Shadow Walker

Encounter

The breeze blew from the North, through the bellows of the Red Desert and over the city of Atunda, dusting the dawn in an unnatural copper glow. Had Declan been looking up, he might've bathed in the impression of sunlight and compared it with memories of the day—something he hadn't seen in almost two years. Instead, he walked to his bus stop with his head down, threadbare canvas shoes crunching gravel as he passed between the gravestones of Memorium Cemetery.

Something was about to happen. He could feel it the air, the way it seemed to crackle with static and hum with the vibrations of change. It was something he'd always been able to sense, ever since he was a child. Tommy called it his 'dung beetle' talent—to always know when the sky was about to dump another load of shit on him.

And sure enough, halfway to his stop, he heard a strange noise—something between a grunt and a cough—and looked up. On the far side of the cemetery, just past the cold marble pillars of the memorial, a shadow moved along the corrugated iron fence and disappeared behind a tapered headstone. He squinted. Was it a bot? Did they know what he and Tommy were planning? Were they tracking his movements? Or were his dung senses distracted by the stench of the dilapidated hospital he'd just left?

A low moan rose from the same spot, easing his paranoia. Bots didn't make human sounds; they moved silently on wings you'd be lucky to hear if you were a dog. No. There was a person hiding behind that gravestone.

"Hello?" he said, drawing closer, curiosity killing his good sense. What kind of morbid individual—besides himself—would be passing through the cemetery so close to changeover? "Who's there?"

In the silence beyond his words, he could just make out the zap, zap, zap of blowflies barrelling into the SolStore street lamps overhead. As his apprehension rose, so did the hairs on his arms and by the time he rounded the headstone, his nerves were strung as tight as his muscles.

He didn't expect the woman to be crouched on the ground, her legs pressed against her chest, hands clasped around her middle. She wore plain clothes—jeans and a t-shirt too tight for an Atunda summer—and when Dec looked closely, he noticed a blossom of blood slowly seeping from her sternum and out between her fingers.

He leaned down to touch her shoulder, an exclamation of concern on his tongue, when her head snapped up and he stumbled back, the exclamation turning to a low defensive grunt. She was one of them—a Northerner. He should've known from the sheen of her raven hair and the stain of her skin which looked as though it'd been dipped in tea. She was just as he'd seen them on the news projections—irises as dark as her pupils, lips full, permanently protruding in a pout. He didn't, however, expect her to be so small, so delicately framed, with features so well-balanced on the parchment expanse of her moon-shaped face.

Her body went rigid and the whites of her eyes flashed in stark contrast to the darkness and shadows around them. Dec knew what she saw. Where he'd once been handsome in his angles and contrasts, he was now angry and pinched. His skin, like all Nocturnals, had become waxy and pallid, showcasing the extent of his sun depravation. His dark hair seemed to be getting darker all the time, as were the shadows under his eyes, giving him the hollow look of someone whose gaze was falling further and further into his head. Nobody would guess he was only twenty. The night had aged him. The horrors he'd seen had added years to his face.

Let her be scared, he thought. It was a small victory for what her people had done to his.

"Fancy seeing a Northerner out after dark," he heard himself say, though his voice sounded far away and deeper than usual.

The woman drew back against the gravestone and whispered, "You can see me?"

It was Dec's turn to draw back in surprise. He didn't know they could speak his language. And to speak it so well, without even a trace of an accent was enough to make him lose his train of thought. "Of course I can see you," he said. "I'm not blind."