It's always dark in City 17.

That was one of the things you learned, like walking and working and going to the food shelter every day for rations. Even when the sun was trying to shine through the diseased, cloudy atmosphere, it was always dark in City 17.

The buildings were dark, like warped, decayed gothic architecture, faded graffiti and posters with black, brown and orange only. Trash littered the streets, old newspapers and squashed tobacco. The police were dark, features obscured with grey gas masks, eyes hidden with shiny, pitch colored lenses and bodies swathed in black trench coats. The people were dark, faces overcast in black denim uniforms, holding all of what they were inside themselves and leaving none of it in confirmation to others of their own humanity. Even the train on the way in was dark, speeding through scenes of cracked desert and poisoned, inky sea water, the interior lights dim and flickering while people coughed and died on just the other bench.

But all that was fine because Lauren's eyes had already adjusted to the lack of light.

Her legs hurt, but she had to keep walking. It was too close to curfew for her to feel safe, she needed to be back in her apartment with the blinds pulled and every potential area where a camera could be hidden blocked with furniture. She'd be there right now if her roommates hadn't voted her on food duty for the night. It wasn't usual to go on ration runs so late—they'd actually gotten their daily meals in the morning, and Lauren had woken up extra early to get something at least somewhat edible before everyone else took it. A teen that slept in the bathtub in their little communal group was the source of the problems. Moron had been giving his share of the rations to a girl down the hall for the past week, and passed out from hunger two hours ago.

She had never gone for seconds before, and was all nerves. Citizens weren't allowed to get more than their allotted share, but some people set up little smuggling systems to get black market goods (such as extra food, water that wasn't drugged, toilet paper) into the city to those that wanted it. Sometimes Civil Protection cracked down on them, and sometimes they didn't get caught. She hoped she wouldn't be caught. She'd been cracked down on enough for the week.

For a moment she was afraid that running the directions around in her mind while trying to go unnoticed around closed bars and vandalized clubs had been a waste of time, but she let out a small sigh of relief when she saw the little sheets of paper plastered around the street corner she'd just passed.

You could tell where you were in the city based on the posters displayed at the various bulletin cluster points. In the apartment complex it was mostly Civil Protection ads—basically that you could get out of that hellhole you called a home and get a real life so long as you were willing to beat your fellow human being into oblivion every other day to keep them in line. And that if you weren't interested, you had to obey the ones that were. The industrial district featured a lot of pieces that involved death—small notices on safety dwarfed by tips on how to work around the dead bodies and proper disposal of corpses. Featured prominently in this particular piece of propaganda was a tall, green uniformed, gangly limbed creature with stark white skin and a long gun in its grip, head like a soccer ball with two cold, beady black eyes staring out at the prospective viewer. In all caps, the italicized text said "KEEP IT CLEAN…OR HE WILL."

Rather than making vague, silly sounding threats, it probably would have been more effective to just say, "Cremators burn garbage and don't care if you happen to be in the fire radius and get all of your skin melted off". Not to mention how the dark colors made it almost impossible to see the creature the poster was trying to display in first place. The whole thing could have been better made if the Combine had bothered to find a turncoat with any compositional sense. And anyone with two brain cells to rub together didn't need a scary picture to know who was in charge anyway.

But that was just Lauren's opinion. She wouldn't tell anybody. You couldn't just mention your feelings offhand to the first person you saw.

Regardless, that meant she was going in the right direction.

But she hated the industrial district. She hated everything about it. Particularly since the factories were responsible for the Synths, a bizarre combo of unearthly looking creatures and machine that tended to menace people so they knew it was an alien superpower in charge and not your typical human dictator.

Ironically enough, the factory with the most amount of deaths was the one that made the Cremators. Small, dusty footprints could be seen going in and out of the main door, but they'd probably released the children for the day. She wouldn't have to worry about actually, well, seeing any of them. The building was completely papered over with more posters, probably to cover up the ill-advised, poorly spray-painted lambda graffiti that someone put up on their fifteen minute lunch break. Making sure to look both ways to assure herself that there wasn't a cop on patrol nearby, she slipped inside, lingering embers bathing everything, like the hellish machinery lining the assembly line and the black bins filled with heads and torsos, in a dim, demonic light.

In the dead stillness, the lone figure off in the corner in charge of the "black market room" stood out like a flickering flame. Jumpy kid—and she wasn't using the term loosely, it was a slim twelve year old with half his hair burnt off and a couple packages of rations behind his back, looking every direction but hers and probably being as conspicuous as possible. She almost had to stop and speak up, but he spotted her before she worked up the nerve and gave a quick wave.

"I-I told 318 that people were coming. He wanted to join the other kids and play Manhack Panic instead." His voice cracked, probably going through puberty, and she felt an odd mix of pity for him and revulsion—at the fact that the children were in factories or that the little numbered monsters went to the Manhack arcade after being let out, she wasn't sure which. "I'm glad I'm right. I said I'd stay here at my post."

"Well, I would recommend not being so obvious next time." Lauren muttered, glaring at her feet. "CPs are age-blind."

"I—I know. I'm sorry. I wanted to stay here."

"Of course you did." She pulled a small watch out of her pocket. "Will this cover a pack? We didn't have much, guy in my building needs food."

The kid took the timepiece and looked it over, pressing it to his ear to see if he could hear it tick. "Does it have batteries?"

"I think it's windup."

He took a moment to think about it, and begrudgingly handed her one lumpy grey bag. "If you really need it."

"I do, thank you." She glanced around nervously, wanting to terminate the conversation and just leave. "Uh…"

"What?"

"…Nothing." Lauren turned heel and stalked off, clutching the rations to her chest like it was a bomb. There was an entire other half to the trip to take care of and now she was holding on to contraband. She took a deep breath, a quarter of it smog, coughed and crept through the exit, trying very hard to remember which way she'd come in as it was now close to pitch black outside.


The end of the day was not going well. There was nobody left out and her surroundings didn't flare in her short term memory as having been her path before.

Which way was she supposed to go now? Right? Or was should she have turned around at the Vortiguant in shackles sweeping cans off the concrete?

A sharp, bitter tone went reverberating through the street, and she picked up her pace. The stop had put her off her schedule, and now she was running late for the curfew, and…

She was lost.

Oh god.

She'd lived in the city for three years and had no idea where the hell she was now. There had been a wrong turn back there somewhere, and now she was whirling bemusedly through the run-down downtown thinking of just hiding in a condemned bar until sun-up—then a figure in a long trench coat with a sizzling baton illuminating its thickly gloved fist approached her from a broken streetlamp. The blood in her veins turned to ice, pinpricks of fear networking through her back and gut.

It was probably the gas mask. Each Civil Protection officer wore one, twisted and distorted like alien faces, emotionless, set, hostile. A human voice couldn't even make it through the breathing apparatus—there was nothing redeeming in their looks, anything comforting or remotely familiar hidden beneath the uniform.

The radio filter on his belt sputtered, and then the voice came through, a tinny, grating drone that was almost incomprehensible for the sheer amount of noise. "It's past curfew."

Her brain started to run at 500 miles a minute, and her mouth had extreme difficulty catching up. "I-I-I-I know, I-I got lost, some-someone stole my food and I had to run all—all over town to get it back—"

"Could you identify this person if prompted?"

Lauren's heart stopped, and she forced her jaw to move—no sound came out. He was mocking her, of course he didn't believe her, "I-I didn't get a good look at them, bu-ut…" The terror smothered her voice. Stupid stupid stupid…

The metrocop took a single step forward, and Lauren found herself bolting away as fast as her legs could carry her, consequences be damned. Air quality being what it was, she came to a stop with her body crying out for more oxygen only just off the corner in a back alley, but when she looked, the figure was gone, and she had made it with her extra pack of rations. She took care that her victory exhalation was nice and slow, and crept through the shadows back to where she thought was the residential district.

A grin broke over her face unannounced. There was no reason whatsoever to feel so proud of herself for running away, but the fact was that she was bruise free and had gotten away with getting extra food. What's more, she recognized her surroundings now. She'd stumbled into a space between two old restaurants, a familiar, scuffed dumpster marking the pathway back to the her living area. Keeping close to the crumbled brick, the sound of her weathered shoes on the cement destroyed her personal sense of covertness, but there wasn't likely to be anybody who could see her.

Unless the CP was still trailing her somewhere, and she'd just missed him when she'd looked for him. Lauren held on to the rations a bit more defensively, like it was some kind of shield and would protect her from anything that would do her harm. A shadow stood in the corner of her eye, but wasn't there when she turned her head.

The residential district was a mass of apartments crammed together, like a whole block just for barracks. They weren't really homes—most of those were outside, broken down and scattered like Lincoln logs. These were more stable, but colder. Almost everything had to be cleared out to make space for all the people living there, most of the furniture in the rooms, all the trees on the sidewalks. She'd overheard some people refer to it as like a safe zone, away from cameras on street corners and with some hope of not getting harassed by thugs-though Civil Protection regularly made apartment raids to root out people suspected of being in the "resistance". It didn't feel safe to her.

After a moment, she spotted her street number. Somebody had added a new piece of graffiti to the enclosure wall while she was gone, a single dove flying out of the darkness, and someone else had taken the trouble to scratch it up almost beyond recognition. If there was something positive to say about her neighborhood, it was that it functioned like a living canvas, lots of voices rising up to be heard and lots of batons or shivs getting readied to break them down. Disappearances were common, although not as much as the vanishing rate for anybody who had just dropped off the train.

But these thoughts depressed her. She just wanted to get inside her building, self-anesthetize with some Administrator's Reserve and slip into oblivion.

Pausing at the door, she fumbled in her denim pockets before remembering that they didn't use keys anymore. The ID camera gave three quick flashes while she presented her exhaustion worn, scar crossed face, and the lock clicked open. When she came in, popped a loose quarter in the vending machine for the only drink anybody was able to get now, the smears of blood on the walls and floor the color of coffee stains didn't quite register into her mind until she noticed, getting into the large community room, that the unconscious teenager was gone and everyone else's faces were just a little more dismal than usual.

She was so tired. The pack of food hit the table like a sack of moldy potatoes and she stole a mattress for herself while the others tried to get the plastic open with their gnawed off nails. None of her dreams stayed with her in the morning.


Lauren felt the city, sometimes, creeping under her skin, pushing under her eyelids while she slept. It was impossible to push away or define, and encompassed more than just the population inside its walls. It felt like a pollution of the spirit, or maybe some kind of encroaching psychosis.

Her roommates were always the first ones awake. Usually it was the kid that shook her shoulder until she forced her eyes open, but he was, unfortunately for her, gone. So. She slept in.

Nobody bothered to wake her up before they left—she supposed they just forgot, and so she was in bed for half of the day. It wasn't like there were any warm, hopeful rays of light to filter through the window and tell her body it was time to stop producing melatonin and get the hell up. The only reason she did at all was because in the middle of the day she was introduced to a cold, unforgiving floor that almost cracked her head open because the mattress was so tall. She took it as a sign and stumbled to her feet.

Somebody had taken her can of drugged up water while she was asleep. Now she was thirsty and had a massive headache, and several times on the way downstairs she found herself smacking against the wall. There were still some stragglers lagging behind everyone else, heading along on their little daily paths, and she followed the flow of people to avoid losing herself again—invariably, this led her to City 17's center just off the train station.

It wasn't really the center of the city—that would be a few blocks over, at the base of the Citadel. It was just that this was the place everyone seemed to congregate, where new arrivals came and long-time dwellers went to think. All streets converged on this spot, a large circle of buildings and benches around a pedestal and a statue.

The statue in the middle of the circle was, of course, of the Administrator, the self-professed leader of the city and overall turncoat. She wasn't entirely sure who the man was, really. The white marble was so crudely carved it could have been anybody, although it was made with him wearing some kind of office suit with a loose lab coat, so everyone could tell he was a scientist. Funny, the emphasis on more intellectual figures in a place that amounted to a concentration camp. Lauren suspected that he didn't actually exist—that many of the things they were told about the world today were outright fabrications. But she couldn't remember anything before that train on the way in, so who was she to say? They had made her forget. She was a rat in a box.

Well. At least she knew she was in the plaza.

It would be nice if there were as glaringly obvious landmarks in the rest of the city.

It wasn't as if she had much to do except brood—unlike some people, she hadn't bothered to go out and get a job yet. She suspected she had at other cities, but clearly her employment hadn't lasted long. Besides, they lived at best on a token economy, meant to give an illusion of autonomy, but it didn't really matter whether you did anything or not, you would still get the same amount of food every morning. The only thing that counted was how good you were at keeping your head down. So that's what she did. Just sat herself down at a cold bench at the base of that statue and fiddled around with her cracking fingers. She liked to think she was one of those people that new arrivals spied as they stumbled out from the scanning stations where they were checked for anything remotely resembling free will, an omen of how terrible life was here. She'd watch for sinking spirits until noon, and then maybe look for something to eat…

Her muscles froze. One of the Civil Protection officers screening people coming off the train was aiming that mask of a face directly where she was sitting, lenses lightless. She thought of last night, of running away, her blood became ice cold.

There was a lull in drop-offs. He was coming her way. She stood up, legs tensing. Oh no, no no no no no…

"Hey-"

At the first syllable her mind shut off and she ran. This had to be the same one. There was no other reason to approach her. None at all. He was going to pull her off to a deserted room somewhere, wanted to have a "talk" with a stun stick and his boots.

His footsteps, heavier than hers, pounded against the pavement after her. Nobody cared, this wasn't a strange occurrence. One or two CPs even seemed to consider joining the chase, before deciding that it wasn't worth it to get thrown off their patrol for one scared little rabbit. Lauren was alone.

Oh, but she had always been alone.

Somehow her path led her off to the industrial district again. It might be just because there were less people and she didn't have to worry about hitting them, but she regretted it. There weren't a lot of places to go in a hurry with all the machinery and factories taking up so much room. And it wasn't like she was going to remember any routes from last night.

Although she did end up ducking into the Cremator building, operational in all of its horrifying glory. The hellfire of the smelting stations licked at her heels while the children worked, oblivious to her presence like the little drones they were. She needed out, where was the exit? WHERE WAS THE EXIT?

She'd been cat-and-moused before, but never for an actual offense. She'd watched people who were attacked for doing things they shouldn't. If they didn't die from the initial bout of "subduing", they got dragged off to interrogation chambers. If they, somehow, survived whatever went on in there, rumor had it that they were taken to the Air Exchange to be…processed.

Not really a rumor. Metrocops would brag about it to passing civilians every day.

Lauren didn't want to be one of those people that got processed.

The factory exit door beckoned, and she sprinted through. She could run away. Try to join the resistance. Get a new name. Move? Kill herself? Find a deep hole somewhere. Ideas, fears, everything going racing in a disorderly tangle of her mind like an influx of a drug rush, she careened into a tall figure at the end of the line and crashed to the ground, catching glimpses of a round white head with beady black eyes. A long, dark green trenchcoat with stick thin, pasty white arms bringing a large gun up to fire for the first time in its miserable, short life.

She snatched the Immolator out of its hands and rounded about for an enemy that hadn't reached her yet. Her heart thudded from somewhere at the bottom of her sternum. She didn't think she'd ever held a firearm before. The weight was uncomfortable and the thing stank of other people's suffering. It wasn't suited to her hands—that's what she was thinking as she stumbled away from the Cremator still reeling from its empty fingers, radio static and directional demands starting to come up from inside the industrial center. The first way that looked like it didn't lead to a dead end, she took it.

Was she crazy? Had she lost her mind? There was no conceivable way she was getting out of this and going back to normal. Why had she reacted so badly? It probably wasn't even the same officer.

Nevermind. She was running out of this mess. Lauren picked a direction and stuck with it, the sounds of habitation and factories slowly being replaced by an alien, almost imperceptible hum of silence that she only tended to notice in her nightmares.

In an ordinary day, this street led to a garbage plot-just a place for people to toss in litter, or officers to toss in nonessential contraband like toys or leaflets, and burn it into the heavens. It didn't seem very environmentally sound, but there was a whole tower specifically for polluting the air somewhere, so this was small change by comparison. Today wasn't ordinary, and it wasn't just because in the span of ten minutes she'd lost all hope for status quo and was probably being written up as a fugitive even as she gasped and attempted to regain her breath. There was something wrong-a shadow where it shouldn't have been, something mismatched and out of place, a gaping hole in her vision almost floating above the junkyard. It wasn't waiting for her, she didn't think, it was-maybe it was observing something else?

What she saw was a—well it—it was—

It was like heat on a sidewalk in the summer, lines of curved light radiating off the pavement, except it wasn't a sidewalk, and there was no warmth at all. Maybe a better comparison would be some kind of vacuum, tugging things into it, but that didn't seem good enough because it had a form. It was a—a shadow, pulling at her mind and jarring loose a painful babble of thoughts and memories. And it looked at her as she, insignificant bug she was, drew its attention, but she wasn't sure if it was a face. Something in her was saying it was. Her eyes said it wasn't.

Lauren frowned, worked her jaw, trying to make sense of the distorted space she was looking at, that she had stumbled upon so suddenly. Her grip on the Cremator's gun was weak, a sense of shock rooting her feet in place. She couldn't even tell what it was doing-like by the very fact of it existing, this thing was doing something so impossible and mind-warping that all other activities it happened to be engaged in were irrelevent.

The shadow cleared its throat and adjusted its tie.

"Well. This israther unfortu-nate, isn't it?"

But maybe that phrase had just been false memories and the dead air compounded with her sudden blankness, though it did feel a little bit like there was a voice of some kind whispering in her mind about what she was doing while the thoughts in her head started to spill out of her ear.

She felt her arms move, but none of the impulses in her brain that should have accompanied them. It wasn't like operating under puppet strings at all—the movements were fluid, they felt correct, but none of it came from her mind, she had to guess the direction the gun was spinning and not automatically know, didn't recoil when the barrel rested up against her temple. Her eyes developed tunnel vision, everything blacking out again, a deeper darkness that didn't even let you look—everything but that gun was very far away, even her own self. Her blind hands fumbled for the trigger at the sound of approaching bootsteps, and that Immolator was the last thing she saw.

Funny. Concentration-camp like conditions aside, she hadn't been planning to kill herself today.

The very last thing she heard was the whoosh of the flames and the pursuing Civil Protection Officer calling her name while her skin melted away from her cracking skull.


I know canon-wise Lauren's just a post-it note in Barney's locker, but she's kind of turned into a full-blown character for me. Much of that's restrained to the canon-verse, though. I'm not sure precisely what's different here aside from the fact that the two hadn't been dating for as long before the Cascade hit. And she's kind of mean. Meaner, anyway.