"Sometimes you can see the sunlight, if you tilt your head just that way, reflecting off of the edge of the rooftops, glittering down onto the slums. Have you ever tried it?"
Honestly, he hasn't. He hasn't stopped long enough to even look up at the plate, stare up at rusted barriers and blood painted signs that ward them away from the light and the life that floats above, taunting them, dancing behind the lines to mock them.
He's always just so, so busy.
"How can you see the sunlight with the plate there?"
She giggles, holds a hand up to her lips, and points, goddess flowers in hand, auburn hair tossed back over her slender shoulders and dancing in a chestnut river down her back and to her spine. She's let it flow free today – just today – because today is special.
Today is their day off.
"I bet you didn't know this." She always starts that way – as if she's already explained everything she's ever wanted to explained, already said the words at the tip of her tongue and he's somehow missed them when he wasn't thinking, somehow didn't catch the bells ringing out the words that he's never heard before, the myths he's never learned before. "But there are tiny little cracks in the plate – real little ones. They're hard to see, and you can only see them sometimes, when the sun is just right, but they're there."
He looks at her, focuses on her face, but she isn't watching him – she never is – and is instead staring up, away, out over the smog and the darkness and toward some light that only she can perceive.
"How do you know?"
"I can feel it. It's warm, you know. Really warm, and nice. Have you ever felt the warmth?" He has to pause to think about that, but he shakes his head when he realizes that no, he's never felt the warmth before, but he'd very much like to.
But he doesn't say so.
The high, blue suit collar is choking him too tight. The words don't come.
"It makes the flowers grow here. There's a big crack over this church, running all the way back home, lighting up the flower garden and warming everything just enough for the world to grow. That's why the plants grow so well."
She's turning away before he can ask her how they grow, where they come from, ask her the thousands of questions they won't answer, ask her the millions of questions that he's never asked, because he's too well trained. A trained dog. A whipped dog, beat into submission.
"Try it."
She vanishes like a gorgeous goddess, like a phantom, her whicker basket dripping flowers down her wrists, dripping sea greens and scarlets and magentas – he never even knew such colors even existed before – and he watches her go in a patch of her own light, her own warmth.
And he knows the sun is hitting the cracks just right today.
He reaches up, pulls off one glove with his teeth, and in a graceful tug, yanks the tie down his chest, tossing to the side, his head tilting up to squint at the rooftops nearby.