Prologue

New nations are rarely built in peace. The painful blaze of war leaves ashes in its wake, and it is left to the winning side to sketch their new boundaries, to reset the chess board. Names of countries and cities erased forever, stamped down to cinders. It was thought to be easier this way. Easier for people to pick up their lives and begin again in a shiny new world. The Creators constructed Utopia from the ruins of their own making and welcomed Earth's survivors. Here is your perfect world, they said, use it well. They even named it using a word coined by man.

Utopia was created in Year Zero by those who thought they had saved the Future, saved man from itself. But predicting the future is a dangerous game, and not for unpracticed minds. Safety in Utopia came with a price. There were rules to follow, rules set to preserve perfection and prevent evil, and consequences for breaking them. In the end, her new citizens were grateful for order after chaos, and most took the rules in stride. The Creators were right -it was easier this way.

Midnight, New Year's Eve, I gathered with two May girls -Iris and Julia. Girls and boys born in May were given I or J names, it made things less complicated. We came together to celebrate in the city that bore an ill-fitting name -Utopia. Utopia 147. Tonight they had turned it into St. Petersburg, a city in a country called Russia that no longer existed. Projected the city onto the plastic walls with snow falling down against the images of its oddly shaped buildings. Everyone lived in a Utopia. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them. I'd requested information at the library on U-28th after the announcement had been posted at school:

Year Sixteen's featured city will be: St. Petersburg!

Featured activities: ice skating (skates available for 600u), snowball fights (gloves/mittens required, available for 400u)

Sleigh-taxis will be in service from 19:00-23:30

Most citizens wouldn't be able to afford the two activities, and 600u was hardly an investment, considering the fact that those ice skates would only be available for twenty four hours. There was snow most years, but the novelty had worn off quickly. Most children thought cold was the water we drank. They never knew it could freeze. I'd be among the children and adults who came to the park to watch the rich have fun. 600u was expensive, but perhaps my father would let us try. After all, I'd never skated, not really.

The computer tablet had been withholding when I had put in my information request on St. Petersburg. It gave me a short description of the city and some digitized images. It had been a dangerous city in the Past, torn apart by revolution. Utopia had solved these problems, we were better off without St. Petersburg. I went home and set myself to studying for the January Assessments. I'd been second in my year this past November, and never below fifth in all my years of schooling. The points I lost in Assessments usually corresponded to a word that no longer existed. Ones I'd discovered by accident in one of my dreams. I knew which ones to use and which ones to keep secret, but sometimes I slipped. My parents explained the foreign ones to me. I was their September girl -Sylvia.

My city went all out for New Years.

St. Petersburg, a silver sound. How oddly the real one struck our ears -Utopia 147. A sound like bronze. Like horseshoes on stone, hammer on anvil, thunder in the name. Not Petersburg of the bells and water, that city of mirrors, of transparent twilights, Tchaikovsky ballets I'd watched behind closed eyelids. Its name had twice been changed by war -Petersburg was thought too human, bearing the name of a man.

Utopia 147. The sound is bronze, and this is a story of bronze.

That night, the cusp of Sixteen's New Year, we prepared to conjure the Future in Julia's dark bedroom on U-56th. From down the hall, the sounds of her parents' large New Years soirée filtered under the door -women's laughter, scraps of pleasant music, the scent of pine, manufactured for artificial satisfaction. Nothing was authentic in Utopia, but it was as close to real as the Creators could manage. In the Past, music was played on instruments that people held in their hands. Music is the language of the soul, I'd heard the words in a dream. I typed it into a personal document on my desk tablet the next morning and received two demerits for Unauthorized Writing. Through dreams I learned that music could be ugly, angry, frightening. It could be soothing, and make your heart ache with its beauty. But no more. It was thought to be too expressive. Too much could be conveyed. And so the Creators had left it out when Utopia was designed. Now we had discs with approved music created on a computer. In the Past people set words to melody. That wasn't allowed anymore, either. I remember being very small, being bathed by my mother, and she was singing, I know that now. I know because I looked in her demerit book (adults had them, too), and found the date and description of the offense "singing". They'd given four demerits. I snuck a look at other crimes. Sprinkled among the petty ones were High Offenses. My mother, a secret rebel. I'd have never guessed.

Year 4: unauthorized pregnancy (600d)

refusal to terminate unauthorized pregnancy (300d)

attempt to accompany relocated unauthorized offspring (100d)

Year 5: willful endangerment of self (1000d)

unauthorized writing (20d)

Year 6: unauthorized writing (30d)

Year 7: willful endangerment of self and others (4000d)

Year 8: unauthorized writing (1200d)

Year 12: invoking name of deity (4d)

I made myself look away that day. I was alone in the house and I was frightened.

Tonight below in the street, harness bells announced temporary holiday sleighs busying themselves transporting guests to parties all along the snow-filled streets. Only a few transport pods could be seen darting through the slow traffic like beetles seeking shelter. But in the warm room we giggled breathlessly, having escaped the New Years festivities, eager to trick the Future. We were brand new women with big ideas, some of them silly. We wore gowns and felt older than we were. Older and exotic, filled with mystery. Gone were the days of playing in our mothers' closets. Julia in her black gown, Iris in a homemade dress of light blue velvet, and myself in russet silk with an olive overlay. What in the Past had been an expensive luxury was now commonplace. I had complained about the silk earlier, it had been cold in the snow, even with my coat.

I was a month shy of sixteen, the same age as the Year, a month away from becoming a Protector of Utopia, the first generation of Protectors. I longed to discover the secrets kept from us in our youth. What I'd spent all my life training for. All the Assessments, all the required Completions. We waited for midnight to cast our wishes, bouncing on eager toes, heads converged together. Julia's dark cropped locks, the dusty blue-black of a crow; Iris', ash blonde, braided and twisted like a crown around her head in that style she refused to abandon; and I, with hair the red of young foxes crossing a field of snow, woven like bread on top of my head by my mother's dexterous fingers earlier that evening. I'd stolen her perfume and copied the way she applied it, on her wrists, behind her ears, across her collar bones. It didn't smell the same on me.

It seems like a scene in a glass globe to me now. I want to turn it over and set the snow to swirling. I want to shout to my young self Stop! Don't be in such a hurry to peel back the petals of the Future. It will be here soon enough, and it won't be quite the bloom you expect. Just stay there, in that precious moment, at the hinge of time…but I was in love with the Future, captivated by the idea of Fate. There's nothing more bewitching to the young -until its dogs sink their teeth into your calf and pull you to the ground.

What did I hope to receive that night? It seems romantic now, this young girl who wanted to change the world. The errors my teenage self found with Utopia 147. I see her there, staring impatiently at the clock on the wall, a girl both brash and shy, awkward and feigning sophistication in hopes of being thought mysterious. I want her to stay in that moment before my world changed, when I longed for youthful things, when the Future assembled like brilliant horses loading into the starting gate. I remember the next instant, the shimmer of an answer to a question I'd spent years asking myself in the dark.

I wished for the Past. The truth of it.

I saw her in my mind -the woman from my dreams, the warmth of a man's voice, a broken song, the wrinkle of a long journey filled with unimaginable strife. The memories were inside me, fighting to stay hidden, and I couldn't scrape them out. My calm and quiet mother, my strong father, the parts of themselves they had buried away were out there somewhere.

My younger self looks up. She senses me there in the room, a vague but troubling presence. I swear she catches a glimpse of me in the window's reflection, with silvery St. Petersburg swirling outside. The woman from the Future -neither young nor old, bathed in grief and compromise, wearing her own two eyes. A shudder passes through her like a draft.

I left the New Year's party on U-56th as St. Petersburg faded from the domed city walls, replaced with the deep night sky, street lamps to light my way. The sleighs were already gone -a pod zipped to the edge of the sidewalk and beeped patiently, offering me a ride, but I politely refused. Workers wearing the same face set to work, deprogramming the snow along the streets so that it disappeared mid-fall and faded away altogether. Until next year, I told myself. I watched a Worker cross into the park to deprogram the ice skating rink. As an unexpected but delightful surprise, my father had taken us skating. My mother seemed slightly embarrassed at the enormous dent he had made in our credit book just for an hour of what looked like fun. It was mostly adults who took to the ice, ones who knew how to skate. Their little children with lower centers of gravity scraped along easily enough, but I struggled to remain standing, even with my father urging me on. He amazed us, skating backwards and moving across the ice like a smooth line of ink on paper. My mother took a few minutes to find her stride, and was soon skating gracefully with him, a smile on her face, her nose pink with cold. And I, their ungraceful daughter, stood on the sidelines watching them until, after a time, they seemed to remember me. My father took my right hand, my mother the left, and they pulled me along with them. After several falls my mother took me out of the rink and we handed in our skates. But we stayed nearby and watched my father take several last laps around the oval of ice. An expression on his face I couldn't quite read.

As the temperature of the city regulated I took off the coat I'd bought last year specifically for New Years. I looked to the left at the rows of identical houses, slim and tall, a door and four windows. To the right the quiet of a nighttime street with very few pods zipping by. I'd find five demerits in my book at home for staying out past curfew, but usually on New Years the Creators were lenient. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself that a grand change had occurred, that this year was really special, the early hours of Year Sixteen felt like any other night. Only the flash of truth from earlier lingered in my mind. A puzzling vision, as it seemed to grow clearer with each passing moment instead of fading into dim memory. The blurry woman from my dreams had become who I'd always suspected her to be -my mother, her hair chin length, her eyes held fear, perhaps because I'd finally found her. My father's voice pronounced that strange and foreign word -Scully. The song, lilting and uncertain. There was more to this glimpse of the past. There was a story. If this story is bronze, perhaps theirs was forged of another metal.

At fifteen I was filled with the allure of possibility, of the incredible, but I knew that for some the brightness was harder to see. On sleepless nights I would curl on the window seat in my bedroom and look outside at the comforting uniformity of my world, the easy perfection, and listen to my mother cry. When I was a child I shut my eyes against it -not understanding her pain, her sorrow. The warmth of my father's muffled voice, a soothing balm, reassured me.

When I was older, however, I allowed myself to give in to curiosity. What, after all these years, could trouble her so? I got out of bed one April night and crept down the hallway to their bedroom, and saw the answer to my question, heard it in whispers. The mirror across from their bed showed my parents, half covered by the sheet; my mother draped across my father, and he ran gentle circles over her back; naked skin which glowed like the moon. I'd seen the moon in digitized images only, but my father once told me that it glowed, and I collected metaphors and similes like candy.

"I want it back, all of it." Her words filled the room like bats. One sudden move and they'd swarm away, looking for a safer home. "I can't bear it, Mulder," her voice broke on a sob.

He said something unintelligible into her cinnamon hair. I hadn't known it, but he'd said it, then, the harsh tear of a 'sc' and the wavy sound of 'ully', a word that now, for the first time, I understood to be a name. "Scully." If his voice was a cello, hers was the viola, and her instrument sprung a string. "Oh, God, I wish I could dream us back."

"I know," he'd say, and I knew he meant it more than anything. "Me, too." He'd bring her up for a tender kiss, smooth a thumb across her cheek, and she'd rest it over his heart. I almost turned and left the first time I found them like this, feeling like an intruder, but then he began to speak again.

"Once upon a time there was a man named Mulder, who was perfectly content holed up in the basement of the F.B.I by himself." (I vowed to look up this acronym later, but my request for information was denied) "One day, a short redhead walked into his life and changed it forever. She was as smart as she was beautiful."

My mother's voice chuffed out a wet laugh. "Don't get all romantic on me, Mulder. Skip to the good part."

And he'd tell her a story. I'd wait outside, slouched against the wall, and listen to him paint pictures of the Past. Things I'd seen only flashes of in dreams became more than smudges of ideas, they became real things, real people; intelligence became more than Assessments, life became less about Completions and more about emotion, impulsiveness, making mistakes and learning from them. Passion became more than sex, more than love, when before I'd counted them as synonyms. Passion was an all-consuming condition that drove you to madness if left unchecked. My parents were passionate about finding answers to impossible questions. My father was good natured, but in these secret nighttime stories he became funny. He made my mother laugh, a delightful sound in the womblike dark. He drew her out from the shadows of fear and solitude and together they jumped into shared memories, golden pools of hope and joy.

I reached our house on U-21st and the corners of my mouth twitched into a smile as I saw them through a gap in the curtain, my father had one arm around my mother and was rocking them side to side. I snuck in the door and listened to my mother giggle. "Mulder, stop it!"

I stepped further into the house and turned to the right, saw him holding my mother at arm's length, and she was spinning. Laughing, her hair fanning out around her. He caught sight of me and pulled her back against his chest, kissed her messy head.

"Hey, who's that beautiful woman standing in the hallway?" he asked, and my mother raised her head, brushing hair away from her face to look at me. Her eyes softened and she smiled, still rocking back and forth in my father's arms.

"What are you doing?" I asked, trying to imitate their posture.

He smiled. "Ah, the lost art of the slow dance." My mother chuckled in his arms and he kissed the crown of her head. "All we need is some bad music and a disco ball and then I might be able to get to second base later," he joked. I'd seen dancing before, those Tchaikovsky ballets, those wonderful dreams.

"Mulder," my mother warned.

"Second base?" I asked. My mother moved out of his arms and tossed him a sleepy smile. She sat down on the sofa and motioned for me to come sit beside her. There was hesitation in my step. The short-haired version of my mother, her face now appearing gaunt as the vision intensified, haunted me.

"How was the party?" she asked, smoothing her hair into a semblance of order. It hung in waves over one shoulder, the same color as my own. I nodded, trying to smile.

"It was nice. Iris' parents said to tell you 'hello'."

She touched my shoulder, and there was a hint of worry in her eyes. "Are you tired?"

I shook my head. Then my father's voice, "Why don't you get in your pajamas and come back downstairs. We'll make hot chocolate."

As I climbed the stairs a sense of dread slithered up from the arch of my foot to the shell of my ear. The same feeling that had woken me from sleep since I was a very small child. Only recently, over the past few years, had it carried any explanation, or the blurred edge of one. Another vision. I hurried to my room, closed the door and leaned back against it, my heart like thunder in my chest. I shut my eyes against it, but it roared through my head anyway.

Blinks through time, after each short-lived memory a sharp tug into another one, making me nauseous. I saw my mother's life through her eyes, unforgiving to her unwilling observer.

(two hands clasped together, two people running through what I understood to be a field of corn,

a world of white, snow falling thick like wool around me,

my hands stained with dried blood -not my own-, caked and brown under my nails,

the swirl of harsh winter, yet joy filling me up to bursting, my thumbs on someone's windburned cheek. I loved them, powerless against the gauntlet of feeling,

Utopia 147,

now warmth, my body pliant with sleep,

a baby wrapping four fingers and a tiny, perfect thumb around my ring finger)

Outside of the vision I inhale sharply. That baby is me.

(Utopia 147,

"we won't lose it, Scully," he's wrapped around my mother, a palm on the taught skin of her belly)

That baby is not me.

("this place is no Utopia. It's Hell." my mother's voice)

A deep breath as I tried to escape it, overwhelmed, but like always, I had no control.

(panic running in my veins like a high speed train, men in white, the world a blur through tears and pain, the pain isn't physical, it's inside me, loud in my head, a part of my soul tugged away forever, the cry of a baby, and my own scream, a scream that rips me apart)

"It's all right, it's all right," my mother soothed, cradling me, pressing my cheek to her breast as I wept, waking up from it.

"Here's a blanket," he said, covering me, smoothing back sweaty hair from my face. "Shh, calm down."

My mother's lips against my hot forehead, the song from the vision, the vibration of it as she hummed. My green eyes opened to blue. She smiled, trembling slightly. I looked from her to my father. It was the first time I'd seen fear in his eyes. Worry, concern I'd seen. Never fear.

I sat up in her arms, shaking her off, and looked from one parent to the other. Two liars on either side of me. I hated them for the red hair and green eyes that branded me as theirs. I wanted to run, but knew my legs wouldn't hold me up. My silk dress had torn sometime between me closing the door to my bedroom and waking up on the floor of it. For some reason that upset me. The easily replaceable silk, torn like that, was a painful image to my adolescent mind, but paled in comparison to what I'd just borne witness to.

I looked at my mother, coldness in my eyes. "Your name isn't Dana, is it?"

I saw her struggle to come up with a lie. I turned to my father. "Who's Scully?"

"Sylvia, you can't say things like-" my mother was saying. I cut her off.

"You had a baby, another baby, and the Creators took her away before you saw her." I saw the hurt whip through her, and she moved back as if burned.

"Her?" my father asked, his voice cracked on the word.

"This place is no Utopia. It's Hell," I echoed bravely.

My mother burst into tears and my father stepped over me to get to her.

"No, no, please, God, no," she sobbed.

Utopia 147. A sound like bronze. Like horseshoes on stone, hammer on anvil, thunder in the name.

And this is a story of bronze.

A/N: New fic, this is a prologue to test the waters. I posted this previously but wasn't happy with it, so I tweaked it a bit. Would love some feedback!