Frobisher

Part 1

Alex sat on her window seat with her headphones in and scrolling through the internet. The window of her run-down apartment was wide open, and a warm breeze swept through. For once it was a nice April morning, and for the first time in a week, it wasn't raining. The run down Mornesse stretched out in front of her as if someone had taken every abandoned warehouse, every ghost estate, and every dying building and dumped them in one town. Just this small section of the Byiron City, where the poor lived, and the rich sneered at. It was one big black inkblot on the white page of the city. And Alex loved it. Here no-one told her to stand up straighter or to wear a dress and look pretty. In the Mornesse, the only rule was to treat everyone as equals. And it was a rule that Alex herself put in place. Alex looked up from her phone and stared out at the docks. Ships came and went on the beautiful turquoise sea, and the city bustled about, minding its own business, too preoccupied with surviving to enjoy the beauty.

 "Hey, Alex?" called Happy, searching through the drawers in the kitchen. This snapped Alex out of her trance, and she turned back into the living room to look at her friend's frantic search through the small kitchen's depths.

"Yeah?" she replied, pulling out one headphone. 

"Have you seen my knife?" Happy asked her, rummaging through the papers on the table.

"Which one?"

"The one with the black handle"

"They all have black handles"

"The medium-sized one with the spiral up the blade"

"Isn't it in the blade cabinet?"

"The first one is but I'm looking for the second"

"OK."

"So have you seen it?"

"Seen what?"

"The knife!"

"Ummm, no. I think Byron might have taken it."

"Thanks for the help!"

"You're welcome"

"I was being sarcastic!"

"Oh"

She rolled her eyes and went in search of Byron while Alex returned to her phone and continued scrolling for the next twenty minutes.

"Alex!" shouted Happy from two feet away. "What was that for?" she shouted back, pulling her headphones from her ears. "I've been calling you for a good ten minutes, if you're going back to the house to get the rest of your stuff, you should do it now because you can't risk your dad being home. Also, Byron didn't even have the knife so thanks for the advice."

"Ok, Ok, I'll go now," she replied, plugging her headphones back in.

She scooped up her bag on the way out of the apartment, her long brown braid swinging behind her. She walked right past the elevator without even looking, though saying a silent prayer that it would be eventually fixed one of these years, and continued down the six flights of stairs.

She passed Mrs Scruncy, putting out a few more bowls of cat food outside her apartment, and sighed. They got so many strays in the building because of those bowls that they never knew what to do with them. She swung out of the apartment building four floors down and fished her keys out of her pocket as she strolled over to her motorcycle.

She hopped on, revving the engine before speeding out into the empty roads on the sunny Wednesday afternoon. She passed through the decrypted apartments and ghost estates full of people until she eventually made her way into the nicer part of town. Slowly the graffiti reduced, the houses became nicer and bigger, and the number of people wandering the streets without a job to get to, greatly reduced.