Black Marion

13

Winter came early in 2576. Barely November, the snow swirled about the towers of the Sky, the night glitter of the cityscape caught upon the crystal flakes. It was a beautiful view from within the warmth of a falcon. Atmospheric, a vision accompanied by the hum of gentle rock music, drumming to the rhythm of the storm.

"I'm so sorry about this, baby. I know you've been waiting to see that play for a while..."

Alex smiled at the apology from the driver's seat. Her mother had bought them tickets to Across the South Sea to celebrate her recent achievement with her internship, but not a half-hour into the show, the hospital had called. There was no helping it—a doctor was obligated to her patients.

"It isn't a problem." She glanced at the rails to navigate a dip into flight mode. "I could use a visit down. It's been a while."

"It's nothing to miss."

"It's where you spend most of your day."

The corner of her mother's lips quirked, a crease of age in the buccal padding of her skin. Women her age could erase such things by science, but Clara Davis had always been a bit different. Her family came from the lower, where even citizens of the Sky tended to be frugal. Marrying her father, an assemblyman of the upper, had been the boldest transgression she had ever made in the Davis name. They did not speak with her much anymore.

She still worked among the familiars of her old community though, floors three-hundred of Central Hospital, a place far more rugged and hectic than the calm pristine levels where Alex always went for her own check-ups. Here on the unceremonious gray deck they parked, and Alex followed her through the unadorned halls, which smelled of routinely scented citric disinfectant. She had been raised by the prestige of her father, surrounded by deliberate décor and aromas; down a few hundred floors, it was a different lifestyle. She had learned not to disdain it because of her mother, but else, she wondered if she would have turned out like her preparatory school peers—believing that the lower you lived, the lower you were.

They ended up going lower still than the floors three-hundred. For a short time Alex waited in her mother's office, working on a weekend assignment on machine learning, until her mother returned to inform her that she needed to fetch medication from the midground stocks. Such a thing never happened in the upper Sky, where all the necessary supplies were kept in routine stock. But here, the maintenance was not as stringent.

"You can wait here, if you'd like," said Clara.

"I'll drive you," said Alex.

In truth, Alex would have preferred to stay in the stable warmth, wrapped up in the electric text of academia. But the media gave terrible impressions of midground at night, particularly with the illicit Ground activity in recent years, and she did not want her mother going down alone.

It was a ten minute drive to the lowest floors of Central. Alex dropped her mother in front of the entrance, then took the falcon for parking on a midground hospital deck. When she exited the falcon and walked onto midground, it seemed as if she had emerged into an underwater universe where the liquid was the pressure of the looming towers. She wanted to look around. She was afraid too. Intense curiosity and timid apprehension tore at her, until a vibration on her wrist demanded her attention.

It was a message from her mother: Come help me with the boxes! R104.

With a bit of reluctance, Alex walked away from the midground landscape. Inside the hospital, she was quickly taken by another new scene.

About a dozen adults and four children were waiting in the lobby, some with imperfect skin, some a little under or oversized. A blue dot shone through the two napes exposed to Alex. They were Grounders, perhaps permitted workers of the Sky or permitted visitors to the hospital. She had heard somewhere that Grounders frequently requested the advanced medicine of the Sky for the more troublesome medical conditions; a rare few were granted the permission up. Even so, their treatment occurred down here, which was a world away from the amenities of the real Sky. The lowest Central floors functioned more as a warehouse: over half the space was used for the storage of newly manufactured machines and medications.