Prologue:
It has been two days since I stepped outside my home. After I watched the last of the meteors flying through the atmosphere - I think they were the last- I locked myself away. We wear sunglasses to protect our vision, and thick suits of foil and cotton woven together to keep the sun out. It is hot all the time, inside and outside, though I remember that breezes filtered ash and smoke through the bare bones of trees I cannot remember how they felt.
At night, what passes for night now, gangs of men and women roam the shells of towns and cities. I hide inside my cave, without the sun or the cold, and listen to the sickening howls of pain and pleasure that permeate my walls. I am not sure if they know I am here, wedged between our ripped up couch, and the china cabinet my mother loved so much. When it is nearly morning, in the half hour before the sun rises over the first of the horizon - left hand corner, sixty degree angle above the hill where the observatory is crushed - I move the chest of drawers away from the back door and run to the market.
Markets trade every morning, from two am to sunrise. There are three, maybe four hours in that time, and the canvas hooded mobile homes are rich with voices. This is the only time I leave my home, it is the only time we are safe from the sun and the gangs. The starts are no threat now, people whisper in little corners as their food is measured out in sacks. I watch a couple touch lightly, their fingertips brushing each other, and I can pick out their guardians, red and blue ties in the women's hair say they are Patriots. Being around Patriots is only safe in the market zones, where they are merely people, I have heard stories about the women's vicious snarls as they torture young victims in the name of a dying country. The men are coughing around blue lit pipes, the fumes curling above their noses and into the scent of the air.
I am quick to buy only what I need, food enough for a few more days and a flashlight with half full batteries. I cannot stand the light to be so bright as a full flashlight would be, instead I read with the bulb pushed centimetres from the page, always wary of fire. The flap-snap of canvas makes those around me look up, necks tense and straining against the instinct to run. The furthest caravan is rocking back and forth and Observatory Hill lightens to a dull pink. Behind me I hear a shout, a young woman knocks me sideways as she flies by, green ribbons streaming. As the end of her ribbon flicks into my eye, I can understand what the voice is calling; "Thief! Thief!" If she is caught, they will cut her hands from the base of her palm to the tip of her fingers, it will be months before she can use the hands again, if at all.
A small drop of blood tracks down my cheek from the corner of my eye and I turn back to my stall, wrapping my dented batteries in a tea towel. The man is shouting louder now, above the crowds surging displeasure. I hear a running commentary by a man two people from me; "She's at the base of the hill. Going up. What's that in her hair? Green? Ah, well. They always end this way, don't they? Bloody kids in their bloody street wars. Can't do anything with them." I think of my mother, locked in the basement of our family home. The ribbons she wore buried with her in the silence of the fourteenth year of the Great Wars. Green was her favourite colour, of the grass she remembered but couldn't see anymore. Naturalists die quickly, and often painfully, their desperate need to touch base with their Mother Earth ruining them entirely.
The batteries and flashlight in my pack, I begin to jog back home against the wave of angry men and women. A scream in the distance touches my ears as I reach my door and I am surprised she lasted so long. The image of my mother appears again, lit by sunlight, the ribbon around her neck burning to ash like a chain about her neck. I close my eyes and lock the door, pushing the television against it and angle into my crack of security. Stroking the dented cover of the only book my father didn't throw away, I breathe the musty odour and close my eyes to the old once more.
They might be prohibitively expensive here though.
