Each Separate Dying Ember - XXXVII

Jedekiah

Feet ache on the pavement - these aren't my boots. I picked up someone else's, they're too big, they rub against my feet and the back of my left heel is open and wet - I can feel the blood under my foot inside the boot. One of the bandages on my hands is gone. My lungs ache and my throat is close and full - I can't see straight. That's if I let the thoughts in.
So I close them out and fall into the instinct, the nothing - but it's screaming.
My head is screaming.
A yell echoes in. The Broads got out of my way but an Enforcement starts to run after me, yelling something, loud and authoritative. Atarah's voice cuts through - I don't listen to the words.
In the second she takes to try and stop him, I accelerate, kicking harder at the ground, turning a corner into a narrow alley - instinct brings my feet up onto a dustbin against the wall. But my stumped wings whisk through the air without catching, and my legs are tired and aching - my knees hit the top of the bin, and I fall onto it, crashing over and rolling onto the ground on my side. The ground is rough and filthy and as I stand up trails of blood well up and leak down my arm. I leave the alley at the other end and keep going.
Atarah's voice follows me a while later - I'm out of Broad turf now. Where? The steppes. I found my way into the steppes. She can barely talk - she can run better me, always had stronger lungs or at least filled them with less smoke and pot, but running and yelling together is hard and she sounds breathless. Then she goes quiet - but I can hear the footsteps pounding behind me, speeding up. I run between the mismatched buildings. It stinks here. The steppes stink - shit and weed and gear and filthy people shoved into tiny spaces together. Tall walls and low roofs skim past as I pound along the streets, but I can't get my feet while my legs are shaking underneath of me and with every other step the back of my heel tears deeper through the flesh: I get a little further, and then her body is colliding with mine.
Without her wings she can't get the jump. She was trying to kick me down, pounce on my shoulders, but her boots land just above my arse instead and we hit the ground together. My already torn-up elbow scrapes along the ground and I can't roll with her on top of me, so my cheek scrapes along the pavement and the air's knocked out of my chest.
She's breathing hard, a tiny stream of words tumbling from her lips. My head turns. Her eyes are full and deep but the face they're set in is messy, the skin patched, the lip torn and the eyes deep-set and worn.
"When did we get so old?"
The lips, the trickle of blood leaking down the chin, are still moving, the hoarse voice proclaiming something again and again.
But the sound gets inside my head. The words are a key-code to the explosions in my head. The animal isn't there to block out the heavy silence. The explosions aren't sound, aren't life and fire and pain - they're emptiness, hollow, nothing and weakness and less.
If the screams come out of my lips, the ringing silence in my ears drowns them out.
There's a strength from somewhere I don't know. It fills my arms to hit her shoulders and chest, jerks my legs up into her stomach to kick her away, carries me onto my feet and away again.
This is the steppes. Someone will be hunting. But I can't see them or smell them or hear them - there's just the running. The impact of pavement on boots. The flaring cut in the back of my heel.
And eventually it all fades, even the sharpest pain.
I need it back. I need the pain back. I need the feeling.
Universes exploded inside my chest when we hit the water - Jed's idea, the glue in the bag and the drowning. You go to the very edge and you come out more alive. Slingshot effect: the closer you go to nothing, the faster you spin back into reality.
Maybe there's an almost-death waiting for me here, with Asher and Flixton and the hunters, with the darkness coming down over the city. Maybe the almost-nothing will die with their screams.
But my feet are changing direction and taking me with purpose now and I don't know how to tell them to stop.
Stop.
Stop.


North

For the second time in two days, I am sat in an Enforcement cell when Clay comes storming in.
Everyone on our side of the Enforcement line was arrested - this definitely goes against our rights. I can't remember specific laws.
I haven't slept in two days - when I wake up I will care about my rights, and everyone else's, but I intend to use this time to close my eyes for a few hours.
There's an odd kind of peace in my chest.
So I manage to doze before the door opens. I sit up, scrabbling for balance on the slippery mattress cover with the odd lightness on my back, and blink a couple of times, reaching for my glasses on the floor - and then there is a hand, rough and hard and forceful, yanking my chin up.
My fingers spasm in shock and then try to grab at the wrist, abandoning the search for my glasses - but even as I blink again to try and get the sleep, what little there was, out of my eyes, I recognise Clay.
I squint past his body to the door - there's the shape of an Enforcement officer closing the door behind him, but they don't step into the room to interfere.
He yanks my head up so sharply my neck seizes and a gasping squeak chokes out of my mouth - but his face is close enough that I can see the expression.
Fury comes off him in waves. They batter against me so hard that my bladder clenches tight and every instinct screams to bolt - but I'm frozen into place. When Clay is angry he spins on the spot and grabs his hair and slams his fists against the wall. But now all that rage seems to concentrate into the fist he's formed around my jaw, that squeezes tighter as I inadvertently meet his gaze.
"Who was he?" he hisses, his face so twisted that his voice is distorted and almost lisping.
My head tries to shake but it makes his hand clench tighter around my jaw as he yanks me up again like he's trying to pull me to my feet.
Did he never meet Ezek? Why does he care to know who he is now? Why does that make him angry?
But when I can't answer, he jerks my face again as with his other hand he pulls something  - a scrap of paper - from his pocket and shoves it toward me. I have to blink hard to try and focus my eyes and it's too close, but I can't pull my head away and I don't dare reach for my glasses, don't dare to anything that isn't exactly what he instructed: Look at this.
After a second when I don't say anything, he relinquishes my jaw so suddenly I almost fall to the floor. He turns away and throws the scrap down at my feet - my hands hesitate but I reach for it after a second. My eyes flick up; he's facing away. With my heel, I kick the glasses under the bed. He paces halfway down the cell, gathers himself facing the door, and then turns back expectantly, brows high.
It's a photo and half the article that came with it torn out of a newspaper. Like the Disciplines photo in the City Isis, it takes me a second to get to grips with the black and white and the confusing shapes. But this photo is simpler. It looks almost staged, and it's not how I remember it.
Juniper, I think, and Clay's head snaps to my eyes so suddenly that I'm afraid I've actually said it out loud - but then he snarls, "Well?" and I know that I didn't.
My head is spinning and my fingers shake as they hold the page.
And then a confused and slightly strangled laugh is hiccuping out of my throat.
Clay doesn't know what to do. He takes a step closer, jolts a little, then closes the gap and grabs my wrist, yanking the photo out of my hand. He looks at it for a second, one last time, then his nose crinkles in disgust and he tears it in his hands, dropping the pieces to the floor as he lets go of my wrist. But my laugh keeps coming and it makes my body fold forward so that my head is between my knees, the sound jolting breathlessly out of my twisted body. Ezekiel. Being clipped. Two arrests. The fact that I spent the whole day sitting on the front steps of the BoNReJ and still have 'FAG' written on my head in smudged marker pen.
And what he brings is a photo of a stranger kissing me at a party famous for being drunk and promiscuous.
"You could at least have told me," he spits, venom lashing forth on the emphasised words.
And the laugh starts again. "I'm sorry I was a little busy for that," I whisper back - it wasn't meant to be a whisper but my voice is soft and hoarse and I'm breathless with laughter.
Then his palm slaps across my cheek.
He doesn't miss at the last second. His fist doesn't scatter pages on my desk. I don't catch his hand and save my face.
His palm impacts on the soft part of my face beneath the cheekbones with all the force of his anger and his arm, knocking me sideways off the bed and onto my knees on the floor.
My whole face is numb.
The pain only comes in after a second.
Even when I can see again my ears are ringing and the whole world spins.
He doesn't pull me back up. His lips appear close to my face and as the tingling in my jaw turns into a pain hot and sharp enough to jerk involuntary tears from my eyes he speaks.
"After everything I have done for you," he spits.
Then he's gone.
I don't want to stand up - it's easier to drop onto the floor than to pull myself back onto the bed - but I do. I make it to the sink in the corner and vomit. As I slump on the cold metal, breaths shallow, face too tender to wash clean, my eyes move to the door. It's closed; the Enforcement is took on the other side, clear through the webbed transparent plastic, and they don't look around. They never looked around.
Knowing I won't be able to sleep, I lay back down on the bed again anyway and cross my arms across my chest. I want the security of facing a wall but can't leave my back bare; I want the comfort of a wall against my back but the cell is empty and yawning and every movement opposite makes me flinch.
So I lay on my back and focus on the ceiling as my cheek moves from splitting blinding white pain, to a sharp yellow, to a broad, tired pink-red ache.
There's nowhere for my mind to go that doesn't ache - Clay, the Disciplines, texts from Pike, Ezek, Kiah's good times - but somehow the rest of today - the thunderstorm and the Enforcement and We are firewood is better. It puts my mind somewhere with a purpose. Somewhere with an end game.
I can't go home.
The door opens in the morning. Eventually the exhaustion did it: I wake up to the sound of the door, and the feeling of my face burning. My back is to the wall - I must have turned in the night, and not onto my bruised side.
I don't sit up until the man has paused a few feet away from the bed. Weirdly calm again.
I sit up and look at the Broad. He looks immaculate - blonde hair and suit and smile - in the harsh light of the cell; as I test my neck - it seizes up so sharply I gasp when I try to bend my head back - he passes me a mug. I take it, sip, and then reach under the bed for my glasses.
He's never actually hit my face before but something told me I should do that last night. How convenient of my instincts.
The Broad moves one of the torn-up fragments of newspaper with his foot, peering at it and making an interested face, then sits down on the bench next to me. He has another mug, coffee, but he has it milky and frothy, the opposite of Clay. I sip my tea again, and look at the front of the cell. No officer this time.
"You could not wait until Saturday, could you?" he muses, his voice almost smiling. I take another sip.
"His justice shouldn't wait."
He nods and then sips his coffee.
"You did a good job. Especially with that speech. It upsets me greatly that the best moments are apparently unscripted, but I figured we could at least help."
"You... Helped?"
He smiles and gestures around the cell.
My brows furrow slightly. I stare at my tea, suddenly oh-so-suspicious and oh-so-uncertain. I flex my fingers against the warmth - very warm, almost scalding, pretty real - and then let my eyes flick around more accurately, taking in the way the shadows fall from the glaring strips of light on the ceiling, how the smells of tea and coffee and my unwashed sweaty body and plastic and metal all play in my nose and mouth.
He reaches into his blazer pocket and pulls out his phone, unlocking it and tapping with a few smooth gestures of his thumb to load something up - a photo.
I adjust my glasses, even though they don't fall down my nose any more, and take it to look at them. He scrolls one across to show me that I'm allowed, and I move through them.
Broads. Some Longs. Shorts as well. Some of the photos are outside this Enforcement building; some are on the steps of the BoNReJ, while others are on the streets or actually around the outside of the Disciplines stadium.
People stood with signs. People yelling. Banners. Stones caught on camera mid-throw - at Enforcement. Kids, mostly Longs and Shorts, surrounded by Enforcement with guns and shields and helmets.
At first it makes my heart skip uncertainly and almost with excitement; the faces are written with passion, more than half of the foreheads decorated with the word - the rest I'm assuming are allies, or those for who it isn't safe to be out, but other than this unifying feature they're all pretty diverse. The signs and banners are mostly simple: