Blue Heeler 19

[azzandra]

Name: Azzandra

Story: Transit

Colors: Blue Heeler (19. Have a little cry, dust myself off, pick myself up, on with the show.)

Styles and Supplies: Cut-away, Panorama

Word Count: 419

Rating: G

Warnings: None

Notes: Needs tags for author: azzandra, story: transit, color: blue heeler

 

 

Transit was a city carved in shadows and shards of light.
 

 

Ardor tried to compare her impressions of Transit with her impressions of Bridges, and she could not find any similarity. Bridges had been a threadbare, but clean place. Undermaintained vital systems, but scrubbed with excessive care in all visible places. Gilt over rot. She hadn't realized that at the time, but it seemed obvious in retrospect. Even the smiles of the people of Bridges had been pretense to an optimism the people did not feel; she could not remember it ever reaching their eyes.
 

 

Transit was a place too old and tired for pretense. Where it was grimy, it had been so for centuries, and where it was polished clean, it was to a sterile, metallic gleam. The lower levels were little more than warrens of tunnels, eternally lit by fluorescent ceilings. The mid-levels were old and loud, stairs and bridges and walkways criss-crossing between levels, connecting the residences and businesses and government branches in a labyrinthine mess, and if Transit had a beating heart, that was probably it. The glut of the population could live out their entire lives on these levels, without going to the underlevels or anywhere nearer the deep machines, and without going any higher, to the elegant spires reaching upwards towards the dome.
 

 

And the dome, of course. The dome covering the city against the cold of the Endless Night beyond, and the welkin plastered just beneath the unbreakable glass to imitate a sky that nobody living beneath it had ever seen in person. In Bridges, the artificial sky had followed its own cycles. Night turned to a rosy dawn, then to blue-skied noon, and steady golden afternoon gave way to a scarlet, dramatic sunset. It was a carefully crafted production, varying only in details from day to day.
 

 

But in Transit, the sky had been set to nighttime for centuries, and had remained so in memory of a man that nobody but the Nocturne could remember clearly.
 

 

If someone looked up from the lower levels, and glimpsed pieces of the sky between the accretions of architecture in the way--or if they were privileged enough to walk the upper spires--they would see that a cold, violet-tinged moon looked down upon Transit, set against a swirling band of stars, thickly clustered together. Sometimes the moon was orange, or sometimes the stars were set in different arrays, but always there was that night sky, as familiar a companion as the spires of the city.