Written in collaboration with the talented Sonya Lano in a fun-filled sprint, Dance in These Hollow Walls is available now for purchase on Amazon and other providers!
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She’s a dancer and slave. He’s a level one nobody, worse than the rats that scurry the dark. Together they must stop the ruling class of the upper levels from a scheme more depraved than those who live in the gutters.
An explosion propels Serycia out of her master’s clutches and into Soren’s. In the Walled City, life expires at 25, when a virus in the gut turns everyone into a mindless, cannibalistic Infected. If Soren and Serycia could find a cure, not only will they have a new lease on life, but so will everyone in the city.
But that’s the last thing the ruling class wants…
Read Chapters 1 & 2 below!
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DANCE IN THESE HOLLOW WALLS
Serycia
I sprint through an underworld of steel.
Crumbled concrete and brick buildings gleam moistly around me in the flickering light, the surfaces not wet with rain – not down here – but from acid. Poisons and toxins swirl like oily rainbows in the black puddles that pool between the reams of garbage shovelled to the side of the lanes.
The pavement jars my high heels with every footfall, but only someone stupid would kick their shoes off here, where rat corpses glisten in half-dissolved mounds, and cats leap on raw, bloody paws between pitch-black puddles.
My high heels wobble, though, threatening to snap. Stupid shoes! I despise them, but he loved them.
Cipher, these heels are intolerable…
Your legs look so gorgeous in them, though, Sery, the way the straps twine up your calves. His cerulean eyes always locked me in place with his pleas, his soft gaze roving over me in candid admiration. His look always followed his fingertips, his strokes sliding aside the silk, sliding into… devastating in a myriad of ways. You’re beautiful.
I stagger, a stitch in my side, and mash my palm against it. I mutter a curse and hunch over, loping forward, limping onwards.
Each breath burns a scalding path down my throat, soured by toxins and poisonous with putrefied meat. Stale air that has been stuck down here for centuries infiltrates my mouth and coats my lungs with a sick, tangy film, as if a corpse has smeared decaying fingers along my rib bones.
Hurry! Don’t think.
How much longer?
Suck in the pain.
Three minutes? One minute?
Mere seconds?
Faster. Don’t stop.
My harsh panting echoes in my ears. The yellow silk gown Cipher gave me flutters uselessly over my calves.
Come make love to me, Sery.
I gasp in the rhythm of panic, wheezing to the thunk thunk of my heels. Enslaved for years by a high-level lover, I’m unaccustomed to running, to exertion. My spoiled body strains like a wild animal against its crippled strength.
Around me huddle low-level inhabs, half-naked in rags, their shoulders half-eaten by sores and propped on shadowy doors, hair sparse over eyelash-less eyes. Their craggy expressions harbor churning hostility toward the silken-clad dancer out of place in their midst, running.
Run faster!
My ankle twists and slaps the side of my heel on the wet pavement. I jolt forward, stumbling, nearly falling.
Stupid! I can’t do this with these shoes.
I yank off the heels – fortunately slip-ons with no straps tonight – and hurl them. They clink satisfyingly against a steel-braced wall and tumble into a gap of decomposing rubbish.
Who cares anymore. If the Gezeva doesn’t work, then let my feet burn.
But as my bare feet slap onwards over the grubby Level 1 street and my pampered skin crunches over glass, the shards feel like mere indentations of pressure beneath the balls of my feet. No punctures, no blood.
Proof of how Gezeva saves lives here in the under-city, the drug toughening skin and making it resistant to acid and glass debris and the rusted nails that nestle in the pavement and cracks of corroded buildings.
“Serycia!” Boots thud behind me.
Cipher. My master. My lover.
The complex tangle in my heart.
Go back, Cipher.
I dredge up the map again in my mind, from memory. I always had a good one, good for studying, for research, but Cipher used it for—
Dance for me, Sery.
His hands buried in my hair, pulling me, urging me into all that I’m good for now.
I swerve around a corner into a dark alley where old rags and sleeping people pile up in formless heaps. Rats scuttle into unseen corners. A blanket-doused vagrant emerges from concealed depths, blinking reflective eyes. Someone shushes a child’s whimper.
Tumbled curls escape my elaborate braids and straggle loosely down my back, caresses reminiscent of Cipher’s over my shoulders earlier this night, touches already half-undoing me before he—
I veer around another corner into the semidarkness of another street. I drag my mind back to the grids and lines of the map he’d left open on his screen for several successive nights in a row. He’d memorized it because his father had wanted him to. I’d memorized it because of premonition.
And hungry minds left fallow need filling somehow. My mind has starved in a glutted body. Any knowledge consumed has gone unused, just bloating me up with powerlessness.
This had to be his father; Cipher would never have planned violence, not like this.
The map of Level 1 had only shown the path to one square. I hadn’t understood why.
I do now.
“Serycia!” Cipher’s voice again, fainter now. I’m faster.
I turn right, the pavement here dryer, my way lit by mounted lights on the underside of the second story foundation above us. Some of the bulbs flicker, some don’t work at all, and grubbiness grimes them all, alongside overgrown spider webs gone uncleared for decades.
People call out to me now. “Pretty hair, Level 7!”
“Pretty gown!”
“Where’s your shoes?” Sneering. “Got any Gezeva for me?”
My silk gown ripples around me like melting amber, emphasizing my disparity.
I flit onward, past glittering eyes tinged by darkness and flashes of light. Faded faces drained of colour wage wars of misery and envy.
But they don’t dare touch. They don’t get near.
Not to a Level 7 inhab. No Level 1 would lay a finger or even a breath on me and hope to live through the night.
They crowd in, though, reaching out with hands half open.
I’m not afraid. Ever since the attack by the crazy Level 9, Cipher has forced me to carry tiny tranquilizer pellets.
You’ve enough to knock out thirty of them. He’d paid for lessons so I’d know how to throw them.
I’m nearly there – nearly at the market square – ‘market’ being an arbitrary term that means next to nothing down here.
There: Cipher’s father’s sign graces one of the carts being pushed into the open square where people have gathered, anticipating the treats heaped high on the cart beds.
“Don’t!” I scream. “Everyone, run! It’s a trap!”
Faces look up, look around, look at each other.
The man pushing the nearest cart half turns.
“Run!” I scream.
Nearly there.
The throng would be a press of confusion for anyone else, but they shy back from me, petrified of being accused of molesting a Level 7 who shouldn’t even be here. They’re staring at my amber-gold gown, my bare feet, the grubby street.
I run past the cart and lurch at the crowd. “Run!”
They cringe back, shoving wildly at those behind them so they don’t touch me, so they won’t be condemned to death.
I advance more and they surge backward in earnest, bodies twisting, eyes widening, elbows jabbing those behind them.
“Level 7, what’s happening?”
I whirl toward the cart driver and run back toward him, flapping my hands. “Go! Get out of here!”
“Serycia!” Cipher bolts down the street behind the cart, toward me, his face bloodless, his blond hair dyed with blue streaks.
“Cipher, get out of here!” I shout.
He launches himself at me – and the world behind him explodes.
My eyes widen slowly, as if they have all the time in the world. They widen and widen, taking in the orange ball of flame curling outward from the cart and consuming the driver and those beyond him, and those beyond them.
It billows outward in a ball extending a thousand reaching arms. Cipher’s panicked face paints a stark silhouette against its insatiably growing brightness, the engulfing heat.
His body hits mine – and time speeds up. I hit the ground, his weight on top of me.
A last brush of his lips against mine.
A breath.
And time ends.
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Soren
Haggard men and women crowd in like hunched skeletons in sallow skin, every one gripping a plastic bowl. No bowl, no receiving, that’s the rule. Hungry, with eyes only for the coming silver carts, the mob waits with eerie patience at the double doors, which occupy most of the southern wall.
I’m near Street 534 by the entrance, waiting like everyone else. Megan never asks me for anything, but this time she’d begged and begged. They’re giving doughnuts away, Soren. Two per inhab! Have you ever heard of such a thing?
Doughnuts – a treat we haven’t had since the city’s last founding anniversary. She’d giggled, my baby sister drooling at the thought of sugar.
Megan’s only eleven; still a child. As her big brother, I’m the only family she’s got left, and her legal guardian. She’d gazed up at me – eyes shining with childish innocence. I’d always imagined they would glimmer with little flecks of gold in the sunlight.
Only we’ve never seen the sun.
Instead, her eyes are flat and dulled to the shade of dirt. Ringworm has eaten away patches of her hair; fresh scabs dotted black spots across her scalp in the sickly green-yellow light of our one-room unit. She’d stood trembling, hope clutched in her tiny fists. Congealed grime and old blood ran dark lines around her chipped fingernails.
How could I say no?
It’s just a doughnut. Such a simple thing. Only it isn’t, because those upper-level gluttons take everything, even though they already have everything. Then when they’re done gorging themselves and find they have too much, they throw it away. Throw it down the Shaft to the lower levels, where officials distribute the broken bits and leftovers. Each Level 1 inhab only got as much food as their bowl could hold. No more, no less. Unless the leftovers run out, which they always conveniently do within minutes of the Giving, even though I’d seen the piles of food – I’d sneaked into the Bread House one night and waited for the downpour, which normally happens in the early hours of the morning.
It was a freaking feast. Food so mouth-watering one would never have known it was grown and produced in food labs across the higher levels. Broken shards of meringue, mayonnaise-laden chicken shreds, corners of pastry with a half-bitten slice of strawberry still on it. Strawberry. I hadn’t seen a strawberry since that time when the collapse of the westside 3674x tunnel brought about one of the biggest riots of the under-city – protectors holding the elevator and threatening us with fire while the rioters pounded at the steel underside and clambered through the air ducts to go up-side. Maybe someone looted one of the upper levels, or sneaked into the ground guard chambers. Who knows? But, somehow, somewhere, Densy Drake managed to get hold of a basket of them juicy fruits and had hidden away with it. Of course, these things almost never go undiscovered for long. I guess who could resist the temptation of bragging? Twenty-three shining scarlet gems. In the end two men had died, trampled to death, their hands smeared crimson.
The ground guards didn’t take the bodies away until three days later. Which was how I found the strawberry. One had gone untouched, unblemished, hidden away an arm’s length away from the foot of one of the rotting bodies. It sat soaking up the toxic puddle it was in, plump and the colour of a nasty bruise in the flickering light, but recognizably a strawberry. I’d seen the pictures; now I had one right in front of me.
If it weren’t for the fact that even roaches and rats hadn’t dared touch it, I would’ve shoved it into my mouth there and then.
So when I’d heard about the doughnuts given as gifts from Level 8, and this not on the city’s founding anniversary, when such treats are normally given, I knew I shouldn’t have come.
The Giving is held at Saurvon Square, the central point of our level where all the streets lead in Section C. Four hours and the crowd’s showing no signs of fatigue, their minds too fixated on the promise of a rare treat to complain. I can’t lie. The mere thought of soft, fluffy buns; the heavenly smell of caramelized sugar; and licking jam from sticky fingers and lips almost made me giddy, too. Doughnuts. Would they be filled with apple jam or chocolate cream? Or perhaps ring-shaped and dusted with sugar? Is this for real? With the crowd gathered in front of me, I have to believe maybe it is. Could be. Stranger things have happened. Now the waiting’s driving me crazy, childish cravings winning out over suspicion.
Finally, uniformed guards wheel out five decorated carts.
The towers of doughnuts are fat with buttercream and glazed with sugar, shamelessly decadent on silver platters.
That’s when she bursts through the door, a shimmering, flowing bolt of honeyed silk and ruffled strawberry-blonde hair, slender feet kicking out from the hem of her dress.
She stands out like a shard of citrine, pure and beautiful and ridiculously out of place, eyes wide in her smooth-featured face, lovely even in the sickly glow of under-city light. For a moment I think I have to be dreaming. A Level 7 inhab? Down here? What would possess her to—
“Run!”
Everything happens as if in slow motion, understanding clicking into place with every disconnected image. The appointed ground guard approaching the woman, and she twisting towards him. Level 1s shrinking back, recoiling from the madwoman like oil from water, then scattering. But not all. I see it in their eyes, still shining with the haze of sugar. The decadent towers.
How could I have been so stupid?
“Get out of here!” she shrieks, now some way into the square.
The carts, still by the doors, the guards pushing them frozen in confusion.
The people around me converge towards them, an unstoppable tide.
I run in the opposite direction, straight for the sewer I know is mere meters from me. Something’s horribly, horribly wrong, and I’m not going to stay around to find out what.
Behind me, someone shouts, “Serycia!”
Dimly, I recognize the Level 8 accent.
No time.
I bend and yank out the drain cover.
Mould and stale air rush up at me.
Then everything explodes.
