The first thing she saw was the waveform skyline of an unfamiliar city rising over a black dashboard. In the darkness of the cab the red glow of the taximeter attracted her attention next, and if she was reading it correctly she had thus far slept through 87 dollars worth of rented road. Anticipating having to pay such a bill, she patted down every inch of the leather upholstery for her purse, then swept her hands through the dark space above the floorboard. It was nowhere to be found. When had she gotten in a cab, anyway, and where on earth was she? Out of the window she saw the suspension cables of a bridge whipping by, and a wide void underneath that she assumed was a river. The taxi had crossed the high point of the bridge moments ago, and the shift in gravity had been enough to stir her awake. Now it was all downhill into the city.

Given the mysterious circumstances, she was relieved to feel the rectangular outline of her cell phone in her pocket. Due to the tightness of her pants she had to lift off the seat and form her index and middle finger into a pincer to extract it. It was her new ‘Eos’ smartphone, a thin rectangle of aluminum and glass which connected her to everyone and everything else, more or less at all times. Her father had given it to her yesterday for an early 19th birthday, since the actual day would arrive when she’d be away at college. Eos phones were all white or black, but he had somehow modified the aluminum frame to be orange, her favorite color. It was a especially extravagant gift for a man like him, which he had begged off by saying it doubled as a going-away present.

All of this was perfectly memorable to her, so it was especially strange that she couldn’t remember her own name. Her birthday was in September, she knew, and that Eos was the personification of dawn. Her father, her birthday, her phone; her other memories seemed intact enough. She checked her head for injuries, recalling how amnesia happened in old cartoons, and took the opportunity to brush her wavy red hair away from her eyes. She remembered putting on the beige pants and the cream-colored sweater that morning, then spending a bittersweet day with a friend in preparation for the new lives that were respectively in front of them. Outside of a shoe store they had traded slippery promises to remain in touch and then parted ways. The leather boots she’d bought then were on her feet, unbroken and stiff.

Whatever happened when you couldn’t make the fare for a taxi wasn’t something she was eager to discover. Did the driver take you back where you came? Even in the best-case scenario it was bound to be painfully awkward. She decided her situation was enough out of her control to call someone for help. Any one of her friends or relatives would rush over to… wherever she was. It definitely wasn’t New York, whose skyline she knew well. The city was too bright, too dense, and too glassy-futuristic to be anywhere in Europe or the United States. She could only guess that it was one of those comparatively newer Oriental metropolises.

She opened her phone’s contact list and was dismayed to see that it had been tampered with. In lieu of friends, family, and Chinese takeout, the months of the year were listed:

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

October

November

December

She cursed herself for never committing her contact phone numbers to memory—not even her parents. It’d never been an issue before. And furthermore why—whoever did this to her—why did he omit September? At least she appeared to have Internet access, so she could contact someone that way. A quick review of her home screen indicated that her phone had been factory reset. Worse than a factory reset, because there were no social media, web browsing, or email applications installed. The orange Eos phone was definitely hers, and might even be the only orange Eos in existence, but nothing else about it was familiar. The application store was missing, so she couldn’t think of a quick way of redownloading her missing tools. She couldn’t even tell what time it was, since there was something wrong with the clock application. It was dark out.

“Hey, um, where are we going?” she asked the driver, leaning forward to hear the reply and get a better look at him. So far she’d only seen the shoulder of his gray blazer. He was a Caucasian—as in someone from the Caucusus—with mussy salt-and-pepper hair and thick bushy eyebrows. A little paunch strained the buttons on his white shirt, and he had a tuft of wiry, exposed chest hair near his neck. If she passed him on the street she would probably look at something else.

“Evening miss September. I’m taking you to the Yellow Team ingress.” he said, in an accent which she couldn’t place but felt was on the Russian side of central Asia. His English was fine in spite of his accent, though it sounded like it shouldn’t be.

Was September her name? It was missing from the contact list. That was absurd, though; how was it possible she knew exactly eleven other people, all named after months, and no one else? It suddenly struck her that she didn’t know anyone’s name. Her parents, her friends, her acquaintances and enemies—she could recall every detail of them, except for that one thing.

“My name is—I mean, how do you know my name?” she said. The cabbie laughed.

“Because you’re an Enduser. By the way, I can only answer three questions.”

Before she thought about it, she blurted out:

“Huh, why?”

The cabbie sighed with disappointment.

“Because those are the rules.” he said, and shrugged. September was flabbergasted when she realized she’d already asked three questions, and more than a little put off at the arbitrary nature of it all.

“You’re not going to tell me anything else?” she said, incredulous.

The cabbie shrugged and pulled out his own well-worn phone, which was nicked and riven with spidery cracks, and checked it with a nod of his head. He slyly tilted it towards her, intending for her to see something on the screen. She saw a scroll from Natter, a social network which imposed a 144-character limit on outgoing messages. She’d know it anywhere. Natter had recently displaced Twitter by virtue of being a quantitatively superior product. All of the tweets (a genericized trademark, Natter claimed) on the screen had a common tag: her ‘name.’

“#September is the cutest #Enduser!”

“cabbie cheats and #september blows the third question, instant karma”

“Driver for #september giving her too much help. Was the same with #april and #may. dirty old men”

“i want to fuck #september”

And so on in the familiar, often grammatically challenged, and occasionally vulgar patter of self-expression unique to consequence-free discourse. The Internet hadn’t created it (there were probably insulting cave paintings) but it had ubiquitized it. The cabbie slipped the phone back into the inside pocket of his blazer. It was then she noticed the small camera installed in the dome light, trained on the back seat. She turned away from it, self-conscious that her actions were being broadcast. Was she on a reality show? The cab turned away from downtown and into a neighborhood of tightly packed bungalow-style houses. She was a suburbanite by birthright, but had always romanticized what it might be like to live inside the city. Before everyone sprawled out, they lived on blocks like the ones passing by her window, with their small lawns and small houses and large families. The cab rolled to a stop.

“We’re here.” the driver said.

“I… lost my purse.” she said, the redness rising in her cheeks. She blushed easily, and her pale skin did nothing to hide it.

“Don’t worry about it. The name’s Harry, by the way. Good luck, miss September.” the man said, and handed her a business card with his phone number on it. She didn’t like how ‘Miss September’ made it sound like she won a pageant, so she made an off-the-cuff and unexpectedly significant pronouncement:

“Call me Ember.” she said.

#

She stepped out of the yellow cab and looked inside once more by the glow of the dome light for anything she might be forgetting. The driver gave her a kindly nod and pulled away. As she watched his car recede into the cool night she saw that the fresh asphalt was slick with a recent rain, making a double-parade of reflected streetlights down the center. No one else was around. She looked down and nudged a few blades of the damp and freshly cut grass with her brown leather boots. It was a nice little neighborhood for the inner city. Gentrified, she imagined they would call it.

She had no money, no way of contacting her loved ones, no identification, it was nighttime, and she was in an unfamiliar and possibly foreign city. None of that was good, but at least it was all explicable, even if most of the explanations were somewhat disturbing. What really stuck in her mind were the matters that defied her imagination: why couldn’t she remember the last few hours, or her name, and what was going on with the camera, the ‘rules’, and the Natter traffic? She sat down on the curb and put her hands on her knees, and rested her head on them. This had always been her go-to pose in times of stress.

A boy emerged from the house behind her who was about her age, or just a little older. She was tall for a girl and he had about an inch on her, with an athletic build that pointed to a more strenuous extracurricular than her own sport of swimming. He wore a dark green button-down shirt and his blue jeans were held up by an ostentatious silver buckle. A pair of cowboy boots and a head of short black hair rounded out the ensemble. He looked down at her with a surprised and confused expression whose genuineness she intuitively felt. Ember looked up at him curiously, glad at least for the company.

“Hey,” he said, looking up and down the empty streets warily, as if he were stranded in a bad neighborhood and was worried about the prospect of aggressive youths. His attitude did nothing to make her feel safer. “‘Ember’, is that right?”

“H-how did you know?” she said suspiciously. She’d assigned herself the nickname moments ago.

“You’re all over the news. I’ll explain, but not out here. The short version is that I’m July and we’re in the same boat.” he said curtly, and offered her his hand to help her up, only to withdraw it slowly when Ember scrambled to her feet by herself. She took a step back and regarded him. The thought crossed her mind that the boy might be related to what was happening to her, or even in on it, since she’d been delivered to his doorstep. It didn’t feel that way, though. His surprise at seeing her was too genuine. She trusted her instinct that his claim to be a fellow victim was true. She gave him a nod after a spell of consideration and he quickly led her up along the concrete path.

“Is this your house?” she asked as she passed through the threshold.

“Cabbie said it was, if I heard him right. Never been here before, though.” July said as he walked into the living room.

It was tiny, musty place, full of old furniture and a lifetime of tchotchkes. In the living room there was one bookshelf-sized cabinet packed from top to bottom with porcelain angels on glass shelves. Though the room was small there were clocks everywhere on the walls and every flat surface, some in motion and others stilled from neglect. A stately grandfather clock presided over them all from the floor, its own pendulum motionless. It reminded her of her grandparents’ house. A pair of black wire-rim glasses rested on the coffee table, an ideal place to get at them for reading. A brick of a remote lay nearby in case one wanted to watch television from the comfort of the floral print couch.

July gestured to the couch, inviting her to take a seat. She went instead to the grandfather clock and opened on the door on the front. Her own grandfather had one similar to it, although the circle on the face of this one was divided into tenths and not twelfths.

July picked up an ancient remote and clicked down a button on it. The four-legged CRT television against the wall hummed to life to display a series of commercials which resembled television versions of website banner ads, and were every bit as low rent as their online counterparts. July went to the window and cracked the blinds open to peer through, making himself into the portrait of a wary criminal on the lam. “They’ll get back to the news soon enough.”

“Excuse me but, where exactly is ‘this place’?” Ember said.

“Ain’t no point in telling you.” July looked off.

“Oh come on. You can’t just say that.”

July took a deep breath and considered.

“Alright. But you gotta promise not to laugh.”

She nodded. He stepped in front of the window and pointed outward to the skyline: “This here’s another dimension or something. Noumea. S’what I heard on the news.”

Ember bit both her lips and kept her expression studiously neutral, in accordance with her promise, but there was no doubt about what she was suppressing.

“Your face’ll freeze that way. You’re just like my little sister.”

“She must be really cool.”

“She’s nine, by the way.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, though.”

“Huh?”

“That her face froze.” Ember said with a grin. July sniffed, shook his head, and appraised her for a second. Then he nodded.

“Yep.” he said.

Something July was carrying began to emit a tinny barking sound. Judging from his reaction he was as unclear on the meaning of that particular noise as she was.

“So are we in Narnia, or.” Ember said, deadpanning it.

“Nah. Seems regular enough. Probably a big put on for a television show.”

“Oh, what’s an Enduser?” Ember asked, a long overdue question. July furrowed his brow and took a moment to compose an answer. It went unsaid, for just as he opened his lips to speak a black arrow crashed through the window between them carrying a dervish of glass and wood in its wake. Time appeared to dilate as she saw the strike rend the couch apart and send both of them to the ground in a shock wave full of floral-print cloth and clockwork.

Ember pushed aside the bits of metal and glass and wood that lay atop her, finding herself weakened but miraculously unharmed. The few clocks that had survived the blast were all stopped now. She imagined it would have given her a few real injuries, but she just felt a bit sluggish. Even that feeling was fading as she unearthed herself from the pile of debris. The living room had been obliterated by the little tornado, and the ensuing explosion hadn’t helped what was left. There was nothing remaining of the grandfather clock except splinters, and the only thing in the room which had been totally spared was the glass case full of tacky angels. Little fires were everywhere feeding on the wooden fragments, a promising start for an impending inferno. She coughed and struggled to her feet. Worrisomely, July was nowhere to be seen. A moment ago he had been standing on the other side of a quaint living room, now a rubble-strewn disaster area. The search for him was made difficult by the thick, stinging smoke hanging in the air. She decided he must have made it out, and if that was true she felt a stab of indignance that he abandoned her in a pile of burning wreckage.

The vibrating alarm of the phone in her pocket didn’t seem like something she should be paying attention to, so she ignored it and exited the house via the new garage-sized hole connecting the living room to the front lawn. The area outside was dotted with debris and little burning fires as if a terrorist’s bomb had gone off, or a gas line had exploded. She had no firsthand experiences with either of these, but the sanitized coverage she’d seen of the same sorts of incidents recalled similar imagery to mind. A gas explosion was the most likely explanation, she concluded, quietly damning her vivid memory of the black arrow to the fate of post-traumatic fabulism. She found July standing on the lawn out front amid the wreckage, but when he saw he saw her he pushed back a warding hand. She blinked and narrowed her eyes in doubt about whether she was seeing things correctly: in his other hand he wielded what appeared to be a matte white sword with a fluorescent green edge. It looked like a toy of a medieval knight’s sword, and yet from the way he held it, and the weight with which it moved, there was something threatening about it. Her mouth hung open in surprise.

“Ember!” he yelled, “Get away!”

She wasn’t immediately sure what she was getting away from, and so, naturally figuring it was the burning house, she ran towards him. From the look on his face she gathered that it wasn’t what he wanted from her. It was then she spotted a figure standing on a rooftop across the street, holding what appeared to be a takedown recurve bow whose twin limbs shone a vibrant pink. The figure holding the bow was that of a slim girl with her hair in pigtails, on the short side, but she was too much in shadow to tell any more about. Ember squinted her eyes, and saw that the girl was about to dry fire the weapon. She wasn’t worried by the empty shot until, closer to full draw, an arrow seemed to materialize in it from nothing.

The girl whipped the deadly shaft down towards Ember’s heart without hesitation. A split second after leaving the bow a vortex of grass cuttings and droplets of water formed in the arrow’s wake. July leapt in front of her and knocked the arrow off to the side with a well timed swing of his toy sword. She had no time to express her surprise before a hot wind from behind her and a torrent of concrete shards knocked her head-over heels and rolled her around in the following vortex. When she regained her senses she felt lucky that her neck hadn’t been snapped. In the haze resulting from the strike she lost track of July. Bits of grass were plastered over her damp skin and clothes.

Now she understood which way she was supposed to run. She got to her feet and fled as fast as she could while she was still obscured from the shooter by the dust and mist. She hid behind one of the neighborhood houses and heard another crash of an explosion come from the street. The vibration alarm was now going off continuously, and she went to silence it before it gave away her position.

Immediately after she unlocked the device a frantic little fairy jumped out from the screen and stood upon it like a ticked-off doll on an illuminated runway. The fae girl (woman, rather, if she were full sized) had four translucent, orange obtuse triangles spread out behind her like wings, and she stamped around and pouted at her for a moment. She was blonde, wore a fancy braid, and was dressed in a white Greek-style chiton robe which cut off at her mid-thigh like a Halloween costume for adults. Ember was sure the high heeled sandals were an anachronism as well. The criss-crossing brown leather straps climbed up her little calves, stopping only short of her knee.

“Finally,” the fairy said, “I’m SOFI, your Agent. Would you like help?”

Ember nodded stiffly, her eyes wide with childlike terror. Her ability to question events had been short circuited.

“Your, ahem, opponent, May, has decided to rush. She’s more powerful than you, so there’s no shame in hightailing it. Success is possible but it might not be all you dreamt of. So, are you in or out?” SOFI said, hands on her little hips. July wasn’t a friend of hers, but he had saved her life. If there was something she could do for him—though it was hard to imagine what—she would. After mulling the point over for a bit, Ember gave SOFI a quick nod.

“I’m… in!” Ember stuttered out, pinching her eyes shut with fear as house vibrated with another distant blast. When she opened them again SOFI grinned and gave her a smile, and dove back into the surface of the phone as a dolphin into water. SOFI had disappeared, even from the screen, and Ember could only hear her voice.

“Then in accordance with the terms of the License Agreement, we draw the Cellblade!” SOFI yelled, her voice eerily doubled by a duplicated echo from speaker. A pattern appeared on the screen. A thumb sized squashed oval at the bottom, then one long one up the center which bisected it. “Draw it!” SOFI demanded. Ember shakily outlined the pattern and a metallic cross-hilt of a sword appeared jutting out of the top of her Eos, the handle protected by an ornate latticework of sugar maple leaves.

She instinctively seized the handle with her right hand and pulled, producing from her Eos, as if from a scabbard, a long orange blade with a phosphorescent double-edge which glowed brilliant yellow. It was impossible for the length of the phone to have concealed it. The broad blade was glassy and had the glow and appearance of a screen. To test it she whipped it across some nearby blades of grass and it easily severed them. No telling how sharp it was. The sword was unexpectedly light and easy to use, and the blade was longer than she expected of a one-handed weapon.

Now that she was similarly armed some imp in her spine was actually looking forward to getting back at their surprise attacker. Another crash behind her shook the ground she was sitting on, and freed dust and loose paint from the white clapboard siding to fall on her head.

The blade was easier to handle than she expected, although she doubted her ability to smack arrows out of the sky. She ran back towards where she’d left July, careful not to take the same way she came. A row of bushes afforded her some coverage as she sneaked around the attached garage to spy out into the street. July was already stretched out on the ground in the middle of the cracked asphalt road, his blade lying useless a few feet away from him. A distressingly long streak of crimson spread out on the pavement behind him.