Authors: Zachary Rawlins
It wasn’t far to the front gate, where Emily wanted to meet him, though Alex had never made the walk previously. She’d wanted to change out of her uniform, before they left for Central, so she’d given him directions to the front gate, and headed back to her room, telling him to meet her in about half an hour.
The Academy’s grounds were enormous, it was true, but most of the classrooms, faculty offices and student dorms were clustered near the front gate. It only took a few minutes for Alex to get there with the meticulous directions that Emily had given him, on a piece of off-white stationary, each step written out in lovely flowing cursive. It was so elegant that Alex found himself reluctant to fold it or throw it out, and he was still trying to figure out what to do with it when he rounded the last of the staff buildings and saw the Commons, and beyond that the front gate.
The Commons were like a bigger version of the quad between the student dorms; a large open space with carefully maintained green grass, a handful of stately old oaks and willows, a few strategically placed benches and tables, and a motley collection of students and faculty enjoying the weak afternoon sun. It was a nice scene, bordering on idyllic.
The gate behind it was impressive, an ornate piece of stonework that looked to Alex to be ancient, and though he wasn’t sure he could tell decades old from hundreds of years old. Like all of the major structures on the campus, it was made of tightly fit angular blocks with no obvious mortar, the same dull grey stone as the Academy walls, which stretched off in either direction for miles, perhaps twice as tall as Alex and thick, but in poor repair. In many places the wall had partially collapsed, and in numerous other places the wall was bowed and bent. The gate, however, had either aged more gracefully or seen more consistent maintenance. Some of the carvings appeared to have fallen off or been worn away, and a few of the capstones were gone, but as a whole the great stone arch was intact. Alex could not decide if the inscription on the gate arch was a language he didn’t recognize or simply a collection of abstract scribbles, but he found the whole thing a touch foreboding.
All of this paled in importance for Alex, next to seeing Emily in her street clothes for the first time.
Emily was pretty in the uniform, Alex wasn’t about to deny that. But in a simple white dress that looked a bit light for the weather she looked amazing, even with a sweater pulled over it, her blond hair curled and radiant in the late-afternoon sun. Then she smiled at him, maybe a little bit shyly, and he got very nervous indeed.
“Did you make it okay?”
She was anxious, leading him out of the gate and to the road outside, as if she wasn’t beautiful. As if she had anything to worry about.
“Were the directions alright?”
“They were very, um, accurate,” Alex said lamely, realizing he was still clutching the scrap of paper, and shoved it in his pocket. The dark grey hoodie he’d worn seemed a bit incongruous with Emily’s dress, but it wasn’t like he had any clothes that would have been appropriate.
The road itself appeared to be one uniform piece of worked stone, but when Alex got closer, he realized that it was made of the same tightly interlocking blocks as the walls of the Academy, worn smooth with age and traffic. In many places the stones had begun to buckle slightly, and the road’s surface was not nearly as even as it appeared to be from a distance.
“Who built all this?”
“No one knows,” Emily said, shrugging and leading him toward what appeared to be a totally conventional bus stop, with a colorful route sign, and a glass and metal enclosure complete with system map. Alex felt a profound sense of dislocation as they walked toward it. “Supposedly, it was all like this when the Founder discovered Central, empty and waiting. The road and the wall, the Academy Main Hall, Analysis and Operations, all the major structures, they were all here already. At least, that’s what they tell us in class.”
“There is a bus?”
Alex ran his fingers across the plastic covering a small system map, showing three separate lines, each with half a dozen stops.
“Well, yes. It’s pretty hard to get anything big through the Ether, and it’s not like we have a factory here or anything. We’ve got a few diesel buses. I hear they had to disassemble them, and bring them over piece-by-piece.”
He knew that Central was located somewhere in the Ether; Alex had gotten that much from Windsor’s lectures, and had somehow been found, rather than built. He couldn’t tell if it’s location was a secret or a genuine mystery, but without an apport protocol, he knew there was no getting in or out, something that caused him a certain amount of late-night anxiety akin to claustrophobia. But, even if he knew that, it was jarring to hear it said out loud, the casual practicalities of an abnormal way of life that he barely even noticed he was living, most of the time.
Alex studied the map. The area depicted was not really large enough to be called a city, more like a town, in a rough half-moon. The built-up neighborhoods were clustered in an area just to the east of the Academy. Alex was surprised to see that the Academy and its grounds constituted a full third of Central, and that a good portion of the remaining space appeared to be open.
“There aren’t that many of us,” Alex guessed.
Emily shook her head sadly.
“No, and there seem to be less every year. Only a few people live in Central full-time. But yes, there just aren’t that many of us. We could all move to Central, if we wanted to, and there would still be space to spare. I would swear there were more people here when I was a kid…”
Emily seemed sad, so Alex hunted for something else to talk about.
“What’s here?”
Alex tapped at the grayed out area that surrounded the town on the map.
“Wait and see,” Emily said, smiling playfully.
The bus arrived a few minutes later, a green-painted diesel that reminded Alex vaguely of pictures he’d seen of Europe. Emily refused to say anything about where they were going, responding with a smile and a ‘wait and see’ every time he asked. Alex eventually gave up, but it didn’t turn out to matter much – he had his eyes glued to the window the entire trip, while Emily amused herself by playing tour guide.
It took a few minutes of winding through the hills around the Academy before they entered Central proper, while Alex tried to remember the last time he had been in a motor vehicle of any kind. Only a matter of weeks, but it felt l
The Academy was set two-thirds of the way up the peak of a massive hill, and Central sat in a partial ring around it, about halfway down the slope. Below the city, at the base of the hill, there was only a great grey space, the vastness of the Ether stretching out like an endless lake in all directions, Central rising out of it like an island. After a few minutes of descending down the windy road, they crossed an invisible line and the sun disappeared behind the pea soup-thick fog that covered the town. Emily told him that the skies here never cleared, unlike the Academy, which was set high enough on the hill that the fog broke. Central itself started as a series of low grey buildings, no more than two stories tall, each set slightly apart and surrounded by small, neat yards and clusters of elm and oak trees.
“We think they were probably houses to begin with, though the proportions are a little strange,” Emily commented, leaning over his shoulder. “Some people still like to live in them for the privacy, but they get wretchedly cold in the winter.”
The road curved to follow along the bank of a moderately large, fast-moving creek, both sides of the road surrounded by the individual stone homes. Electric lines and various utility cables had been added to the structures, he realized, rather haphazardly in some cases, and he wondered again at the difficulty and logistics of transporting materials here. For that matter, he wondered, where did the electricity come from? He hadn’t seen anything that looked like a power plant.
After a while, the structures gradually got larger, and then started to fuse together. At first they grew closer to each other, but they rapidly started to include points of interconnection, and by the time they descended into the city proper, the buildings began to meld into gigantic structures. They grew taller as well, some five or six stories tall, though Alex was starting to notice the proportions issue that Emily had mentioned – the stories appear to be a bit too tall, as did the windows and the stairs.
“People live here in apartments they carved out for themselves,” Emily explained. “They knock out walls and put in dividers and create some sort of congruent living space, then build in kitchens and bathrooms. Even though the walls are old, it takes some effort to bore through them so you can install chimneys, plumbing, and the like. But the advantage of the big buildings is that they have central heating and a sewer system to plug into. If you live in the outlying areas, you’re on your own, so to speak.”
The buildings they passed continued to grow larger and denser, with more ornate detail work and filigree appearing on the buildings as they drew closer to the city center. The road was no longer singular; a number of different roadways, all paved in the same ubiquitous grey stone, intersected and then separated again in what Alex could only describe as a downtown. Their own route was circuitous, passing by buildings which were now almost level with each other at around ten stories, forming solid urban walls that the road wound around and through, sometimes in the form of brief mossy tunnels, at other times using crude breaches in the structures that clearly had been created with explosives.
Alex found the whole scene oppressive – the monotony of the stone, the lack of sun in between the walls of buildings, damp and cold under the weak light that filtered through the fog. If he hadn’t had Emily with him to point out the sights, Alex wasn’t sure he would have known that there were any, every structure appeared so monolithically uniform. They passed the main business offices for Central, set on a rare open plaza, each great building surrounded by an interconnected warren of smaller sub-buildings. It was bleak, under the perpetual fog, and Alex found himself unsure of this strange city and of his own place in it, amongst the great grey stone buildings that seemed so foreign to anything human. It appeared to have been built to hold hundreds of thousands, maybe more, but he barely saw anyone at all.
But then, as they passed through the center of town and on to the western tip of the crescent that Central described, he discovered that people did in fact live there. It started with a few lone pedestrians, and gradually expanded until there were crowds of people, and even rudimentary traffic made up of bicycles and motorcycles. The area had been selected for inhabitation by the first cartels to arrive in Central, and as Emily explained, it remained the choicest and most exclusive area. Only those connected to the larger and more powerful cartels could afford to keep offices and accommodations in this neighborhood, locally referred to as the Ring, for the circular edifice that towered over the rest of the neighborhood, almost a third higher than any other structure in the area.
The bus ground to a halt just outside the Ring, and Emily led him out on to the street besides the giant round building. Up close, it was almost impossible to tell how large it was, as it simply appeared to be a gradually curving exterior wall, encompassing whole blocks in its bulk. It’s most striking feature was not its size, however, but rather that it had been painted – a white lacquer had been applied to the surface of the stone in a thick, moderately uniform coat, and in contrast to the grey buildings that they had passed, it practically gleamed. The buildings that surrounded the Ring on the three sides that Alex could see were similarly coated in varying shades of cream and brown, as well as a scattering of more brilliant blues and greens. The scene was practically cheerful in contrast to the depressing monotone vastness of the rest of Central, and Alex had little trouble understanding why anyone who could afford to lived here.
“This way,” Emily said, taking his hand gently in her own and leading him along, around part of the Ring and then a few blocks further west, down a side street where the buildings had been subdivided into smaller living quarters, each painted a different Easter egg pastel.
“I know,” Emily said, seeing his look, “it isn’t exactly the most tasteful street. But, we are – I mean to say, that the Raleigh cartel – well, it’s just that,” Emily gestured haphazardly, and blushed furiously, paused on the lower steps of a baby-blue staircase, “we aren’t exactly wealthy. Not anymore.”
“Seems like you’re doing okay.”