Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Drifting in a disembodied, narcotic haze, Nila’s mind played with her past.
Nila’s fingertips traced the edge of the concrete, sand-paper rough against her skin. There was a slight gap between her left cheek and the flexible seal of her breather where the rubber had started to rip, but the air wasn’t that bad today…a sluggish breeze from the coast, beyond sight to the west.
Updrafts from the skyship sucking the smog away, she thought as she glanced to her right into the sky.
It hung their, defying gravity, an elongated disk, oval, shaped like crushed can, with spikes of conning towers above and below. She could hear its low thrub as it pushed against the pull of Terra’s mass below.
Iamblic, Gina and Toro were next to her, Toro with her legs hanging over the edge of the abyss and rambling on about some dreamy boy from class, her feet kicking heels against the outside wall, quite oblivious to the height, as if it were an entertainment construct.
Iamblic and Gina passed binoculars back and forth, maginifying the events below. Nila’s focus seemed to stick to the binoculars. The textured manual wheel within reach of Iamblic’s tattooed index finger, with its steel ring adapted from a washer, flattened along the curve. The lenscaps dangled on their cords, dancing as the binoculars jostled.
Gina wouldn’t even put her legs over and stayed back from the low wall’s edge, instead chosing to kneel behind it, next to Iamblic who sat cross-legged. Nila noticed every so often she would reach out and touch his back, sliding her fingers between his long, light brown dreads and his dirty shirt.
Nila’s attention was drawn to the crowd below. Like ants they were far below, obscured sometimes by the wafting smog left over from the night’s cooling. She couldn’t hear them at all. All they could hear from their eyrie was the upper wind rushing between the buildings and the thrum of the skyship a few klicks away.
She kept look down at her hands on the concrete. Three strangely large rings gasketed on a longer cylinder. It was bulky and almost uncomfortable against her middle finger, itself seemed to be lacking something similar… The three gold rings were appreciably heavy, and gleamed…There was nothing else gold in her life. Where did I get them?
Gina laughed at something that Iamblic said, some dumb joke, and Nila brushed the electric blue hair from her eyes. Something isn’t right.
Her parents–all of their parents–were down their, ants among ants. Mom had complained bitterly about the food prices for weeks, months, as long as she could remember. Dad was pretty quiet about it, but she could tell he was mad too.
Day after day the news feeds told them that prices were lower now and the new golden age was here. It was coming to Blackmarshtown this week, next week or the week after to Dogtown, flowing through the City like a flood of prosperity.
Of course, this was all rubbish. No one in Dogtown beleived the news feeds. They had been saying the same thing for years, mom said. Dad didn’t see the point in protesting. Noone is listening he said. But still the skyship lurked over there.
Nila wondered if the crowded people on the street could even see the skyship; it was blocks away, casting its shadow to the east, probalby hidden by the buildings, especially Lazy Bob’s warehouse tower, which shot up 40 storeys interrupting the street to the east, gaping windows on the three lowest floors, but said to be still in use in the upper floors.
The rings seemed off and out of place on her tiny girl hand. Iamblic and Gina giggled like schoolchildren. Toro would have been eleven, because she was a year older than Nila.
Without warning the skyship began to move, silent but for the thrumming, a low, bone-vibrating pulse, it gradually, almost imperceptibly moved closer. Nila could see its vast shadow cast the eastern blocks into darkness. It moved like a dense cloud, but according to its own will, ignoring the wind, which blew fromt he west.
Nila could see the wisps of orange-brown vapors hurled up from the the depths as it moved. (Even with the good air today, everyone on the street would me masked.) That shit stung the eyes and was like needles in the lungs.
“What if you dropped a couch?” Iamblic sputtered out, choking on his wheezing laughter. “Do you think it would make a crater in the street?”
“No, dumbass,” Gina pushed him with her open palm. “It is too soft. It would break its frame but the cushions would bounce away.”
Toro looked at the other two, rolling her eyes for Nila’s benefit. “No…It depends on what it was made out of. My uncle has a couch-bed…”
“Futon?” Nila contributed, looking quickly into Toro’s big brown eyes.
Toro met her eyes. “Yeah, Futon….Anyway, Baji’s futon is really heavy, he and my cousin, Vraj, had to carry it up sixteen flights of stairs when Baji got it from his friend at work and Vraj complained for months that it was sooo heavy that his fingers still hurt.”
“Because Vraji is a pathetic durak,” interjected Yamblic.
Gina pushed him again. Yamblic rocked away dramatically, laughing again. Probably inhaling adhesive, Nila speculated, kind of wishing it was her that had sat down next to him.
From the corner of her eyes, she saw the skyship drifting closer. The shadow of the massive ship’s nose was just starting to move over the broken warehouses. By now the people on the street should be able to see it.
She imagined she could see them, resolve their faces. Her fingers clenched the edge. She felt the concrete abrading her soft skin, but could see powdered concrete crumbling beneath her fingertips. The rings, sitting in their…saddle…what a strange word. Saddle, she said it to herself over and over again, the word had no meaning to her, but there was a story from when she was a little kid…
Saddle…nyereg...Nila felt a wave a nausea, her stomach turned and she clenched the concrete wall even more tightly. Gritty powder grinding. Leaving broken indentations. The powder getting under her nails, which were never that well kept on a good day.
“What’s going on?” Yamblic just had noticed the skyship. Gina still hadn’t.
“The skyship is moving, dumbass.” Toro saw it too.
Nila could see the faces on the street, now each one stood out. Each one was a person, a neighbor. There were her parents, waving a paper sign around. She knew it was them. Mom’s mask was red and dad’s was dark blue with grey tape on one side. HIs beard jutting out around the edges. It never fit well. It complemented the grey streak in mom’s hair, which sprouted from her widow’s peak. Everyone always commented on it and said it was an omen for a woman as young as her to have that sign.
They saw it too. The crowd was anxious. It moved like it had a mind of its own.
It wasn’t obvious earlier, when the protestors first got together, but now Nila could see barriers behind the crowd, blocking off the street traffic, massive fences taller than a person.
“Do you see that, Gina (she held the binoculars now)?” She asked.
“The fences? Yeah. The cops just put them up.”
The nausea rolled in like waves, a sludge of unease from below. Nila kept looking at her hands. They were not kid-hands…the rings.
The shadow of the skyship darkened the streets. She could hear the panicked murmuring and see the ebb and flow of the mob on the street. Caged animals, pacing. The mass of them shifted this way and that.
“What are they doing?” It was unclear whether Yamblic was asking about the crowd or the skyship.
“Guys, I think they’re going to get arrested.” Toro was nervous. She had dismounted the edge-wall and now was standing leaning on it, look down at the people on the street.
They all watched intently. Gina tugged at the strap of the binoculars that Yamblic was hoarding. Their voices scraping at Nila’s attention from both sides, she tried to concentrate on the goings-on below.
The crowd was now half under shadow, as the skyship slowed to hover above them. The thrumming continued. Nila wondered if her friends could hear it the way she could. The rings on their saddle reflected a hazy sunlight into her eyes. She could still see her mother and father on the street; mom was pushing past some people to get back to dad after they were separated. Most of the people had dropped their signs.
The corralling fences were still in place, blocking escape, but the cops had retreated. What was going on?
Disembodied voices, she thought it was Yamblic and Gina, but the male voice was too deep to be Yamblic who still sounded like a girl.
This is the antigrave generator. Most cars have three or four. At least three for stability. Bigger ships have a lot of them.
They oppose gravity? Said the female voice. Slight accent. Foreign. Nyereg.
Yeah, the inside spins and the whole mechanism pushes against gravity.
Like the time device?
I really don’t know how that works. You tell me.
I wish I could.
It wasn’t Yamblic and Gina. Someone else was talking. Nila’s vision was no longer aligned with her equilibrium, a feeling that she would not again experence until a few years later after too much bad hootch.
It was almost like a click. An electric shock moved through her.
The thrumming continued…Nila was sure that was the massive anti-grav engines of the skyship–they didn’t usually hover over the city.
Londbridge was splayed out before them, on what could have been a pleasant day on the rooftops. Thousands of rooftops, uncountedmillions of people. Each with names and faces and lives and families.
The click was preceded by clouds of shattered concrete, pulverized and reduced to molecules. The click might have just occured in Nila’s head, in her imagination–the same way that her hands were wrong, with the weirdly large rings and their daddle, and her hair was blue.
The effect was silent.
The rooftops above and around the gathered protestors erupted into small low (hanging just above them) clouds of risen dust. Starting form the tallest–Macrogiftcorp Tower was around 55 storeys, and exactly underneath the lowest part of the skyship–the top floor crumbled.
Grey powder and rubble spilled over the edges like pyroclastic flows.
As the first tower disintegrated from the top, gradually the neighboring ones started to as well. Pulverized concrete flowed downward. She could hear the screams of the men and women and children in the street.
Steel girders and twisted plastic and flesh. Shattered glass fell like rain.
The skyship was crushing everything.
Nila looked around. Her friends were motionless. Her hands were not her own, even as she brushed the blue hair out of her eyes again and again. The were shaking. The rings were heavy in their saddle…nyereg…
“We have to get out of here,” Toro said with a quavering voice.
Gina was up, ready to get out of there. Yamblic was too.
“Nila, let’s go.” Toro called her. She was already at the access door.
Nila could almost see the skyship edge-on. The lower conning tower must be almost at street level. What had been street level.
The crowd, the protestors, mom and dad, thousands of others, friends and neighbors, all drowned in a flood of disarticulated structure, ground into paste by the skyship’s protective fields.
The finer dust was pushed upwards by the outgassing of air and smog, displaced by the fields, wafting over the tallest buildings around the crater in the center of Dogtown.
Nila caughted and pulled her breather back up to her mouth and nose, blinking her eyes against the dust.
She could smell burning plastic and the lightning-scent of the protective field, and blood and flesh…
And then a pop. A pop that deafened her. Her ears rang and burned like nails had been hammered into them.
There was a rush of air inward, toward the center, towards the skyship.
Fortunately, (she thought) she and her friends had moved away from the wall, away from the edge.
They were all knocked down–except for Gina, who was standing in the open access door to the stairwell. Nila landed on the gravel rooftop floor six meters from the door, and three from where she was standing when it popped.
The air rushedinto the void, drawing the dust and disgusting smell of death and acrid smoke back down into the hellscape below.
We’ll need the batteries too, said the male voice.
Nila lay on the gravel and looked through her blue hair at her adult hands splayed out in front of her with the ring-saddle…
Even though her perspective should have been an eye-level encounter with rooftop gravel, Nila somehow saw what was happening beyond the wall at the edge of the precepice. Steel girders strewn outward, vomited by the wretching buildings, bursting as the crush came upon them.
Her friends called for her desparately from the open stairway door. Toro held it open and frantically waved Nila to get up, jumping up and down even.
Nila was transfixed.
The skyship.
It hung, crushing lower and lower with every suffocating breath. Nila watched the shadow drop across the sunlit face of the westward facing buildings, an ominous taint on the city.
She could hear the truncated screams as the people, men and women and children discovered they had no escape from the simple intersection.
NIla could also see the edge of the low wall around the rooftop. Particles of concrete hovered in the air, freed from chemical bonds. Grit at first, then fist-sized chunks, then whole sections broke away: first levitating, then casting themselves outwards, then pressed into the ground, the floor.
She could feel the pebbles hitting her face and taste the alkaline dust, just as vividly as she could hear the screams below. Desperation.
Finally, Nila half-got to her feet. She never in this instant was fully upright. She merely got her body off of the hard gravel, with only the toes of her hand-me-down boots touching ground, and lurched, sprinted as fast as her spindly legs could carry her, toward the door which Toro still held open.
As they skipped down the stairwell–they used to be for emergencies and maintenance–she could hear Yamblic and Gina a hundred steps below. Toro was ahead, but kept stopping to check if Nila was still there.
More voices: Gravity can be thought of as a force that brings one to it. These whirling spindles make it push away. The ether knows no such rules…
Gravity and antigravity were life and death.
Toro, a dozen steps ahead, held the inner rail as she skipped two and three steps at a time. Nila followed, as if in a playground game.
Then came the shockwave; the air in the stairwell briefly got denser than usual. Nila, then a girl, would have rolled it into her nausea and fucked equilibrium, but chips of paint flaked off the walls as she looked, not just with the one step she landed on, but with every step. A cacaphony of rubble and scattering pebbles and twisting steel reverberated down the shaft.
A door opened then slammed below. She had been descending for ages. Again, Toro, panting, flushed and with caring, loving big brown eyes, black hair sweaty and clinging to her neck, held the door.
Nila’s legs were rubber and the boots which never fit properly chaffed at her skin, eating the flesh of her feet.
“Fuck ! Hurry up, you gimps!” Gina was never a poet.
The four of them booked it–to use a term that phuro used to use–they ran as fast as they could. Away from the catastrophe, not yet realizing that it was a cusp, a knot in the skein of their lives.
The tower, some housing block, that they had perched upon to watch the protests because their parents thought them all too young to take part, home to 4500 denizens of the Northwest city of Londbridge, was crushed into paste and rubble behind them.
Nila looked back.
Like an angry god from fantasy cinematographs, the demon growled and scowled at her, billowing and bellowing along the alleyway.
The kids jumped and climbed over stacks of refuse and garbage and pallets pushed out from shops. They ran three kilometers before they stopped to catch their breath.
Gina was red in the face. Yamblic, always spry and athletic eased himself onto a stack of boxes–the top bulged, its plastic expanding like the throat of one of those extinct swamp lizards–Toro came up and put her arm around Nila’s shoulder.
Behind them, a cloud rose. It was grey and charcoal, rising like a cumulus cloud over a summer island, but evil and shrouding the airship. They could see the shape of the shields as the ash and soot rained down and vibrated off in particulate rivulets, choking the air.
It wasn’t until later that the other three came to find out that their families were all dead.
Ion Fyr 