5. Vesper
VESPER
At the age of thirty-one, I’ve crawled through the gutters to survive. The biggest threat in Dross is starvation. Every day, people starve here, resorting to eating anything they can find. Sometimes, there was nothing. Sometimes, what you found belonged to someone else.
Eat or be eaten.
And sometimes, you’ve gotta fight to eat.
Anyone who makes it to adulthood in Dross has learned that lesson.
They’ve fought and scratched and clawed their way to this age, but unlike most, I’ve honed these skills.
Sure, I’m good at other stuff, but I’ve always been the real fighter between me and Dox.
She knows that. She’s the charisma between the two of us. But this isn’t a talking matter.
It’s a fighting one.
The leader launches himself forward at my jab, a large, sharpened pipe his weapon of choice.
I have my knife out before he’s even taken a step and launch forward to meet him.
The other goons stumble back away as I slam the knife home once, twice, three times in his gut before he can so much as raise his weapon.
His eyes widen as he looks down at his stomach in surprise, his blood staining his cotton clothing.
“You should’ve ignored daddy’s orders,” I whisper to him before I step back and he crumples to the ground. I grip my knife tight, my hand stained with blood as I turn to look at the other men. “Who’s next?”
They all rush me at once, understanding that they can’t take me on one on one.
Jokes on them still. I meant it when I said they should have brought more with them.
I dodge a sharpened metal blade and kick the legs out from under him.
He falls on the knife because he never prepared for the attack.
I watch as the blade jabs up through his chin and plunges through the top of his skull gruesomely, but I can’t spend much time analyzing it.
I’m spinning away from another pipe bat a second later.
“Ves!”
I launch myself backward and spin to grab the asshole advancing on Dox. I grab his face and twist, breaking his neck so fast it makes Dox gasp as the man slumps to the ground in front of her. I stand my ground and face the final three goons, raising my brow at them.
“You sure you wanna die for this?” I ask them.
They look at each other, as if talking silently between them, before they turn and start to sprint away.
“They’re gonna tell Orion where we are,” Dox warns.
“You’re right,” I say, picking up a fallen blade one of them had dropped. “We only need one to do that.”
I throw the blade and watch as it makes a satisfying thunk in the back of the right man.
The left one makes a shrill sound he should definitely be embarrassed by and starts to zigzag.
Like that would somehow stop me from hitting him.
The middle one trips over a piece of concrete in the road and falls on his own blade, hitting the ground with a grunt and then silence.
I snort at the absurdity of it. It must be hard to find good goons these days,
“Aren’t you going to hit him, too?”
I glance at her. “We’ll be in the Harrow Gate before they can amass anything large enough to take us down.” I watch as the last goon disappears around the corner. “Besides, I want Orion to know how close he was and that he still fucked up.”
Dox smiles and shakes her head. “You always were the poetic one.” She looks around at the five bodies. “Anything we need?”
I stare hungrily at the shirt the leader wears. It’s too big, but I can make something that would fit me with that. And it won’t itch.
“Yeah,” I say, reaching down to pull it off him. He’s heavier than expected, his dead weight making me grunt with effort as I roll him around until I get the shirt free. Dox takes only a few small trinkets, leaving clothing and weapons behind.
“Where did Oberon predict the gate opening?” I ask. I know it’s this district, but how far we have to go to make it is the question.
“We’ve got about two kilometers to get there,” Dox warns. “And apparently, just under two hours to get there at this point.”
I nod. “Guess we better move then.”
I take a step forward, prepared to head that direction, when I feel it. A soft vibration. So subtle at first, I almost miss it. On the second step, my ears pick up the gentle rumble.
“Is that—” Dox starts, her eyes widening.
“The thrusters,” I rasp. “Shit!”
At one time, there were thrusters all around the ring.
From what I understand, these thrusters were meant to keep the rings orbiting on time.
They only needed to come on every so often, the mechanisms so far apart, I’ve only heard them a handful of times throughout my life.
Most of the thrusters no longer work, but a few do, and when they come on, it’s spontaneous and out of time.
The fact that one is coming on now in this district means two things.
One: The gate will open sooner than we thought. We’ll have no way of knowing how much sooner.
Two: It’ll remain open less time than we thought. Which means we need to be closer to the front of the line if we’re going to get through.
“Move!” I shout, starting to sprint. “We don’t have much time.”
And if we miss it, we’re fucked.
Harrow Gates are as unpredictable as much as the thrusters are.
Sometimes, astronomers are close. Sometimes, they’re way off and no one is prepared for where they’ll show up.
Sometimes people have an hour to get through and other times, it’s less.
With the rumbling of the thruster, I realize just how off the Astronomer will be on his time.
At least he got the location right, I think as we sprint through the streets, joining the crowds rushing forward as the alarms start to blare.
The sirens are loud grainy things that are so shrill, they make my head hurt, and also somehow are deep enough to make my chest hurt at the same time.
The warning system isn’t something we created.
They’re just a remnant of our ancestors, one that mostly continues to work despite the decay.
Despite working, the sound has gotten increasingly garbled over the years, until the sound is this strange static.
As the sirens scream, more and more people pour from their apartments, from the alleys, all rushing to make it to the Harrow Gate in time.
“There they are,” someone shouts and I have enough time to glance behind me to see the survivor standing beside Orion. How the fuck did he get here so fast?
“Fuck!” I growl. “Keep moving! Don’t stop for anything!”
And when I say anything, I mean it. When people start falling down ahead of us and creating a barrier as they pile up, we don’t stop.
The people at the bottom are likely getting trampled, but it’s every man for himself right now.
I step on the pile and climb over it, adding my weight for a split second.
Dox does the same, though she winces when she steps on a face as she vaults over after me.
“Where do you think you’re going, V?” I hear Orion shout behind me. “You can’t escape me.”
“Watch me,” I grunt under my breath as we push ourselves harder. If we can just get to the gate line, Orion can’t touch us, not while the Ascendant Guards are there. They don’t tolerate any sort of drama around them. “Go, go, go!”
There’s always a line to get into the Harrow, a never-ending stream of people desperate for something better.
Air that doesn’t make you choke on it, food that doesn’t taste like ash, a chance to gain power.
Because of this, if we get there too late, we could be too far back in the line to go through.
There are only so many people they can push through within the time frame.
Though they form multiple lines, it doesn’t matter. We’re limited by our lack of speed.
As we slide into the coordinates, I get my first look at the Harrow Gate.
There are always two gates open at a time, one on each side of the ring.
Where this one is in district twenty, there should be a matching one on the other side in district seventy.
This one decided to appear where a building once stood.
I hope it didn’t have people in it, but that’s wishful thinking.
Of course there were people in it. I can see the pieces splattered over the machines and stone sucked into the massive arch, smashed together like some sort of grotesque art piece.
It doesn’t make sense if you just look at it, but that isn’t even the most impressive part of it.
While there are always remnants of old Harrow Gates in Dross, the inside of the arch is empty once the harrow closes.
This one, though? It’s lit up with bright swirling blue colors.
It’s so bright, it chases away the red wash of our dwarf star, painting the area blue in a way that highlights all the browns and muddy colors we wear.
It lights up faces and makes us all squint as we stare, enamored, at the sight before us.
“Get in line!” Dox growls, shoving me into the back of the right line.
Only then do I realize just how far back in the line we are.
“Fuck, Doxxie—” I start.
“Don’t,” she rasps, panting from our sprint. “We’re gonna make it.” She looks behind us at where Orion and the others slide to a stop. “We have to.”
I follow her gaze and meet the heated eyes of Orion. In them, I see the challenge. Slowly, he steps into line behind us.
There are two lines at this gate, but I’ve seen upwards of four lines before.
Because there are only two lines, we all crush together, separated only by a small barrier quickly put up by the Ascendant Guards.
Directly beside us, a man about our age stands, his eyes eagerly on the swirling blue before us.
In front of us, a woman and man wait. The woman clutches a baby, no older than a year, against her chest. The child is coughing painfully, hacking so loud, it echoes in my ears.
“If we don’t make it in there, we’re screwed,” I whisper to Dox.
“Yes, you are,” Orion rasps in my ear.