Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
“Tomorrow. Dinner’s at seven. Dress nice. Or, at the very least, take a fuckin’ shower. The location coordinates for the disturbance are on the notepad of the phone. Get back to me as soon as you know anything.”
The call ends with a single beep as I’m pulling up the notepad. I flip through the options, find the notepad, and read the location. Sector 4, quad H minus 5, floor 2. Fuck’s sake. I’ve never even heard of these locations. Are there even stairs to get down there?
“Tyyyyyyyse. I’ve got to goooooo,” Anneeta whines from the other side of the door.
I’d forgotten about her. “One sec, kid. I’m coming.”
I pull on a pair of tactical pants, grab a coin from a glass jar on the short counter in the semblance of a kitchen, and open the door back up. “Here.” I toss the coin high in the air, making her gasp. But this one’s got reflexes and that little hand snatches the coin before it can even think about hitting the floor and rolling away.
Anneeta smiles at me, showing off her new, toothless gap, then turns and bolts off down the hallway.
She’s one of the few bright things about living in the ruins. There aren’t any other kids here. The tower isn’t anyone’s first choice of residence and while it’s true most of its inhabitants are poor, illiterate, and addicted to the spark, they’re still smart enough not to try and raise families here. They either get their shit together and get out, or they allow the city to sterilize them for coins and stay.
Anneeta is a special circumstance. A warning for all women who choose this lifestyle to be careful. Her mother’s been dead for nearly four years now. Long enough that I doubt the kid even remembers she had a mother.
As far as I know, Anneeta lives on her own, making money running messages inside the tower like the one she just did for Stayn.
But we all take care of each other in here. We are, as they say, cut from the same cloth. Anneeta’s edges are just a little more tattered than most, but she’s still one of us and everyone looks out for her.
I close the door thinking about the little girl and what a dismal, depressing future she has. It’s not her fault her mother was addicted to the spark and was too far gone to take care of the pregnancy one way or the other. Being born under the influence of the spark is a very rare thing these days. Ever since Stayn took over as chief of patrol, and Basil, our friend from the War College, took over as Council head, there have been no births from spark-addicted women living in the ruin.
They sweep the tower every new moon looking for pregnant women, test them on the spot and then take them out by force if it comes back positive. But Anneeta came along before the spark reforms, so she’s stuck.
She will never leave the tower. The spark changed her brain while she was still developing in the womb. She’s more than addicted to it now, it literally runs her body.
She can wander the tower and the ruins outside, but if she were to cross that imaginary boundary between the Tower District and the Canal District, she would get maybe three or four steps before collapsing. If she wasn’t given a dose of spark within the next several minutes, she’d be dead.
It’s an extreme case. All of us inside the tower live off the spark. We’re all addicted, but we can leave. There would be sickness if we stayed away too long, but we’d be OK again eventually. Even if we never came back. Total withdrawal would be miserable, for sure, but we would not die the way Anneeta would.
No one knows how long she can live like this, running wholly on the spark. She’s the only kid we’ve got in here at the moment—hopefully the last as well—so it’s kind of a case study.
Some do-gooders from outside have tried to rein her in. Tried to make her settle with some of the more responsible adults on the ground floor and live a more traditional life with some schooling and regular meals. But she slips away when anyone gets too controlling. Just… disappears without a trace.
The tower people—the more superstitious ones, at least—think it’s the spirit of the tower god protecting her like she’s his and his alone. But I think she just knows this place too well to be found. Knows all the nooks and crannies to hide in. Hell, she’s probably got a whole road system mapped out in her head that winds through the vents and ducts.
At any rate, the do-gooders have given up on the idea that she can be tamed and now she just does as she pleases.