Stucco hearts

Chapter 1

Annabeth Chase wakes up a whole minute before her alarm goes off and stares at the cracked ceiling of her bedroom as she lies buried in the scratchy sheets of her single bed. The closed window to her right dispels the noise of the street below: cars and buses rumbling up and down tired streets, voices shouting back and forth, angry and worn out. Like the world they live in.

She counts down the seconds for her alarm to go off, three sharp beeps and then the hum of the radio; a bleaty pop song she doesn't know the name of. Annabeth's sigh falls silently into the room and she sits up, dragging the covers away and flinching at the cold air. Manhattan in November reveals the city at its bleakest nature and the cold seems to seep into Annabeth's very bones.

The bed groans as she stands up and stretches her hands to the ceiling, fingers intertwined as her spine cracks. In the same movement, she bends over, keeping her legs straight as she presses her palms to the wooden floorboards. Her body is stiff from the cold and she feels much older than her twenty two years. Sometimes she cannot believe she is already twenty two years old. Her childhood is a distant memory; she barely remembers the innocence she once looked at the world with. Annabeth has spent most of her twenty two years of life angry at the world, at her parents and her government and her damn bad luck. At this point, she doesn't know how to feel any other way.

The floorboards creak as she walks the short distance from her bed to the tiny bathroom and strips off her layers of clothes, stepping into the small shower. The water barely reaches lukewarm and Annabeth makes her shower quick, scrubbing her long blonde curls with cheap shampoo and shaving her underarms with a disposable razor which nicks at her skin. If the air was cold before, it positively stings her wet skin as she furiously rubs her body dry with a thin towel, the material of which is just as cheap and scratchy as her bedsheets.

Life hasn't always been this way for her. Her parent's house - that is, her father's and her stepmother's - is big and beautiful and out of the city, far away from the cluttered sprawl of Manhattan. Her sheets had been freshly washed by a maid once a week and the shower pressure had been - well, more than the trickle she puts up with now. But she will never go back there. As soon as she graduated high school, Annabeth had scrounged up six years of part time work wages and moved into the city. Her father is required by law to pay for her school tuition if he is able to - and he certainly is - but she still has to pay for her apartment, heating, water, food, travel and so on. She gets by now on the wages she receives working four days a week at a law firm; the same one that her best friend Piper is doing an internship with as part of her training to become an attorney. It's dull work, but she prefers it to waiting on tables and forcing polite smiles to jackass customers.

Working four full days a week means that Annabeth has to complete her college course over five years instead of the standard three. Today is a college day, meaning a morning of lectures followed by a measly lunch from the cafeteria before she heads North into the city to take part in one of the protests she's been helping organise for the past month. Annabeth has been protesting since she could first understand the concept of injustice - which was of the age of seven. And there is plenty of injustice for her to complain about now.

A hundred and fifty years ago, mankind discovered the countdown. An internal clock inside every living human which counted down the years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds until a person will meet their soulmate - the one person with whom they would spend the rest of their lives. And the brilliant scientists and technicians figured out a way to make this clock a displayable one, so that everybody could know exactly when they would meet their soulmate. At birth, every baby was implanted with the timer on the inside of their left wrist, and from that moment on, their digits would be ticking down.

As she drags a sweater over her head, Annabeth glances at her own wrist. 3:19:5:42:45. She has three and a half months left and then those numbers will be replaced with a name; the name of her supposed soul mate.