CHAPTER 7

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Later that evening, I climb the steps to my rooftop escape an hour before the six o'clock lockdown. It is the only place that allows me to breathe my own air. When I'm alone here, I feel like all my dreams can come true, and that everyone is interested in my welfare. That is until I look across at the church – my wifi goddess, and see those three palm trees. They are a constant reminder to me and everyone that an angel fell from grace and everything she touched is now rotten to the core. Still, they believe in silly things like bloodlines and ashes of grandeur rising again. Yet no one expects it will be through me. They keep hoping for some secret child to appear and make Leer Island the envy of the Karmic Islands again. And I too long for such a miracle to absolve me from this stain of sin, a freedom that the Dream Killers promised but are incapable of delivering.

Leer Island is one of thirty-three Karmic Islands surrounded by the Bloody Sea, which transforms from aquamarine blue to blood red for seven days each month. It is a mixture of town – where we live, what is considered the country area that starts along the Cave Beach stretch, where some of the crime festers, the middle between us and there, and the forbidden Florence Street Extension, where the hopefuls – the lepers of our society – live.

Yet it's the perfect place for anyone who wants to start over, because most don't come here to stay. For them Leer Island is the shiny key to unlock the rumoured good life in Stocatta. Then they learn the truth, that the embassy is a moody hand in the sky, reeling opportunity back in just as you're about to snatch. So they take their chances on the bridge between here and there, only to find that there are only two ways out of Leer Island. And the alternative to the embassy is the rusty key of death. 

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