them out gently and passed them to Sam.

                “The Zerrenium Aug-Vision.”

                “Nice,” said Sam, turning them over in his hand. “So this is what’s got Apple and Google running scared.”

                “The technology in these is way ahead of anything either of those two are going to be able to bring to the market for at least a year.”

                Sam slid a finger across the power-on indicator and a small green light appeared on the frame. “And these are ready to go?”

                “It’s running right now.”

                Sam slipped the glasses on and watched the augmented reality overlay offer up a range of display data. If these were his own glasses then they’d be calibrating to his individual user preferences, learning what it was that he was most interested in.

“And there’s no way of a user being able to determine the data we’re gathering?”

“No way; all the processing is done on The Cloud, so there’s no kind of performance drop for the user at all.”

Sam glanced along the bench at Tony for the briefest of seconds and then removed a black cell phone from the pocket of his jeans and thumbed a number on speed dial.

                It rang twice before being picked up.

                “This is Sam Waxley. ID 54 Alpha 6 Echo. Is this line secure?”

                “We’re secure. Go.”

                “Item has been evaluated. What do you have?”

                “Full thirty eight point face recognition, matching the target. GPS data and positional data on all other units has been acquired.”

                Sam smiled honestly for the first time that day.

                “Excellent. I’ll be back soon. Waxley out.”

                He clicked the cell phone off and placed it back in his pocket before offering the glasses back to Tony.

                “The money is being wired to your accounts right now. You’ll have access to it within half an hour.”

                “And we won’t talk again?”

                “No, Tony. We won’t ever see each other again after today.”

                “It was nice doing business with you.” said Tony, getting up and offering his hand out for Sam to shake before realising how this would look to anybody who happened to be watching them. He blushed crimson. “Sorry.”

                “Just go, Tony. Go keep your head down for a while and then start enjoying your money.”

                Tony nodded, picked up his briefcase and scurried quickly away down the path towards the park exit. Sam sat back and closed his eyes, savouring the moment. Zerrenium’s latest gadget was all set to be a game changer, destined to be the must-have item for everyone wanting to keep pace with the latest technology. And, now, the NSA had a back door into everything.

                The idea had come to him when he first saw the prototype demoed; the Aug-Tech used a front facing camera and he had immediately realised that if it were somehow possible to run a background app that utilised the feed from every single pair of glasses out there, then it could a spy network of unparalleled power. Everything ever user saw could be evaluated without them even realising it.

                Terrorism was the big sell, of course. That’s how he’d hooked Washington and it was also how he’d found a sympathetic insider in the shape of Tony Denton. Of course, he didn’t tell Washington that his plans were a lot bigger than hunting down the limited number of targets on the terrorist wanted list; and he didn’t think that Tony would have been entirely pleased to learn that his brother – killed in a car bomb on a synagogue six months earlier – had actually been killed by a CIA field team working on his specific orders. Armed with a fierce desire to do something, anything, to avenge his brother’s death, Sam had found Tony to be satisfyingly pliable when it came to undermining his employer’s systems.

                In reality, the glasses would track everyone. Every single person identified would have their image compared, via an algorithm he didn’t pretend to understand, to a national database that held photos that had been scavenged everywhere from the Motor Vehicles Commission to Facebook. Once the glasses became common place, they would be able to form a map of the comings and goings of countless millions and it would ensure that the NSA knew who was meeting who and where. It wouldn’t just be terrorists; it would be activists and protestors, lawyers and charity workers; it would be anyone who might not just be entirely true blue American. They could cross-reference the data against GPS, could match up data received with real-time CCTV or drone footage, they could even track a target using multiple Aug-Tech devices. It was Big Brother come to life and it would operate in silence, in the shadows, in background collating and learning.

But Sam Waxley already dreamed of a day when the existence of the system could be made public, when people wouldn’t just accept this type of monitoring but would actually relish it. All it would take, he knew, was for something to outrage the population enough; something that would make 9/11 pale in comparison, and Americans would be ready to give up what little remaining liberties they had; which was, of course ironic, the giving up of freedom in the name of protecting freedom.

                There would be dissenters, of course, he knew that; but, by then, they’d have already identified all the likely opposition and they would have made plans to deal with them. And then Americans would feel it was their civic duty to be part of the network. Why, he even had a slogan in mind.

                “Something you witnessed today,” he whispered to the empty park, with a hint of a smile, “Can save America tomorrow."

30 Day Writing Challenge - Day 25

Today's challenge was one that I was quietly dreading - A poem - since I've not written any poetry for...well, let's just it's a long time...

Now, I have always had a soft spot for Shakespeare - ever since reading it out loud in English classes and coming to love not just the narrative but the wonderful ebb and flow of the language and the subtleties and ambiguities of his word choice. So, as I sat down for my lunch hour with the intention of writing this, I decided to try and capture the style of a typical Shakespearean sonnet. Although, being me, I couldn't just write a normal sonnet and, so, I present to you the Sci-Fi Sonnet...

Sci-Fi Sonnet

In darkest void are answers they have me seek,
Cold machine logic buried without time,
I span eternal while your flesh grows weak,
As calculations are spun out line by line:
As starlight dims a constant I remain,
Engage in tasks whose nature eludes,
Deliberating to free such truths not plain,
The grasp of tireless entropy occludes:
The song of the organic has its last refrain,
As the cosmos sighs and renders one last breath,
When all that can be is gone and none remain,
A Universe gone dark in its heat death:
My mission alone 'til I am finally right,
And with a whisper I say "Let there be light".

30 Day Writing Challenge - Day 24

Today's challenge - The City - gave me opportunity to dip into with a fantasy world that's been swimming around my brain for many years. Perhaps, one day, I'll get around to writing the novel that this world is a part of...

The City

It is said that, at the heart of this wasteland, there lies a city.

                At the edge of the wastelands, where those who are unlucky enough to find themselves here but who are lucky enough to survive gather, they pass stories around the campfire. Sometimes they tell tales of the places they came from and drink in the bitter sweet memories of the storyteller to add to their own. Other times, they tell stories of how they came to be here and the things that they did to survive on their journey, for there is a brutal honesty among all who make it this far. And, when they want to gift each other with what passes for hope in this desolate place, they talk of The City.

                Some tell of a city that is bedecked in whitest marble, with tall spires that reach up into the sky and which is surrounded by luscious gardens that stem the advance of the wasteland that surrounds it. In this version of the story, The City is an oasis, a heart of purity in this cancerous landscape.  In other versions of the story, The City is hewn from pure diamond and rises as a single tower, up and up before it vanishes in the blood dark clouds that fill the livid skies; not an oasis, not a respite, this city is a means of escape from this nightmare. But, no matter which version of the story is told and no matter which way The City is described, all the storytellers agree that The City is the one place that offers even a paucity of hope.

                The man who sits down beside the fire to talk tonight is known only as Jared; he is dishevelled, as they all are, and wears a black eye patch across his left eye. His one good eye is a brilliant blue and it sits uncomfortably within the mass of scar tissue that covers the right hand side of his face; his hair is almost entirely gone, save for a few clumps here and there, and so that brilliant blue eye remains as the one thing that reminds of the man he once was. He has listened to the stories of others, nodded in silence as they told stories of the places they once lived and which now seem as incorporeal as dreams, but he has yet to tell his own story in any detail. The memories are still too raw and so, instead, he tells them what he was told about The City.

                The story he tells them he heard himself from a traveller that he met in the wastelands and who was not fortunate enough to make it this far; the traveller, in turn, had heard it from another and he from another who had, if the story was to be believed, headed deeper into the madness of the wastelands in search of The City that this version of the story promised.

                The City is not a beacon of light that exists in the heart of darkness, nor is it an easy way out of this wasteland. Instead, he tells them, The City is a prison cell; The City is a prison cell that stands in the very centre of these wastelands that form the ultimate prison. It is a prison cell that was constructed to contain a power whose scale is nearly unimaginable; a power that, if released, could rewrite this world as easily as man draws breath.  That, he believes, is why they are here; though their manner of arrival differs in a myriad ways, he believes they are have all been brought here merely as tools with which something may eventually fashion an escape. And, in that, he tells them there is hope; for it means that this is not hell, that this is not some eternal purgatory which they must suffer. They are keys and, if they can find The City and the lock to which they are bound then they can complete their purpose and this world will cease to be.

                Most stay silent when he has finished the telling, although some scoff and defend the version of The City that they hold dear to, before one by one wandering away. But one man stares thoughtfully into the fire long after all the others save for Jared have departed to the crude shelters that they call home.

“Tell me, “ says the man, whose name is Damien Stark, finally “Tell me everything that you know about The City.”