Last Breath

Part 1: The Wall

The air is putrid down here. My eyes burn and stream in the pollution and soot that falls in a ceaseless black rain, but I have grown accustomed to it after my perpetually dismal years in the Run. Well, this huge, neglected and degraded disc of The City is supposed to be called 'Hollowchane' but we call it the Run. We are looked down upon by those on the smaller disc above, called Rigfell, but I suppose only by those observing us through the cameras that litter the underside of their disc, or the adventurous individuals who would see fit to stand on top of the perimeter wall and look down on us. They never do; their fear of being relegated to the Run is... substantial, to say the least, and even looking at it is too much of a threat to their sense of security.

The fear Rigfell people feel is second only to those at the top of this trophic ladder, those who live in the uppermost (and therefore smallest) disc of Velimore, those who have power and status and air and all the freedoms that wealth and inbreeding allow, freedoms that none of the rest of us can touch. Above Velimore there is only a giant bird. Its talons are rooted in the centre of the disc but from the Run we can only see the feathers of the colossal wings as they unfold, wing-tips outstretched and touching in front of the Eagle's face like a wide halo. It creates an umbrella that shields the sky from our sorry faces.

We tell stories about the 'Fallen' (a kid whose Velimore parents pissed off someone important, punishable by the banishment of said child to the Run) but nobody appears to have ever met one. Of course, Velimore families tell their kids stories too, about how this family member or that friend somehow disappointed the rulers of the City. They were punished, their child ripped from their arms and tossed down the Spire stairwell in the centre of the city, step after step after step, round and round, all the way from Velimore to the great iron door at the bottom. Bomp bomp bomp, all the way down until the door was flung open and the child was tossed into the soot-filled gutter to breathe polluted air and struggle to survive with absolutely no idea how. You have to earn your oxygen down here, and the fables of those cast-away children always ended up in a small, broken and asphyxiated body being thrown down into the Pit. Kids don't survive well without a family. I remember those stories, I remember hearing them through the wall of my shack as a child, alone in the unfamiliar soot-filled, colourless space, too small to reach the cracked, flickering lantern and certainly too afraid to move. To this day I had never dared tell a soul that I was one that never ended up as a body.

***

It was a normal day for me. I woke up freezing cold under the thin blanket that I spread over myself every night. My bed is a stone platform and it never makes for a good night's rest, but I have grown accustomed to it, as I have to many other inhumane things. I unclip my mask while I wheeze and eat my pellets for breakfast, sucking air in between breaths. The pellets are hard and stick to your teeth when you chew. They don't go down except with the help of the water flask. The water always tastes like soot. On a good day it tastes like ash, but mostly it tastes like soot. The black rain is soft and silent and I thought it was a literal plague when I first came to the Run, unable to wash it off and dulling every colour that exists into a tarnished powdery black, but after a while it became an ever-present pest, then an indifferent judge. Eventually you barely notice, except when you see a clean patch of skin and are reminded of what even a whiff of colour is. You always feel dirty here.

When the Guard show up, which is about three times a generation, they hold their noses and look at you with such disgust that you can't help but feel their revulsion sit on you like a tyrannical, judgemental three-piece suit until you manage to strip it off days later. But even then, the underside of Rigfell is literally smothered with cameras to watch your every move and make sure you didn't help your fellow man. When they point directly at you you can see a little laser beam light struggling through the soot to scan your forearms for your ID. It has less trouble finding you closer to the Spire, seeing as the majority of the soot tends to fall around the edge of Rigfell, which is why most of us choose to live closer to the Ring on the outskirts of the disc. The problem with that logic is all the roofs are self-gabled with soot build-up and are periodically prone to collapse. Eventually the piles on the roads mound up and you have to dig out your shack or find somewhere else to live, or you might find a cave-in traps you underground until you suffocate. There are massive piles of soot just lying around but with the population declining it's never an issue, you just move somewhere else until the roof buckles, hopefully not when you're inside. And it makes for a soft underfoot layer, if you could call that luxurious.