Plains of Ion by Adam J Smith

Author:Adam J Smith [Smith, Adam J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-22T05:00:00+00:00

Sout

hside

Rohen was trapped. Perched southside of Bottom-Out, on the edge of the plains, with no real water service, and five minutes from the nearest water-butt, he was getting low. He thought of those who saved credits or else traded their time for a water condenser, and said “Fuck you and the DNA you rode in on. Fuck you and your privilege. Fuck your town. Fuck your city. Fuck the Matrons and fuck whoever had wanted my blood. Fuck my mothers and fathers and laboratory womb. Fuck this dance.”

Of course, no one could hear. Outside the window, heatwaves bloomed golden in the sun. Pawl, whose tattooist had probably been having a bad day when he wrote out his name above his eyebrow, was two hundred metres away. And beyond that; a concave façade of shack bungalows interconnected by a central courtyard, where Bevan, Grail and a few other old-timers lived.

He couldn’t be more disconnected if he tried.

It was the way he liked it.

Except now, it was a problem. The Matriarchs had officially pardoned him for Joe’s death, but he’d seen something in the faces of those who glared at him. Something that scared him. When he’d been punished for Georg’s death, it hadn’t even been close to this.

And now, when he walked the streets, two problems; those glares bore into him on every corner, because – and this was the second problem – their eyes were vacant when they first looked at his face, then down to his gimpy, limping leg, then back up to his face, where they saw the scrapes on his face, and then recognised him. His anonymity was gone. At least for now. “Fuck you, Joe. Fuck you, Elissa. Fuck you, leg.”

He limped across to his sink and turned the tap. The last of the water dribbled into his cup.

The head-height cupboard doors were all open, revealing empty water bottles and a full stock of tinned goods, courtesy of the city. A stack of disordered packets of dried food had been thrown into the back of another, and he looked at these, and slammed the door, and wondered again if maybe he should just live his life in the dorms like so many of his kin, all drained and sitting and waiting around for their turn to jump from the ledge of life, at least then there’d be canteen food cooked up.

“You’d fucking like that,” he said. No, you’d rather I jumped from sundown; oh what a mess those girls would have to clean up.

This was all Elissa’s fault. He ought to carry her to sundown and throw her from the top. He imagined her crumpled, bloody stain of splattered bones on the polished tile of the hacienda, and wiped sweat from his brow. Smelled the dense odour of his body sweat as he lifted his arm. If it hadn’t been for her, he could be standing beneath one of the city’s showers right now. In an apartment that overlooked this shit-hole, rather than being the one trodden on.

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