Page 7 of Xerxes Ascendant
It wasn’t from Kyle. It wasn’t about Kyle.
It meant nothing.
Unknown
Your presence is overdue on Level G, Master Epsilon.
There was no name attached, and it was attributed to a scrambled dialcode like the Coterie used, but Akira had no doubt as to the sender. Sinead Gallagher, the leader of one of Xerxes’most ruthless gangs, was cashing in on the final term of the agreement they’d made for her to call off the Carrion’s job on Kyle.
He had neither the energy nor the motivation to deal with it now. He’d go to her tomorrow, perhaps.
Dismissing the message with a careless finger, Akira brought up a different conversation thread. To an observer it may have looked like a glitch – or feverish obsession, which was closer to the truth – for it was filled with the same two messages repeated over and over.
His thumbs swiped deftly across the on-screen keyboard, and he didn’t take his eyes from the display until a response appeared half a minute later in a repeat of the same two-message discourse he and Kyle’s cousin had engaged in near-hourly intervals over the last ten days.
Akira
Any news?
Indira
No.
Stars, Kyle wasstillunconscious. Akira wasn’t usually the type to pray, having learned that no one controlled destiny but oneself, yet now he called on every shiny fucker in the night sky to bring his man safely out of his coma.
I’ll do anything.
This time, unlike when he’d said the same to the thug earlier, he meant it.Anything.
As Akira’s stolen, overly large work boots met the relatively solid ground of Level E with the intention of getting a couple of hours of work in at the House before relieving Indira Randall at the hospital, the runepad vibrated in his hands. Not once, but insistently: a call.
He recognised the string of otherwise meaningless numbers and letters, and answered.
“Master Omicron.”
“Master Epsilon,” Omicron greeted, his tone curt. “There will be a Coterie meeting in fifteen minutes. Be here in ten.”
Akira outwardly maintained his professional impassivity, while in his head he cursed the man. Separated from his own House as it was situated on the now-segregated surface level, and only permitted to be a temporary manager of the confiscated House Theta, Omicron had little else to do with his time but drain everyone else’s. He’d been calling far more meetings than usual, including last minute like this one, often for matters that could have easily been dealt with remotely.
“Can you defer?” Akira asked bluntly. “I need to change.”
“No.”
He blinked at the suddenly darkened screen. The asshole had hung up on him.
And fair enough, perhaps it hadn’t been the strongest of excuses if the meeting truly was critical, but Akira felt grimy from the client sweating all over him and then the subsequent brushes with death. He didn’t think well while out of his suits, damn it, but if a quorum of the Coterie was there, they wouldn’t wait for him.
With a sigh, he turned and headed back up the slope to Level C.
The prohibition of Lower residents accessing the surface has more implications than systemic classism.
It has also caused widespread vitamin D deficiencies in most of Xerxes' population, leading to weakened bones and suppressed immunity in the workers the city relies upon to perform its manual labour. The lower levels' bio-mimetic lighting systems attempt to simulate daylight, but do not fully replace the sun’s biological effects, and disruption to the body's circadian rhythm commonly results in hormonal imbalance. Psychologically, the absence of natural light and sky has increased rates of depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder. Children raised in the lower levels show delays in sensory and emotional development.
To compensate, Xerxes' public health systems provide – at cost – mandatory vitamin supplements. Is this the measure of who we are, that we would charge already impoverished people for the right to live?
-Extract from 'The Truth Around Us' by Rebecca Mann (never published as a result of the author unexpectedly passing away two days before its scheduled release)
CHAPTER 3
