A figure dressed in what seemed like rags, bent over at the waist, made its way along the walkway beside a small fragment of a pillar out in the wastelands. They had made some attempt to hide their mouth behind a kind of mask, which was really just a stained tea cloth wrapped around the face. They stumbled along the uneven poles that were the only support here, embedded into the surface of the pillar fragment. A few scant wires, occasionally broken, were the only handhold beside a plunge to an unseen and unknown destination in the mist. The figure tripped and suddenly seemed about to fall from its perch, and then raised its hands. The dull orange mist swirled as if pushed, and the figure was similarly repelled back into the structure behind it and away from the edge. Briefly, in the space that the repelling force had made in the mist, you could make out the silhouette of the whole pillar, such as it was: what amounted to a rock, somehow geometric in nature, floating unsupported in the mist, with a few frayed woven cables disappearing into the dull red mist. All around it, coming into view and disappearing through the mist was a forest of similar, larger shapes, all suspended in miraculous configurations, in near parallel. On some were the glittering lights of what may have been houses and walkways, but they were obscured by the omnipresent orange mist.

Also visible for a moment as the figure sagged against its rocky perch were its hands and arms: pale and thin, and on every surface of its body were bloody wounds with black cylindrical shapes in their centre, which to all intents appeared to have been impaled through the body. The figure caught its breath, winded by its contact with the pillar fragment, and then looked up and around at the forest of pillars that surrounded it, dim and shadowy in the mist’s light. Just visible ahead was the glimmering of a few more scant lights upon the surface of another pillar. The figure licked dry cracked lips, and then stood unsteadily. While there was a cable attaching the fragment somewhere, it was in the direction from which the figure had come, and ahead there was nothing, no bridge or span that joined this piece to the other pillars. At this, the figure didn’t seem to notice or care though, and stepped off the walkway and into space. Again the mist was suddenly caught by what looked like a pressure wave, originating this time at the figure’s legs and spreading in a conical manner, and the figure was suddenly thrust forward and off towards the nearest, much larger pillar. The figure seemed to hang there for a moment, in between the spaces of the pillars, before beginning to fall in parallel with the pillar. There was another pressure wave and the figure managed somehow to land against the surface of the larger stone-like structure with a dull whumph, their fingers hooked into a narrow ledge on the surface. Despite its skillful manoeuvres, the figure was obviously suffering and weak. Spying a ledge below it, the figure released its hold and then fell, releasing another wave of pressure as it approached the foothold, driving up a cloud of dust and mist that had settled on the ledge. Then the figure, after taking a moment to recover, began to make its way through the knee-deep layer of settled dust and mist, thick like some horrible grey-red snow on the walkway. They slowly dragged themselves over the surface of the pillar, towards the glimmering lights in the distance.

Su took a beer to the one person still in her small cafe.

“Hey doc, it’s getting late, you want anything?”

“Oh! –oh, sorry, sorry I was just going to order, just a semol bowl. Is it too late? Is that ok?”

“It's ok man,” Su placated the nervous man, “you might have to lock up after yourself though, I’m gonna wash up soon.”

“Oh that’s quite all right,”

The doctor, a bumbling young man with a set of glasses with a number of different apertures all raised up above his brow, was a man with the air of perpetual distraction. Even now he was returning to a book held open by his elbow while he sipped his beer with his left hand, his right hand fidgeting with a pen and paper. The man was writing while reading, thought Su to herself, shaking her head slightly. It wasn’t the same as writing and reading, he was literally writing as he read, his eyes moving over the page of his book as his hand moved over the surface of his paper. Was it the same thing? Was it a transcription? She doubted it, somehow. He was always a bit like that: playing two tracks at once. She wondered if what he was writing made any sense at all, were they notes? It was hard to tell.

She got to work on the bowl.

The figure stopped abruptly, sensing something approaching. Then they ducked and hid as best they could. Almost immediately another dark figure emerged from between the pillars, walking through the air on great cushions of repelled pressure, the mist swirling around its passage. This figure was dressed sharply in a long coat, around its legs and arms and head large tubular bracelets hung, hovering just off the skin. The face of this figure was covered in a mask. They stopped and cocked their head, then gradually began to move towards the pillar the hidden figure was sequestered on. The hunter effortlessly adjusted its orientation to appear to stand –in mid-air– perpendicular to the pillar. The waves of the mist that descended from them were the only indication they were suspending themselves by some application of force. The hunter slowly turned, A display of unconcerned strength, compared to their weak and injured prey. Abruptly, the hunter raised its hands and a strange distortion moved through the air and rapidly outward from their body. The mist and dust stopped moving in the wake of the distortion’s effect. At the same time, the hidden figure jumped up from their hiding place and raised their left arm. A similar distortion emerged from its body and spread outward, encountering the opposing field at a third of the distance. An enormous crack echoed through the pillars, and the dust and mist shook with the encounter. At the border of their interaction, the mist shook violently. The formerly hidden figure, gasping and sweating, their sweat mixed with dripping blood, raised their right hand. The hunter abruptly attempted to swerve and duck behind the pillar, but the finger of the figure dressed in rags locked itself to the other’s position. There was a flash of light, so abrupt and immediate that it was as if the universe had blinked. There was no sound except, perhaps, the dull bass of a sudden vacuum opening and then being filled with surrounding air. The field that the hunter had set up receded, decaying and disappearing. The reason for this was that through their mask and head, slightly off centre, was a perfect cylindrical hole, bubbling and gushing blood at its edges. The hunter began to fall, slightly towards the pillar, but the figure on the surface, staggering and about to fall, rallied themself and pushed out with their left hand again. The body of the hunter was pushed away – thrown like some ball on a pool table, and spinning slowly through the swirling mist, it travelled in an arc traced by drops of blood, into the space between the enormous trunks, and out of sight through the mist. The one remaining figure, dressed in rags, waited for a few moments, and then resumed their stumbling passage forward through the dense stuff on the walkway as best they could, towards the flickering lights that were now recognisable as the definite shapes of houses and buildings clustered against the surface of a few pillars in a vague unplanned settlement linked together with walkways and boardwalks. The figure seemed to gather together what remained of their strength, and repelled off from its current position, releasing a cloud of dust and mist, setting out on a final desperate sprint.

“What was that?” said Su,

“Huh, oh probably some lightning?” said the doc, sounding uncertain.

“There’s no storms predicted, and didn’t the flash come after the sound?”

“Hmmm how peculiar.” The doc closed his book and looked out the tiny window in the wall of the cafe. There was nothing visible through the dull red mist. And then, doc cocked his head to the side, and through the window and the mists, a dark shadow limped along the walkway, staggering under the few odd outdoor lights.

“I think there’s someone out there,” said the doc.

“Who?”

“I don’t think it’s someone from around here.”

The doc sensed the vague pressure of capacitance spikes charging. He glanced at Su, who glanced at him without comment, obviously the source of the energy buildup. A tension gripped the air inside the cafe.

The figure staggered up to the cafe and leant against the door frame, their face still in shadow, and then they moved - or more accurately fell - inside, pushing the door with them and catching themselves on their feet just in time. The bell tinkled. The doc gave a sharp intake of breath, but the figure didn’t notice. The mist and dust flew in after them, and then they stumbled forward once more and the door swung shut with another tinkle of the bell behind them. The sounds of their footsteps, uneven and wet, were the only things that broke the silence. The figure approached the bar to the kitchen and landed heavily on a stool.

“Please… w...water,” the voice crackled, dry as a chip.

Su looked the figure up and down for a moment, but when nothing else happened, she went to a cistern and pulled a glass of clear water. She moved back to the figure and placed it down in front of them. She raised an eyebrow as the figure began to fall backward with a show of tremendous grace, before she realised what was happening.

“Shit!”

She reached out and grabbed the figure’s clothes. This changed the direction of their fall, but only towards the bar instead of away from it, while they simultaneously began to slip out of the stool they were seated on.

“Doc!” Su said sharply to the other person in the bar, who was watching without having moved.

“Oh! –oh, yes!” he ran over and grabbed the figure under his armpits and then dragged him backwards, toppling over the stool as he did so. He laid the figure out on the ground.

“Shit, they fell unconscious sitting up!” said Su, coming around from behind the bar.

The doc was checking breathing and pulse.

“Faint, very weak. There’s a lot of blood. Can’t tell where it’s coming from yet”

Su leant over the body and sniffed.

“Some serious capacitive discharge. Recent, too.” she said. She and Doc looked at each other and then down at the figure, and then Su seemed to come to a decision. “Doc, we’re taking our guest upstairs. I think they might have a dog on their tail.”

Together they quickly picked the figure up by the feet and under their arms and then lifted the body awkwardly through the kitchen and out and up the narrow stairs at the back and onto the second floor, before dumping them on a bed.

Su turned on the lights.

“My god” she whispered. Once again the arm of the figure had come to be revealed, its multitude of impalations, both large and small, becoming visible. The doc reached out with the sudden severity of clinical practice and ripped the figure’s make-shift rags off their body. Su didn’t say anything this time. The shock was beyond her. What lay before them was unmistakably the body of a young man – or at least what had once been a man – but through it, around it and upon it were innumerable capacitive spikes, field coils, and rods, as if he had been attacked by swarms of some peculiar mechanical insect. Where biology ended and implant began was hard to tell, so densely were they crowded all across his flesh, even through his very bones. It was, by any standard, even those who already had spikes, a horrific feat of surgical engineering. That they were visible, that they had broken through the skin, was downright disturbing. There were seemingly impossible numbers of these black shapes, some of which were crusted over, and some of which had been, it could be seen, recently re-opened by what appeared to be the heat the spikes had generated themselves. Su had heard of overclocking before, even seen some instances of it, but this was insane, even here in no-man’s land it usually amounted to one or two blisters. This was something mad, the very skin itself had been torn through and burnt. This person should be long dead. The spikes themselves, unlike her own, were embedded in places where vital organs could –no– should definitely have been! Su swallowed back bile, and then she suddenly hissed and sharply bent lower, getting a better look. The doctor turned, his eyebrows raised. “It might just be my lucky day.” said Su, pointing at one of the capactivite spikes embedded in the body. The doctor frowned and looked closely with his glasses.

“Oh my” he said, “that is something else”

On the surface of the capacitive spike was a circle and within it a stylized symbol that read ‘a-g’.

The doctor clicked his tongue.

“Well, well, fate does work in mysterious ways” he said. “Be that as it may, he can’t tell us anything like this, nor if he is dead... and I assume you want to speak to him?” he said half-rhetorically to Su, who was tugging her lip “but this is far beyond my abilities, so I can’t guarantee any results. I’m going to go and get my medical equipment, I recommend that you make it look like we’re closed.”

Su nodded. “Be careful on your return trip.” she said in warning and handed over the key.

“Yes, yes I think you may be right”.

Su went downstairs and flicked off the main lights, locked the door and quickly removed a few things from the tables. She couldn’t think straight. She felt like she was forgetting something. She stood still for a few moments, then walked briskly to the kitchen, and turned off the cooker.

The doc meanwhile went out the back and descended by a thin ladder to the layer of walkways running alongside the pillar below the cafe. He moved along at a brisk walk with the occasional step of a jog interspersed. Panicking and running never helped, he found. He pulled his mask over his face to block the mist and headed off. The houses were clustered on the surface of the pillar like barnacles, fixed in whatever way they could be maintained. There was no planning in the wastelands, but people decided where to live in relation to others– and in relation to the physical possibility of constructing something on the mostly vertical faces of the pillars. More often than not people wanted to be close to each other and to avoid the risks of being separated, but no man’s land attracted all sorts. Between these two opposed forces, of the desire to be with people, and the desire for space, a strange aggregate of building choices had been made – a real vernacular. The doc moved quickly along rope walkways and narrow boards and down ladders and stairways made of rods stuck into the pillar towards his place, avoiding the wider lit walkways and the houses of others. Every building was built to suit its owner’s tastes, but more often than not all of them employed the poor materials available here. Thin but strong steel tubing made from the refined metallic content of the dust (which was very high), or a paste-like concrete substance made of the compressed raw dust. Onto these structures made from dust more dust settled in a seeming endless steam. This reality meant that the windows were often small, and the houses either light and seeming to be attached to the pillar, or thick and lumpy and embedded into the surface owing their foothold to a crack or a hole or a ledge in the incredibly hard surfaces of the pillars. Their exteriors, hidden behind perpetual mist and dust, were not intended to be seen from this perspective, and so they appeared as unconcerned, chaotic shapes – and every one of them, looming out of the mist, made the doc start and lick his lips nervously. He got to his house, a ramshackle construction itself, and fumbled with his keys before heading inside, flicking on a light as he did so. Dust moved across his floor as he went in. He didn’t take off his coat and boots at the landing as he normally would and instead headed straight to his workshop, a small surgery in his house. He grabbed the tools he needed and shoved them in a large bag and then went to the fridge, somewhat out of place in this room and pulled out a number of different translucent drips, which he similarly shoved into the bag. The doc looked around and then nodded and headed back to Su and her mysterious visitor.

“Here, hold this up” the doc gave Su a drip, and she picked a picture off the wall and hung the drip on the hook behind it. The doc struggled to put the catheter into the man’s veins, clicking his tongue in frustration. “He’s wildly dehydrated.” he said, before finally saying “ah!” with his eyes sparkling as the needle successfully found a vein. “Can we have the heat on in here?” he said as he hurriedly fed the catheter into the vein and extracted the needle before attaching the drip. Su flicked on her small heater. “I’m going to try and improve the condition of his skin, disinfect it and then patch it up with some spray on stuff.” he said, taking his scissors and snipping away at the clothing of the man, though it was nearly as difficult to tell which pieces were torn anyway. Each section of cloth he extracted he threw in a pile in Su’s waste basket. Then the doc carefully positioned the arms and legs of the man before rolling him over and getting the back off. With each reveal, Su found herself further and further beyond the bounds of what she assumed was possible to do with a human body. The sheer number of capacitance spikes, their dull black heads peering from gaping wounds all over his flesh, and others still visible under the skin, made her shiver with disgust. Her own spikes, by no means a meagre spread, were comparatively small, the worst of which was the chain of them that ran up either side of her spine. Comparatively, this guy’s body was like a pincushion.

As the doctor began to clean the sores surrounding the capacitive spikes, there was a creak from downstairs. They both looked at each other. “Did you lock the door?” the Doc whispered

“Yes, as much as that might mean”

“Go check anyway”

“sure” Su got up and looked at herself.

“Is there any blood on me?” she whispered.

“I can’t see any,” the doctor whispered back after carefully inspecting her.

The sound of footsteps. Su whipped around and opened the door onto the landing and then briskly strode down the stairs. Halfway down she gave a convincing little shout.

“What the fuck!?”

“Ah, excuse me,” said the masked figure standing in the cafe, looking at the knocked over chair by the counter.

“I was wondering if your establishment might be open”

“I think it’s pretty clearly not, and I’m pretty sure my door was locked too!”

“Oh, it wasn’t when I tried it.” the masked figure said ambiguously.

“Well what do you want to eat? I’m trying to close. Unless you’re a thief, but you seem a bit well dressed for that.” Su had decided to bluff. Stranger things had happened in no-man’s land after all.

“Oh, ah, no that’s…. Actually that would be quite something, would you mind?”

“It’ll have to be take-away, I do actually plan on going to bed. Is a semol bowl ok?”

“Yes, thank you.” The masked man picked up the stool and stood it up before sitting on it.

Su tried to calm her nervous heart and think. She’d have to put on a show. Maybe it would also stop them from being heard upstairs, depending on what the doc was doing. He was probably listening in anyway. She wondered what kind of spikes this masked man had. She couldn’t feel any charge, but he might have passive sensory kinds like her own, that would pick up heartbeats. She’d have to make some noise. She quickly began to flick on the lights and the cooking appliances. She opened the fridge door for a bit too long picking out ingredients, and it began to hum. She smiled and then started to cook for the man.

He watched her intently as she did so.

“I’m actually searching for an escapee, have you seen him?”

She was surprised. Straight to the point. And this fucker was from AG. But she had to stay calm: this man seemed to be buying her innocent act to some degree. She raised an eyebrow but kept on cooking.

“Seen him? What does he look like?”

“Oh, about this high,” the man indicated, “dressed in rags, you wouldn’t have missed him”

“Can’t say I have, but I’d be happy to put in a notice with pest control, that is if you’ve actually got a reason to keep him under lock and key. This is the wasteland you know, not really cable city.”

“Oh there’s definitely a reason. He is a most dangerous criminal… but no. No I think this is a matter that we will handle ourselves.”

“We?” she said, stopping and looking over at the man. He cocked his head.

“Yes, me and my partners.”

“Oh, well I see. Fair warning though, no company’s ever been able to keep the wastelands. The neighbourhood association won’t stand for you to get too busy around here.”

“I am well aware. It is not our intention to try. We merely wish to seek out our asset.” asset thought Su angrily “If you have any information, we have ample resources to reward you with.”

“Well, if you leave a method to communicate I’ll do my best to let you know if I see anyone meeting that… description… but I’m afraid quite a few people around here wear rags. Comes with the territory”

“Hmmm. one other thing, have you heard any loud sounds this evening?”

“Loud sounds?”

“Yes, I thought I heard something earlier”

“Oh, is that so?...” Su considered her options, but made it look like she was reflecting, or at least, she hoped she did. “Yes, come to think of it”

The man straightened. Damn it, he wasn’t just testing me, she thought. Caught in her own bluff!

“I thought I heard some thunder,” she said, “but there wasn’t any storm predicted.”

“No, no there wasn’t.” said the man. “Did you see any flashing lights, did you hear where it might have come from?”

“No, I’m afraid I was in the back washing up at the time. It wasn’t that long ago though, so if it has something to do with that ‘escapee’ of yours, maybe he’s close. I can’t say I care much if you catch him or not at this point, but if that was a field…” she shook her head and smiled “I don’t envy you if you catch up with him.”

The man looked up at her and smiled

“Be careful not to get on the wrong side of the neighbourhood association either,” she said and smiled, “dinner’s ready” she said, and handed him a plastic container with his semol bowl neatly stacked inside.

“Oh” he said “ah thank you” he got up off the stool and handed a few coins over onto the counter. More than enough. “and thank you for your time”

“That’s no problem at all”

Su followed him to the door and then locked it again. This time she used the deadlock. Harder, but not impossible for someone with spikes – at least if they were trying to be subtle. If they weren’t, then a door wasn’t going to do much good. Then she made a show of cleaning the kitchen and the tables. The man stood outside on the verandah looking into the misty void, and then turned and walked a distance along the boardwalk, the sheets of steel underfoot creaking as he went. He stopped a few yards away, leaning by a column that held the cables running between houses. The single light attached to the pole illuminated him in the dark. He was eating with his back turned to her, his mask flipped around to face her. She shivered. He was still watching her, she was sure.

She went upstairs, where the doctor was sitting, absolutely still, hardly breathing. She picked a set of peculiar looking clothes out of her closet and threw them to him, and pulled out a cloak that she wrapped over the body of the man on her bed. It wasn’t much by the way of sensory field protection, but it was the best she could do – some field diffusion garb. She picked up her laundry basket and went downstairs and started washing her clothes on the loudest setting she could find on her washing machine. I hope this doesn’t damage them. she thought. Sure enough, soon she felt the tingling of a sensory field scan. She felt another field scan come from some other location– one of her neighbours, it seemed, wondering who was disturbing the quiet. The masked man seemed to get the message and didn’t probe any harder. She winced and hoped that it had been enough. The neighbourhood association and pest control would think twice if one of the company’s teams wanted to attack a specific place, even if it was a membership house.

She kept watch at the door at the top of the stairs as the doctor silently got back to work wearing a headlamp underneath the field jamming garments. He tried to keep sound to an absolute minimum. Every so often he would indicate with his hands to ask if the stranger was still watching. Each time she would remove the dampers on her passive spikes and among the sensations of the world that greeted her, she could faintly feel the pressure of someone watching, the curious non-sensation of someone using their own passive sensors instead of the usual vague outward pressure most field generators exhibited. If she put noise out she could block it, but she had no reason to do that, and it would simply invite suspicion.

Finally, the man seemed to think he’d wasted his time and he ran off into the mist and the dust.

“Want me to cast a net, see if he’s really gone?”

“No, it’s alright, I think he was probably just testing the waters, and yours is the only place that looks like it might be an option, from the sound of it, he didn’t have much to go on.”

“Yeah,”

Then the doc and her laughed under their breath nervously, fear at the edges of their eyes as they tried to remain as quiet as possible.

She resumed her watch at the top of the stairs while the doc got to work.

He woke up.

His bones were like fragile little toothpicks, and every nerve in his body seemed to scream all at once. He gritted his teeth and lay back, then gasped and inhaled. He’d been out for a long time. He looked around at the room he was in. It was cluttered but neat, a small 4 by 3 room. He vaguely recalled passing out in a cafe. At least he was conscious and able to move, which was a state he wouldn’t be in if they had caught him. If they ever did, he would either be dead or permanently paralyzed for safety’s sake. He didn’t imagine they’d leave him capable of doing anything after the damage he’d already caused.

He steeled himself and slowly began to move the parts of his body, one at a time. Somebody had fixed him up, he could feel an artificial surface covering the wounds where he’d burned through his skin over the course of his rather dramatic resignation. He’d been fixed up well. He bent his neck and looked down at himself, his chest was visible and showed the splotches of some kind of artificial skin pasted over the worst of his wounds. Pretty high quality. He slowly moved to the side of the bed, each centimeter excruciating, but slowly getting less and less unexpected. He prepared himself, breathing in and out and then swung himself slowly up and into a sitting position. He got a better look at the room and everything around him. It was a kind of eclectic design sensibility that inspired the place. Images and objects with no use, no purpose and no business being where they were, little trinkets and strange sculptures, it was like the nest of some curious collector. He absently pulled the catheter out of his veins and pressed down on the bead of blood that began to make its way out of his arm. Then he pulled the second catheter inserted into his urethra out, much less pleasant as experiences went, but that was to be expected. He wasn’t a stranger to pain. He tested his feet and his legs and slowly began to move them back and forward, tensing and stretching his muscles, and returning them to use. They shook and trembled, but slowly obeyed him. He slowly made his way to his feet, careful to keep a hand on the bedpost. He shivered, his nakedness leaving him feeling strangely vulnerable. Once he was up he went to the closet and grabbed pants and a jacket and sat back down on the bed and dressed himself in them slowly, avoiding touching his tender skin as much as possible, grimacing when the fabric brushed it. Then he silently stood up again, his agility returning to him, and made his way out the door. He waited at the top of the stairs, listening.

Nothing.

He made his way down the stairs, carefully watching and listening at each step, but everything seemed curiously empty. He sighed and then made his way downstairs and into the shop. It was the cafe he had passed out in. Of this he was sure. Made sense, he thought – to a certain extent. He went to the kitchen and grabbed a bag before loading it up with some provisions. He worked quickly and efficiently. He remained in the role of the ‘escapee’, or perhaps the ‘runaway’ and while his mind was not yet clear, he continued on with the goal he had embedded in his mind before he fell unconscious: to get as far the hell away from cable city as he could.

He grabbed a tea towel and made a makeshift mask which he draped over his mouth and nose, and then made his way to the door. It was locked with a series of deadbolts which he unlocked, charging his field just the tiniest bit and skillfully throwing the catched and bolts. It made it seem as if the door might as well just have had a handle. Then he moved out, holding the bell so it didn’t tinkle, out into the mist and the dust.

He was halfway past the cable pole when a voice called out to him.

“You know, there’s nothing out there”

He instinctively raised his hand pointed back towards the source of the voice.

It was the woman. The cafe proprietress, he vaguely recalled. She was the last thing he’d seen before falling unconscious. She had her mask pulled down, revealing her face. He did not yet perform the courtesy of the same act.

“You don't’ have to point that thing at me” she said. Then she pulled a mask out of a bag. It was a mask with a hole through it. The mask he’d destroyed, along with its owner.

“I see very well that I shouldn’t get in your way, but I also thought I might take a punt on you not being a raving psychopath, and try for a conversation…” she stopped

“About what?” his voice sounded like a trembling little lamb, he thought. How foolish he sounded.

“See if I could trust you, you know.” He stared. She said it with the air of frivolity, without suspicion in her eyes. She laughed at his expression of shock. “You know, I’ll believe you if you tell me the truth” she said, and then she doubled over again, laughing at her own joke. He couldn’t stop a stray snort escaping his nose. He lowered his arm. He’d be dead by a long way if she’d wanted to do anything to him anyway, he thought. In all likelihood she was the one who’d tended to his wounds –remarkably well, he had to admit.

“That mask” he said “what else did you see”

“Something quite unbelievable”

“And what was that?”

She looked down at the walkway, and then past it to the pillar it was attached to. “Throughout all of my life, from the day I was born until now, the pillars have always felt like the foundation of my life. I’m something of an amateur archaeologist you know… well, I mean that’s why so many come out to the waste’s isn’t it. Find a relic, get rich selling it on to the man. But what I’m trying to say is that I know.” she paused “I know how long it takes to break down the structure of the pillars. They are nearly as hard as the relics themselves. I have spent hours and hours drilling into the damn things.” She paused again. “They’re unbelievably durable.”

“And?”

“And what I saw was a hole, a perfect hole, the size of this one.” she raised up the mask and indicated the empty space in it ‘cut through not one pillar, but the one behind that, and the one behind that and so on - for about ten kilometers. ten kilometers of dust and mist, yes, but also of some of the hardest material I know, shot through in an instant.”

“An instant?”

“Well, we analysed it a bit. The doc and me. We decided it wasn’t done slowly. And the rest of his body” she shook the mask again “seemed to indicate a rather rapid change of state from living to dead”

“It was quick, which is probably more than he deserved,” he said.

A silence hung about with the mist.

“Some of the people that come to the sticks are archaeologists. Or more like scavengers I suppose, but there’s also the other lot – people who didn’t come to seek their fortune, but to get away from the strings”

“The strings?”

“From cable city and the ones that run it.”

“Ah.” he turned and took a step away.

“There’s nothing else out here you know. This is the wasteland. Whatever you were running from, whatever was chasing you, it’s quite unlikely that it will be able to come out here in force without sacrificing some advantage in the city.”

He kept walking

“you are being highly illogical.” She said and the man stopped. “You think you are running away, and so you are just continuing on running. But you don’t necessarily have to, you know. And if you do keep going, well, there is nothing that way, there are no more settlements, there is nothing but the pillars. You do not have the strength to survive as a nomad out there. You will die… not to mention, you’re wearing my goddam clothes.”

“Sorry.”

“It may seem to you to be too good to be true to have been picked up be someone magnanimous enough to help, and you’re right. I need some help, and I think you can give it to me. You know why I’m out here right?”

He looked at her

“I’m an opportunist. And I smell opportunity”

He watched the mist for a while, and then walked back towards the woman. She didn’t back away, but she gulped as he approached and stood right before her. She flinched when he reached out and took the mask from her hands.

“You don’t mean washing dishes do you”

“No.” then she paused “though I do also need someone to help wash dishes, really”

He snorted again and then turned the mask in his hands.

“Linear Field,” he said ambiguously, and then paused. “Linear field was the name of my project. It’s a fairly simple thing to understand. The fields we generate, fed through capacitance spikes until they reach potential, are then distributed by coils and rods – but their efficacy is the inverse square of distance from the body. Essentially the influence of the field is like an expanding sphere, much as light and other forms of radiation are. This is where linear field differs. The theory aligns matter within a small area, and then piggybacks on the alignment to generate a field that maintains strength for an indefinite length.” he looked at the woman, who was looking at him as if to say why tell me all this? “Don’t worry, it’s hardly a secret, the theory has been around for a long time – it’s the practicality of it that’s the hard bit. It was this idea, or rather the realisation of this idea that I devoted my life to, and the company I worked for was my home, my life, all my friends worked for them, the section of the city I lived in was owned by them. I was owned by them. In exchange I did research and experiments that, I’m sure, made them richer and more powerful than ever… and eventually I succeeded” he paused for a moment and held up the mask as proof.

“So why run?”

“You know... they foster experimental subjects not on the basis of aptitude, but on the basis of how easy they will be to remove from the picture once research is complete. I volunteered myself for my own research, and I suppose I thought it was because I would know it the best that I was selected. But in reality it was because I fulfilled the all important retirement clause for any experimental field development.” he paused “I mean to say experimental weapon development”

“You didn’t know you were making a weapon?”

“I didn’t understand I was making them a weapon. It is the strangest thing to be obsessed with an idea, or perhaps they fostered that obsession too. You ignore all sorts of possibilities. But once they become obvious to you, you cannot go back nor ignore or neglect them. They are the reality of the situation.”

“And so when you found out, you ran?”

He smiled. “Well, when I found out they were going to kill me, the weapon didn’t bother me too much. It was quite useful really. And I managed to destroy a fair amount of the institute and all the data on my project first. I am, after all, a quite selfish individual.”

“Hmm, I think self-preservation is an acceptable excuse for being a little selfish”

“Thank you”

“My name is Su by the way.”

“Miha”

“So… Miha. why did you tell me all this?”

“You said you would trust me if I told you the truth. But it is really more of a warning than anything. It might not be safe for me to stay anywhere. It might not be safe for me to exist.”

They stood for a moment

“and I doubt I can truly be of help to you”

“Hmmm well… maybe let’s see. I haven’t asked you yet, so don’t give me your answer yet either.”

“I’d kind of prefer to know where I stand”

“You’re standing in the wasteland on the edge of the world, and below you and to your side is an endless pit of pillars with no one living on them, no one to help you and nothing to live off. How about, before I ask you what I want, you recover a bit. If you wash dishes for a while I’ll consider your debt paid off – though what the doc might ask for his care I have no idea. You may be washing dishes until you die. And then you can decide, once you’ve heard my offer, whether you want to help me.”

Miha stood there for a moment, and looked out at the mist and the dust.

“It’s not like I have an awful lot of options, is it”

“Well, I think you have quite a few options, it’s not like I’m holding you hostage, but this is the only option that doesn’t end with your death in three days.”

He glanced at her

“From dehydration or starvation or infection, whichever comes first I imagine”

“That’s an interesting way of not holding someone hostage”

“I’m not the one who came to the wasteland unprepared.”

“Alright then. I can wash dishes”

“Very good, that’s what I like to hear. You can start tomorrow.” Su smiled and then walked back into the shop. “Actually, maybe more like a week, I don’t want any fake skin in the soup, you know?”

Miha watched Su go. Something welled up within him, from deep in his diaphragm, it rose to his throat, pulsing there, bleeding out through his lips and eyelids. It stung, whatever it was. He supposed that his life being saved had made him careless. Revealing his life’s work like that. He felt a sudden jubilant change in his disposition. The lump in his throat disappeared, replaced by a ridiculous lightness. He felt quite delirious. Was he, perhaps, drugged? He couldn’t be sure, but it definitely felt like it. A life spent inside a lab had hardly prepared him for the world.