At a jog, Vayne could cover the breadth of Mortal District Rho-07 in about twenty minutes, ignoring other pedestrians and the cramped conditions of the hundreds of alleyways running between, over, and under the buildings. Yet, he had been moving at a steady clip for more than six hours, stopping for rest only when the pounding of his heart and the searing burn in his lungs proved too much to continue on.
Through a lifetime of hauling, building, and participation in underground fighting rings, Vayne knew that he was fitter than the average mortal, albeit rather more scarred than the norm. Life was hard, and the credits from sanctioned work only went so far if one wanted a life better than squalor.
Jobs that paid well were few and far between in the Districts. Overseers earned perhaps twice as much as a labourer, and even they had to be frugal to get by every month, especially if they had dependents to feed. Vayne’s own job as a construction worker paid a hundred credits a week; rent and food for himself and his sister Sylvie cost nearly twice that at the very worst of accommodations.
The underground fighting rings in the sewers were run by dubious sorts. He never questioned just how they financed the illicit operations; all he knew was that every bout he fought earned him a week’s worth of salary in five, maybe ten minutes. Fighting every week or so was enough to cover rent and afford nutrient paste rather than the disgusting dried moss that tasted foul and came out the other way fouler.
Sylvie didn’t like it when he fought, especially when he came back with welts and cuts all over. But he would sooner have her be angry at him than pick up less savoury forms of work over her current one as a poorly paid moss farmhand; there were very few things a waifish young woman could do to earn a living and yet remain emotionally whole.
So when, despite all his attempts to keep her safe, she was gravely injured in an accident when some drunken Angel stumbled overhead and collapsed the hab-block where they lived, what could Vayne do but attempt the most foolhardy of ways to pay for her treatment?
Every natural-born mortal in Rho-07 was taught three very important rules growing up, hammered repeatedly by their parents, commune elders, or whomsoever otherwise raised them. But here Vayne was, breaking all three in his impossible quest.
Rule One: stay in the District.
While there were, strictly speaking, no laws preventing any mortal from leaving the District, the rest of the world simply wasn’t built for his kind. The cobblestones that made up most of the footpaths were rough and unyielding, the cracks between each nearly as tall as himself. The walls he clung near to rose to infinite heights, the shortest among them dozens of times higher than the tallest buildings in the District. Even the plants he encountered – weeds and wild grass for the most part – could hide him from view beneath their fronds.
Though he knew where he was going, having begged a map off of one of the District’s few traders, he was still almost turned around by the sheer scale of his surroundings. So-called landmarks such as a towering monument at the middle of a thoroughfare were easy enough to imagine: a marble carving of a beautiful woman, face hands upraised in exultant worship.
The trader didn’t mention that the statue was several times bigger than the entire Mortal District.
Rule Two: if you must leave, stay out of sight.
The unofficially official way for mortals to travel between Districts was to traverse the sewage lines. Every District was hooked up to the Capital’s vast sewer systems; for mortals who knew the safe paths and times, they could get to a nearby District without exposing themselves to undue attention within days. There were even underground black markets dealing in illicit goods and services that no Enforcer bothered to stamp out because they weren’t worth the trouble.
Vayne had a rather more time sensitive need to reach his destination. He couldn’t afford to waste days on detours and circuitous paths. So, rather against all common sense and self-preservation, he was exposed for any passing Angel to see. Protected though he was by laws as a registered mortal, all it would take was for one careless step or dropped object, and that would be the end of him – and of Sylvie, whose only hope was the success of his foolhardy venture.
Staying close to walls and in the shadows as much as possible, he could scurry along most side paths without getting close to the titanic footfalls of passing Angels. Certainly, most of Them did not bother looking at where They were stepping; a crushed mortal would be a temporary inconvenience at worst, having to pay a modest fine if anyone went to the effort of identifying the blood splatter as a registered mortal.
Life was short, but it could always get shorter for mortals.
Rule Three: Avoid dealing with Angels.
Despite looking like mortal women, Angels were anything but. Quite apart from the way even the shortest of Them towered a hundred times taller than any mortal, there was a certain air of superiority and leisurely ease around every one Vayne had ever seen, as if They never had to work to survive a single day of Their ageless lives. He didn’t know which was worse: that They could not understand the struggle of mortal subsistence, or that They did and allowed it to happen.
As a child, Vayne had heard cautionary tales from the elders in the creche. When they were younger, there was a drought in the District owing to an unusually hot season. The reservoir dried up, and the moss farms shrivelled. Several community leaders at the time gathered to petition the Angel caretaker of the District for help – the Angel still in charge of the District today, in fact – but were rebuffed and ignored.
Undeterred, they rallied nearly a hundred others in protest, raising a clamour and burning plastic trash to literally cause a stink. They sought to draw the attention of other Angels, hoping against hope that one would take pity upon the thirsting, famished District and offer help.
Instead, they drew the ire of the caretaker. A few keystrokes in Her control terminal, and the gates to the District snapped shut. Before the protestors could react in any meaningful manner, She grabbed a rubber hose and unleashed a torrent of water directly at the gathered crowd. The flow smashed into the protestors, killing several from the impact alone and scattering them like twigs in a river.
Nor did She stop there. The hose kept spewing on for long minutes, and She was willfully deaf to the cries of terror and anguish as many more not involved in the protest were caught in the rising tide, pinned and whelmed by flotsam, trapped and drowned in the moss farm tunnels.
By the end, the death toll was in the hundreds. And all She said was…
“Know your place, worms.”
There was an inquiry later, but the caretaker was acquitted of all guilt because She claimed She was “putting out a dangerous fire” and “preventing a worse tragedy”. Complete hogwash, but who would take a mortal’s words over an Angel?
So. Dealing with Angels. The general consensus was: do not.
But how else could Vayne rustle up fifty thousand credits within a week, when even the overseers of the District got barely a thousand a month? Medical treatments were expensive, and his sister was bedridden from injuries that would be fatal within a fortnight or so. She was all he had in the world; what was a crippling debt when compared to her life?
Thus, here he was, following a crudely drawn map into the cyclopean maze of a city that was Angel domain, scrambling from shadow to shadow in a furtive attempt to avoid being accosted by Angels wondering what a mortal like him was doing so far away from a District.
“Two… two streets past the statue,” he counted. “Then a left, and… and down to the canal.”
Stairs. Angel-scale stairs, to be precise: each step nearly ten times his height, stretching downwards in a flight of twenty. Each requiring a careful drop over the edge, a breathless plunge, rolling to bleed off the momentum, accumulating bruises and aches with each subsequent step.
With a determination born of desperation, Vayne forced himself to ignore the infinitely harder climb back. If all went according to plan, it wouldn’t be a concern for the next while.
Halfway down, Vayne felt a tremor in the stonework. He threw himself back against the wall of the stair, making himself as small as possible – and not a moment too soon, as a colossal, ruby red stiletto descended a couple metres away from his prone form.
The Angel continued down the stairs, descending the entire flight in a fraction of the time it took for Vayne to recover from each step. A vast shadow fell across the cowering mortal for a brief moment. Slender, pale legs twice as tall as a District building vanished into a tantalisingly shadowed skirt; Vayne averted his eyes, knowing that being ignored was far more preferable than being caught playing voyeur, intentionally or otherwise. She went on Her merry way, utterly oblivious to the fact that She would have nearly turned him to paste had he been a second too slow.
Vayne swore under his breath as She passed.
Shaking his head and taking a shuddering breath to calm his racing heart, Vayne continued his descent. The ground beyond the staircase was smooth metal plating, cold from the evening mist and proximity to the canal. He felt the chill through his threadbare shoes, shivering with each step as he neared his goal.
One turn away from his destination, the dark alleyway within view but still several minutes distant, he paused for a moment to gather his breath and his wits. He watched the water below gently lap against the edge of the platform, neon reflections shimmering from on high from the towering buildings all around. An idle thought prompted him to count the nearest one’s storeys from the lit windows; he could see fourteen before it vanished upwards into the mist. It was also more than four times as wide as District Rho-07.
To think that the Angels had so much space and resources to build such a magnificent city, yet confined his kind to ill-maintained ghettos and forcing them to subsist on tasteless nutrient paste and cultivated tunnel moss…
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. It wasn’t as if he could do anything about it, anyway.
Setting off at a jog, Vayne approached the alleyway entrance. Unlike most other places he had passed so far, it was dark and uninviting. What walls he could see were plain and empty, the paint chipped from lack of maintenance. The sole light over the alleyway arch was dim and flickered every few seconds. And, leaning against a wall just beyond, an Angel dressed in an unadorned black outfit, gazing out over the canal with a complacent stare, puffing upon a cigarette.
The latter was a concern, but Vayne had been ignored by every other Angel on his journey thus far, and had no reason to assume otherwi-
“Hey, pipsqueak. Your kind ain’t allowed here.”
He froze in horror at the growled words, staring at the ground before him, clinging to the faintest thread of hope that She was not talking to him.
“Yeah, you down there. Now scram before I gotta step on you or something.”
Primal instincts making every movement taut but slow, as if beneath the gaze of a fearsome predator, Vayne looked up – and up, and up – at the Angel staring down at him with dispassionate annoyance.
“I -”
“Not gonna tell you twice. Get outta here.”
He marshalled his courage and raised his voice to a shout.
“I’m a registered citizen looking for work, ma’am!”
A raised eyebrow. The Angel pushed off the wall and stepped closer, making Vayne backpedal from the sudden movement. A leather boot with soles thrice his height slammed down before him, pushing him back from the displaced air.
“You can’t be serious.”
With a sigh and a flick of Her wrist, the Angel discarded Her nearly-finished cigarette, dropping it to Vayne’s side. He recoiled from the acrid stench of the butt – the logical part of his mind noting that it was still twice as long as he was tall – and let out a shriek as a boot descended to snuff it out, grinding it flat.
“What can someone like you even do for work here?” asked She, lifting Her boot and showing the flattened remains of the cigarette. “You should scurry back to your District before something bad happens to -”
“I want to fight for the Circle!” Vayne cried out, then paled as he realised he had just interrupted Her.
Eyes widening in bafflement, the Angel stared down at him for several long seconds.
“How do you even…” She muttered under Her breath. “Y’know what? Not My problem. You stay right there.”
With that command, She rose and walked away a few steps, right hand rising to Her ear. Vayne fell backwards, legs giving out from his own sheer audacity even as he watched the Angel speak to someone else through Her earpiece.
“Hey, uh, Miss Garland? Viper here. I’ve got a, uh, a mortal here who says he wants to ‘fight for the Circle’.” A pause. “Yeah, that’s what he said. Didn’t say how. I figured You might want to let the boss lady know, its the kind of thing She - yeah. Uh huh. Right.” A longer pause. “Sure thing. Night’s still early, shouldn’t be anyone else coming by here for a while. He’s not going anywhere.”
Vayne clambered to his feet and stood his ground as the Angel turned back to him.
“Well, looks like you’re getting a shot, pipsqueak,” Viper shrugged. “My superior is coming by in a couple of minutes to bring you to the boss lady. I’d tell you to be careful what you wish for, but… you’re literally asking for it. Wait just right there.”
That said, She fished another cigarette out from Her pocket, lit it, and leaned back against the wall to resume Her bored vigil, completely ignoring the mortal as he tried to slow his racing heart.
Vayne was starting to have second thoughts. Only the mental image of his sister expiring in agony from her injuries prevented his resolve from breaking. Interacting with an Angel face-to-face was far more nerve wracking than anything he had ever imagined. It was like talking to a moving building that was also annoyed at you for no discernable reason other than the fact you were as tall as a fingernail.
The metal deck rumbled with the approach of distant, titanic footsteps. Emerging from the depths of the alleyway was another Angel, dressed in a far more ostentatious outfit – a sheer, form-fitting red dress, jewelled wrist- and neck-bracers that probably cost more than several dozen Districts, and crystalline heels that matched Her top.
“Viper,” She greeted the other in a perfunctory manner. “Where is it?”
“And a very good evening to you too, Miss Garland, I’m doing quite well standing out in the cold, how about you?” Viper replied. At the other’s glare, She sighed. “Pipsqueak’s waiting right there,” indicating Vayne with a pointed finger.
The frigid glare turned to the mortal, pinning him to the spot as surely as if She used a thumbtack. Her lips curled in disgust as She approached, and Vayne unconsciously backpedalled from the hostility. She crossed the intervening space in three strides, bending down to pick him up by the left leg, dragging him up a dizzying height until he was dangling before Her face.
“Doesn’t look like much,” She commented. The other Angel murmured a vague noise of agreement. “Don’t know what She sees in street vermin like this. It tell you anything else, Viper?”
“Nah. Just stood there quietly like I told him to.”
“Hmph. It knows how to listen to its betters, at least.”
Vayne cried out in protest, vertigo threatening to overcome him. He began to assert his right as a registered mortal citizen who was not to be physically touched unless verbal assent was given, only to choke off his words as the Angel waggled Her wrist, rocking him from side to side, stunning him from the whiplash.
“Shut. Up,” She spat, hot sweetened breath washing over him like a furnace. “If it were up to Me, I’d just as soon flick you into the canal, you presumptuous, insufferable insect. I have My orders to bring you in, but We have very good medical facilities, and nothing says I can’t break a limb or two before I bring you to Her.”
Mortal terror locked Vayne’s muscles up. He cringed away from the Angel as best he could with one leg pinched in Her grip, clamming up and raising his hands in desperation as if to ward away Her nearness.
“Nothing more to say? Good. Now be quiet. If you puke in My hand, I’m breaking your legs.”
With that, the Angel tossed Vayne up into the air and snatched him in Her fist, engulfing him in a warm, unyielding prison of flesh. Utterly pinned on all sides, he could not move in any meaningful way, contorted almost in half as the hand began to swing like a pendulum – walking, he guessed, to bring him to the unknown “Her”. He bit down on his tongue, closing his eyes and willing his stomach not to overturn from the violent motion.
If these two Angels and Their disdain were any indication, coming here was the worst mistake he would ever make. But indignity, suffering, even death… it would all be worth it if Sylvie could get her treatment.