Prelude to Purgatory
1
Her shoulders pushed up against the cold stone of the building, her head resting back upon its cushion of black hair. She could feel the small bob that she'd tied it into pressed against her neck like a hand poised to strike. Water dripped into her eyes, blurring her vision so that she couldn't see the rain; she felt where it splashed against her skin and began to eat into her make up. She imagined the layers of paint dropping off of her cheeks as white tear drops. Passing her tongue over her rain-soaked lips, she tasted gasoline and vinegar.
The adrenaline was rushing upon her and no amount of acid rain could burn it away. She tried to tone down her emotions, to merely be uncomfortable. She could feel the cold of the building through the thin, purple, coat that clung tightly to her back. She forced herself to keep her eyes open and to let the rain burn them. Though none of these bodily sensations were pleasant, they were all better than that sense of slipping out of her skin against her will, of slowly losing her body, that always followed the use of her powers.
An airwhale passed above her and for an instant the little street was illuminated by its blinding spotlight. She raised her hand to block it out; a hand soaked in a red that glimmered slickly under the light. Then the ship passed, leaving Purgatory, heading to either MidCity or the Peripheries on some unknown errand. Her thoughts stayed followed, and for the passing of a moment she felt she might be able to drift away with it, a virtual stowaway. Her stomach lurched as if she had stepped off a precipice and she was sure she was going to phase out. Then her ear vibrated with the hollow echo of static. It was like having a glass pressed over her ear with a fly trapped inside of it. The buzz made her cringe but also brought her back to herself. She reached up her left hand and rubbed her earlobe between two slender fingers, adjusting the volume of the implanted chip.
"I thought we were on radio silence." Her voice was a whisper lost in the clatter of the rain against the steel street and the pounding of music through the wall behind her, the result of a shrill horn blasting a solo in a crazed jazz riff.
"A pointless precaution. The other covens are blind outside of the core." .ZHAR's voice carried subtle arrogance.
"Just checking in." That was .GREP, and she felt her heartbeat slow as she listened to his familiar level tones. "I'm with .SORT at The Watchtower. The rift will be opening in a few minutes."
"I'm ready to go when you are," .ZHAR said. "Found a rift loop at the canals. It's a tidy little thing. You should see what it's doing to the water."
".CAI, where are you?"
The woman who was known in the city of Midnight as .CAI wiped a thin sheet of the toxic rain away from her eyelids and blinked blurrily at the letters of the neon sign flickering above her head.
"Hobknobs," she said. "Edge of the dead zone. I'm a block from The Watchtower."
"Did everything go alright?"
She looked down at a dark shape at her feet, crumpled against the wall of the abandoned bar.
"More or less. He didn't recognize me at first, thought I was a street walker. It was over fast."
"Good. Get over here as soon as you can. .ZHAR, make sure you contact us again before you rift. I want to coordinate this."
"Man, I've been rifting since before you first got pulled in kicking and screaming to the Ghost World. Don't wait up for me."
"Next time, stick to the plan. I don't like making separate jumps if we don't have to."
"I thought #STRIKERS had more balls than that."
.GREP ignored him.
".CAI, get here soon. The rift is gonna be open in a few minutes."
With a quick, uncomfortable burst of static, .GREP broke the connection.
.CAI pulled herself away from the building, flexing her red hands. Looking back, she saw a dark black streak where she'd been leaning, running down towards the body of the man she'd killed. She reached up and undid the bun of hair, letting it fall across her shoulders. The unnatural rain was washing out her dye. It would stain her coat, ruining it, but she didn't care. She needed a new coat anyway. After tonight's encounter, this one now had a tear along the side from where the traitor had rushed at her with a knife after
he had seen the scar above her right eye and maybe she had been too cocky in not covering it up with some kind of makeup because he had known then and had had time to draw the knife before she could react
he'd realized who she was and why she was there. That same knife was now buried in his sternum. She'd seen
a street walker. A young girl with black hair tied up in a cute bun. And after all, why not? Wasn't that why he came here every week? The place was known for street walkers. It was just that they weren't usually this young or this perky. And this one was dressed almost demurely, with that buttoned up purple coat and the skirt that fell down to right below her knees, leaving a tantalizing view of stockings over tight, muscled legs. Long skirt for a street walker; young for a street walker; cute for a street walker. She could be making much more money in Purgatory than in an abandoned zone. But then he had felt something different tonight, that something good was going to come his way. He wasn't usually picky, but he'd turned down the first three walkers he'd seen tonight. And this was his reward for his patience. He imagined that black hair loose and falling over his thighs while she serviced him, one of his hands wrapped through it, caressing the fine shape of her skull. He moved forward to taste those large sensuous lips, and his eye strayed to her one imperfection, a tear shaped discoloration above her right eye
the knife flash in his hand and had barely had time to turn the slashing wrist aside before she heard the sound of ripping and the knife had torn into her coat instead of skin.
that's why I skipped over the first three. Ghost Witch planted the thought in my head, she ensorcelled me. Bitch can't weight more than a hundred pounds. I'll slice her open and spill those Witch guts all over the pavement
.CAI shook her head to clear it. The man's thoughts were rushing over her like cars passing by too close on a busy highway. She leaned towards to the body, held a hand up to the slack mouth. Sure enough, she could feel a slight warm breath against her palm
how did she move so fast that should have cut her from hip to neck and how did she have a grip like that and oh god how was she pushing the knife back towards him, towards his own chest and then he was knocked off his feet, thrown against the side of the building, and the knife was pushing its way into his chest and his muscles were relaxing and contracting and the ramen he'd had that afternoon was emptying itself into his pants and she was pulling away still alive
.CAI drove one palm hard into the handle of the knife, driving it sideways and deeper, piercing the man's heart and ending the deluge of his thoughts in her mind.
"That's for .HULL," she said and spat on the traitor.
Moments later, the alley was empty except for the body. Only the black streak on the wall marked that .CAI had ever been there.
2
The metropolis of Midnight is a sprawl. It sits upon the frozen earth as a black blemish, a gigantic circle enclosed on most sides by the Heavenly Peaks and, beyond that, the icy wastes. If there ever was a world outside of Midnight, the wastes are what is left of it. At the center of the circle lies Purgatory, the very pulse of Midnight. Here, ingeniously designed skyscrapers twist metallic girders and glass faces into the sky; here, cars built to fit some lost aesthetic drive the lengths of ever-decaying highways; here is constant noise and chatter, as the majority of Midnight's inhabitants work themselves to death, or entertain themselves into a placid acceptance of life. The noise, if you listen carefully from the right spot, is sometimes broken by the howl of one of the Tall Men.
The rest of Midnight can be defined as thus: the Peripheries, which are the outer ring closest to the frozen Heavenly Peaks and the icy wastes; MidCity, which is most everything else encompassed in a nightmarish suburbia; and the dead zones, places of abandonment sprinkled throughout the city with no order or reason. It was in one of these dead zones, a splotch of abandonment within Purgatory's otherwise bustling sprawl, that a certain traitor of the #STRIKERS had gone for a quick fix of the flesh and had instead ended up with his own knife embedded in his heart outside of a bar called Hobknobs which played live jazz music all night long, the louder the better.
This dead zone was special. It contained The Watchtower, and The Watchtower contained a rift that activated at exactly 11:59pm and 12:01pm every night, on either side of midnight.
3
The stairs went up the watchtower in a stoic square pattern, hugging each wall like the stairwell of an hotel. .CAI took the wide steps three at a time and was breathing heavily when she reached the third landing. Only seventeen more stories to go, she thought. The Watchtower was an anomaly in a city whose towers and skyscrapers were defined by black metal, blue super-carbon, silver titanium, and shimmering glass. It was brown brick and gray mortar, but more than that, it was brick and mortar which dared to jut into the sky. Like an ancient Tower of Babel, it mocked the more modern structures. I can rise, too, it seemed to say, and I don't need your fancy super-carbon to stay up. The fact that it didn't reach as high as the true skyscrapers didn't take away from its solemn grandeur.
Antique lamps lined the staircase and about a third of them flickered with ghostly light, shining on the rotten bits of carpet that still clung to the concrete steps like hair on a rotting skull. Huge ragged holes in the walls served as windows onto the city scape, which came steadily into view the further .CAI climbed. Sometimes the effect was disconcerting. The worst part was near the eighteenth story, where a whole wall had collapsed, leaving only the staircase framed by abyss on either side. To her right was a dark pit lit only by the pale lamps, giving her a dim view of the stairs spiraling away towards the ground. To her left was the inner city of Midnight; Purgatory, with its lights spread out like a blanket of stars that had fallen from the sky. It was early, yet. A little later, those lights would be joined by six actual stars, the only stars that still cared to shine over the city. No matter how much light the city polluted the night with, those stars would still be brightly visible. Far in the distance, the Uni-Crown stood like the finger of God, the tallest building in the city.
.CAI came upon this treacherous opening at a jog, and caught herself just in time to avoid running out into the open air. She fell to her knees on the last step before the opening. This hole hadn't been here the last time. The Watchtower, like everything else in Midnight, was slowly falling apart. She made the mistake of looking down over the edge and immediately felt herself sway forward with vertigo. She pulled back slowly and shakily got to her feet.
As she stood up, she felt something pulse through her and she dropped to her knees again before the sensation could topple her over the edge of the staircase. It was a rift opening close by, and she felt it in the same way that someone else might hear and interpret a sound muffled through a plaster wall. It was 11:59, then. She had roughly two minutes to reach the top of the tower and catch the last rift out of Midnight. She didn't have time to be careful.
.CAI leapt to her feet in a single smooth motion and began to sprint again, not thinking about the emptiness to either side of her, not looking at the dents and bits of carpet on the staircase waiting to snag and trip her, letting her feet go to where they needed without thinking about it. And like that, she was up two more floors, where the stairs ended in a small room that may have once been used for maintenance. Spare gears and levers lay scattered around the lamp-lit room, but whatever machine they had powered was long gone. Here a ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. It was open and a light shone down through it.
Her pale hands closed around the bottom rungs of the ladder. She gritted her teeth at the unpleasant feel of the rust rubbing against her palms and began to climb. She was panting loudly when a short laugh drifted down to her.
"Told ya she'd make it."
The outline of .GREP's lean upper body and his wiry face appeared framed in the trapdoor. He reached down a hand. She took it gratefully and let him help her up the last bit of the way.
.GREP grunted as he pulled her into the highest room of the watchtower. It was little more than four arches which supported a roof and which had once held four massive stained-glass faces in each arch. Now only one remained, and it was covered with so much grime that whatever the image had been was indecipherable. An ornate chandelier hung from the roof, it's lights blaring almost offensively against the gloom, throwing shadows everywhere.
"Me and the kid had a bet," .GREP said, his features stretching to accommodate his dimpled smile. His brown eyes met her own teal ones in silent greeting.
The 'kid' in question, .SORT, walked into the light, towering over .GREP. "Which you lost," he said earnestly. His own chiseled features betrayed only a very little amusement, though she sensed he wasn't adverse to a game as long as there was a chance for him to claim victory.
.GREP shrugged at .CAI. "I said you'd be here by the first rift." He turned back to .SORT and pointed in mock accusation. "But you said she wouldn't make it at all, so I was closer to right. You owe me a beer."
.CAI's eyes strayed to .GREP's outstretched arm. They all had their scars, and .GREP's extended up his right arm in a pall of warped flesh, disappearing into his tight muscle shirt. A Wraith had caught him on the Planes and ripped a chunk out of his Ghost. .CAI had been able to heal the wound, but never the scar.
"I like your new look," .GREP quipped, nodding at .CAI's hair. "Trying to copy me?" Her hair that had been black on the street, black as .GREP's was naturally, was now a gross mixture of green and gray where the color was draining out, and a glaring platinum blonde where it was already gone.
"Yeah," .CAI said, her voice lathered in sarcasm. "Thought I'd try being ugly for a day, see how you do it."
But .GREP was already turning away, touching his ear and radioing .ZHAR to tell him to get ready to jump. .CAI wondered how long they had. Twenty seconds? Thirty? How close had .GREP come to losing that bet? .SORT had sauntered towards one of the arches and now stood with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, his open trench coat and shaggy brown hair blowing in the wind.
Barely a dozen seconds passed before she felt the rift wash over them. Stray pebbles and bits of granite on the dirty watchtower floor trembled and jittered, as stones sometimes do when a train passes by. She saw .GREP phase out. He walked towards a sizable briefcase in the shadows; he gripped the handle and then it was like he and the briefcase melded into the dark. She didn't see .SORT go. The pull had always been strong for her and she went almost immediately after .GREP left. With a tug at her midriff, she phased out of Midnight and into the Ghost World.
