2. Vesper
VESPER
I’m woken up after what feels like only a few hours of sleep. Dox is standing in my doorway, her expression hard as she kicks at the cracked doorjamb with her worn boot.
“Get up,” she orders. “We’ve got new work.”
“Is it waking hour already?” I ask groggily, rubbing at my eyes. I look toward the window, but it does little good. The same light that filled the sky when I went to sleep still fills it now.
“No. It’s been three hours,” she replies before backing out of the room and thumping around in the apartment.
“Three hours?” I groan. “Why the fuck are you waking me up then?”
“I told you,” she shouts from the main area, “we got a job.”
Normally, I’d tell Dox to shove it and go back to sleep, but her tone has me shaking the sleep from my limbs and standing up to pull on my itchy pants again.
I’m yawning as I finally come from the room and try to wake up a little more.
She hands me a cup of caffeine water we’d traded a hell of a lot for, and ushers me to drink it.
That’s how I know it’s serious. We ration the caffeine water heavily.
“What the fuck is this job?” I ask, narrowing my eyes on her as I take a sip. The rich flavor of the crystallized plant fills my mouth, but it’s stale. As everything in this place is.
She hands me a piece of paper. “Black Spur Union. Courier Service. Pays very well.” She hums. “It mentions they’ll pay us with more fruit.”
Now that is a reason to wake up fully. More fruit? I’ll do some sketchy things for fruit.
“Did you get any sleep at all?” I ask her.
She grins. “No. I just got back from Trig’s flat before I found the job request slipped under our door.”
I shake my head. “You’re gonna regret that, Doxxie.”
“Nah,” she replies, waving away my words. “I’ll be fine. Besides, Trig did indeed do it for free, so I feel great.” She wiggles her eyebrows at me. “Finish that and we’ll head out. I’m gonna go clean up.”
The caffeine water isn’t exactly good, but I down the rest of it.
We waste nothing in Dross, and Dox had gone out of her way to make it for me.
The electrolyte caffeine crystals aren’t exactly hard to come by though.
It’s one of the things that comes from Luxe.
The gangs all take control of it once it comes through and mark the price up though so most people can’t afford it.
I guess the Ascendants want us to have enough energy to crawl our way into the Harrow Gates when they open.
They don’t much care if we starve otherwise.
It’s a failing on our part at that point, never mind the poison air, the insufferable heat, or the limited resources with overpopulation.
Not even fifteen minutes later, Dox is ready and we lock up our shitty apartment as we step over more Breathers to get back down to the street below.
“I don’t get it,” Dox says. It’s the same words she says when we encounter Breathers anywhere.
“What’s there to get?” I ask, saying my same answer. It’s like we’ve rehearsed this conversation a million times. “They don’t want to be here anymore, but they’re too afraid to kill themselves. Besides, I hear Softlock is a gentle way to go.”
“Gentle?” Dox says, wrinkling her nose up. “It shuts off all your senses. How is that gentle?”
I meet her eyes as I step over another Breather, a woman.
She stares up at the ceiling with blank eyes, the only movement from her body the rise and fall of her chest. It’s where the name comes from.
Their body shuts off completely except for the breathing.
At some point, even that will stop, and they’ll be just another resource.
It’s not a terrible way to go. You feel nothing, just the gentle relief of fading.
Once you try Softlock, there’s not really any going back.
“Sometimes, the suffering is too much for people. The skin is too sensitive. The smells are too much.” We step outside and I look up at the red sky and wrinkle my nose. “The sky is too bright. It’s easier to check out and feel nothing than to starve to death and be aware of it.”
“They should just go into the Harrow,” Dox argues. “At least they’d have a chance there.”
“Not everyone is a fighter, Doxxie,” I remind her.
We’ve seen plenty of people die. Surviving in Dross is a brutal fight, and sometimes, that fight is too much for any one person.
I can’t confidently say I’d have been able to do it thus far without Dox.
She’s the reason I keep fighting. That and pure spite.
I despise the Ascendants so much, I won’t give them the satisfaction of dying by their greed or entering the Harrow if I can avoid it.
“Good thing you and me aren’t like that,” she chirps. “I’d be lost without you.”
I grin. “Yeah, you would.”
She bumps her shoulder with mine. “Shut up, Hyena.”
The endearment hits me in the chest and reminds me of its source, just as it always does.
Dox doesn’t ever use it lightly, not when she knows where it comes from.
The tiny book is one of my most prized treasures.
It’s worn and falling apart despite my attempt to care for it.
Everything decays in Dross, no matter how you try to save it.
The little book is leatherbound, the initials A.A.
emblazoned on the front in worn gold. Astra Arcturus.
It’s the only thing I have left from my mother.
My mother died when I was only seven, but before that, she was no better than a Breather. Sick, mentally unwell, and living in a last life house. Somehow, she’d birthed me and I grew up there until I was strong enough to leave with Dox.
I don’t have many memories of my mother, only a vague blurry image of what she looked like. Luckily, my mother was an artist, and her journal is full of sketches and words. Self-portraits, sketches of people and creatures I’ve never seen, and one repeating sketch of a single man.
My father.
I only know this because there’s a letter written in the journal to me from before she grew unwell. She was still pregnant, still sane, as she wrote me a letter, she’d never know that I would be able to read.
My mother, Astra Arcturus, was Luxe-born.
Her journal is full of stories from the outer ring, sketches of the city she must have grown up in.
Among those sketches are pages she’d copied from books.
We don’t have them here in Dross, not that I’ve seen.
Any book is simply a recreation or some sought after treasure someone the likes of me hasn’t been privy to.
But in Luxe, books are readily available.
And my mother read them. She loved them.
And she particularly liked the books about animals that once existed beside humans.
There are many theories about our origins.
One is that humanity wasn’t born here in The Cradle, on the planetary rings we live on.
Humanity came from somewhere else, some world that once held wondrous creatures I have no name for.
But there’s one animal my mother seemed to like in particular.
She drew it over and over again, wrote down fact after fact beside the drawings.
The hyena.
It’s a strange, alien-looking creature. Too sloped at the shoulders, too short of face.
It looks like it shouldn’t make sense, but the way my mother repeatedly drew them endeared them to me.
Powerful creatures, intelligent, and matriarchal.
My mother was very insistent on reminding herself that they were ruled by the females.
It doesn’t work like that in Luxe. In Dross, it’s every human for themselves so no man rules entirely. There are women just as powerful because it’s about who is most willing to ruthlessly take what they want. In Luxe, the men rule regardless. Men like my father.
Eero Vox. High Reckoner. He’s important in Luxe, in charge of a sizable portion of it even, but I don’t exactly know what he does.
I do know I don’t like him. My mother’s letter said he betrayed her, and somehow, she got from Luxe down to Dross.
I’ve never met another Luxe-born here because they shouldn’t be able to travel backward.
Only Ascendants can. Even I know she should never have been here.
The small leatherbound journal rests in my right pocket. It goes with me everywhere. Just in case.
“You ready for this?” Dox asks, breaking me out of my musings.
“Yeah,” I reply, but I’m not sure if I am really.
I’ve had dealings with the Black Spur Union before, but not nearly as much as Dox has.
I tend to take jobs from the Lift Rats more often.
They don’t pay as well, but they’re consistent and I’ve never worried that they could take me out if I breathe wrong.
The Black Spur Union though is the worst of the worst. They have dealings with Luxe more than they deal with us Wastrels.
Anyone who works for Ascendants is dangerous.
We all know that. But the promise of fruit makes that danger worth it.
The Black Spur Union has many hubs, but their biggest one exists in our section of the ring. It’s why we chose this district, because the opportunities for jobs are higher here.
Their gates are imposing as we approach, patchworked together metal and old tech we have no name for or knowledge of how they work, just like a Harrow Gate.
We lost that knowledge long ago, sometime after it all stopped working.
It’s been at least a thousand years at this point.
If anyone knows what the machines are, they aren’t telling us.
So, just like us all, the Black Spur Union has recycled them to create their intimidating gates.
“Dox!” the guard says, grinning. “Back so soon?”
“We’ve been summoned,” Dox replies, producing the job letter.
The guard’s face changes when he sees it, his smile dropping immediately. “Oh. Good luck.”
Gone is the charming guard who apparently has a soft spot for my best friend. In his place is a man who now looks at us like we’re marching to our death.