Page 31 of The Fall

Lusa looked around, searching the nearby rubble for anything metal. She spotted a bent piece of rebar poking up among some weeds growing a bit further down. Lusa braced herself, making sure the rubble wouldn’t shift under her feet and tugged. It moved slightly, but didn’t come free. It must be quite large.

Changing positions, she tugged again, pulling it out like the sword in the stone. Lusa twirled the bent and rusted metal bar like a prized weapon. She could probably do some damage with this if she needed, but right now, it had another purpose.

With a loud clang, the bar rolled until a corpse stopped it from going any further. It glowed red, then yellow. Then it melted into a puddle, hissing and sputtering until it ran across the floor, causing a small fire on the high traffic carpet. Eventually, it separated into enough smaller sized puddles and carbon scale that it was no longer considered a threat by the system. Unfortunate, she thought.

Next, she tried the cylinder. She half-hoped that it would also melt and then she could return, grab Pinga and leave this ruined dump, but alas, the cylinder appeared unaffected.

Lusa blew out her cheeks and crawled through the hole.

The carpet stunk with the must of long forgotten employees and wet boots. And now, the tang of hot iron. Nothing like the pleasant decay of the woods in fall. More like fermented laundry mixed with the alkaline stench of those mushrooms you weren’t supposed to eat.

Low power Hexaline lighting bathed the room in an eerie amber hue. It would have been considered mood lighting in any other situation, but here, with the absence of activity, it felt off.

Even the silence felt heavy. There were no water pipes or distant motors powering air intake fans. No creaks or soft pops from the building settling. It was a dead place, save the slow growth of moulds and fungi consuming what little organic matter remained.

The hallway led into an employee break room. What she guessed had once been lockers had melted. Fireproof uniforms and SecTac helmets lay on the floor surrounded by blackened scale.

A table stood in the corner next to a pin-up board with faded sheets announcing ancient concerts and markets. One reminded employees to wash their hands. Another had a number to call if they needed help. Help with what, Lusa didn’t know.

Legs bowed from moisture, Lusa was in no-way tempted to try her luck sitting on the chair. A bowl had been left to one side, containing something that Lusa assumed was food. Dried, now, but it didn’t look like it had rotted. She squinted at it, trying to make sense of what it might have been.

She examined a fork next to it – unaffected by the field, so it must not be metal. Lusa nudged it with her finger. It stuck to the table, glued there with whatever starchy residue had remained from the unrecognisable bowl of food.

Lusa’s fingers skimmed her thigh where her knife belt usually sat, a calming ritual Talia had taught her to ground herself, a replacement for her stuffed lion. On bad days, her fingers would carry the scent of iron.

The fork would be a poor substitute but she pulled it free and took it with her anyway. Her anxiety subsided enough to let her continue.

A spread of burned carpet and scale that must have been a fire door opened to a stair well on the other side. Leading to the first floor, Lusa made her way down cautiously. At the bottom, she found another fire door, this one whole. The field that interacted with metal must only exist on the top floor.

The lever protested with age, but a bit of effort brought her into the main lobby. To her right, she found a wide set of double doors that must be the exit. Lusa tried to open them, but they were bolted shut with some unseen lock. Leaning back, tugging on the handle, they didn’t so much as rattle. Too bad, she thought. It would have made getting out easier.

Lusa returned to the lobby. Hexcel sheets had been left on the reception desk, referencing numbers she didn’t understand. The NovAITech logo on the front glowed brightly while ads for products she had never heard of played on repeat. Body modifications. Chemical enhancers. Military equipment. Then she saw Sparx’s motorcycle racing around a city in a much better state than the one she was in. Presumably all of these products were owned by this company.

Lusa stared wistfully, confronted with images of what used to be, people she could have met, maybe even women her age like her. Maybe even meet someone for whom she wasn’t just a placeholder. She could dream – especially when there was no chance of that dream becoming reality. She could forget for a moment the real reason it was out of reach.

She could deflect her shortcomings onto the fallen city, an entire world that used to exist, only for her to be born too late to live in it. The only remnants – gangs fighting over the scraps and this strange, untouched time capsule.

Lusa sat on the comfortable looking chair behind the desk and ruffled about the drawers. Keycards. Employee ID badges. A protein bar and some Stim. The package promised sixteen hours of unlimited energy.

She took the keycards and the Stim. She wouldn’t use it, but Pinga, whose appetite for risk knew no bounds, would love it. She might need it after facing her parents when they got home. Sesi always came up with the most creative punishments.

Swivelling the chair, Lusa spotted an emergency exit map glowing on the wall. She brushed aside the sisterly schadenfreude of Pinga’s fate and quickly found where she needed to go.

A few different keycards later and Lusa unlocked the Secondary room. It still had power. Screens blinked. Buttons glowed. The big red one her mother had told her about still had its plastic cover, sealed and unbroken. Not that it was connected to anything. She peered through the thick air-gapped windows into the Ruskov chamber.

A single beige plastic and glass terminal sat in the middle of a circular room. Smooth walls rose into the blackness above. As close to space temperatures as you can get, Callie had said. She would need a cryosuit to go in there.

Lusa made her way out of the Secondary room and found another door that read Changeroom.

It smelled of old drains and sanitisers. Cryosuits hung in a row, next to a nook with a statue of a woman with a skull for a face and dressed in blue and red. The remains of a candle sat at her feet. Lusa drew her finger across the statue. It resembled Death in the set of cards her mother used for her own grounding ritual.

Talia had tried to get Lusa into them, but she found more solace in the tangible reality of her knives. Now without them, she regretted not accepting the deck when it had been offered. Odd how she chafed at the thought of being tied to the Lake, and now, free of it, she felt unmoored. Talia would not be nearby if she had an episode.

It didn’t matter that she hadn’t lost control in a long time. Knowing that nothing would stop her was enough to keep her hypervigilant and on edge.

She took a calming breath and ran her fingers over the handle of the fork before thumbing through the cryosuits hanging on the wall. Ancient name patches greeted her. Revica. Juno. Talia. A small measure of encouragement.

She made a quick wardrobe change, pulling at buckles and straps, remembering that the big red button in the Secondary chamber activated a sarin pod. Patting down the suit, Lusa found a thin, cylindrical object woven between layers of fabric. That could be a problem if the seal had degraded after all these years.