His hands were quite uncomfortable as they were, bound within a solid inch of steel handcuffs. The chain wasn’t much of an alleviating factor either, but it did serve to take his mind off the constant din of the engines. The hallway which he was being escorted down was lined with polished wood, and the glint in its surface followed a pattern of light and shadow as they passed in front of the overhead lamps. Its width was spacious to the point where the guards could have comfortably flanked his sides, yet they chose to constrict him between their armour pieces nonetheless. At long last, when they had met the end of the hall, a grandiose pair of doors swung open, revealing the chambers of the minister.

The guards roughly pushed him over the threshold into the room, then quickly scurried away, shutting the door behind them. The presumed-to-be minister cut an imposing silhouette against the expansive window, his frame a stark contrast to the light shining in. 

“Care for tea, Langston? It’s not the most fragrant this time of year, I’m afraid, but I’m sure it will be well-suited to your tastes,” the minister drawled, fully aware Garrett had little access to hot water, much less tea of any sort. A serving boy quickly ran in, pouring a delicate teacup nearly to the brim, and setting it before Garrett. He raised it to his lips, cuffs clinking all the while, and paused. 

“Let’s cut the formalities, Emilio, what do you want this time?”

The minister went rigid, swiveling around in his chair to come eye to eye with Garrett.

“Alright, I’ll lay it straight. What’s wrong with the engines?”

Garrett made the most innocent face he could manage. “What engines?”

“Don’t give me that. You very well have noticed from your cell that the city is quickly descending into the cloud layer, and that the engines continuously produce some dreadful noises nobody’s heard before. You tell me now, and I might let you off easy.” The minister drew a revolver and laid it gently upon the desk before him. 

“What, you think I know anything about it?” Garrett said, glancing nervously at the gun. “Even if I did, I sure wouldn’t tell you of all people.” 

The minister chuckled, then hefted the revolver up into his hand, barely reaching around its girth. 

“You’ll tell me alright, you old useless architect. Otherwise this gun...” He loaded a bullet into the chamber. “May have its third use today.”

Garrett stared as the minister continued to caress the gun, and began to sweat despite the chilling atmosphere. He was truly stuck between two evils; either he gave up the information, or he gave up his life. Being that he enjoyed the full capabilities of an alive body, Garrett chose the most appealing option, and hoped that his ancestors would not frown upon him. 

“Alright.”

The minister looked both surprised and disappointed. “Alright? Well, come along,” he said, setting down the gun and striding across the room to an entryway on the left. Garrett reluctantly rose and trailed behind him, chains continuing their raucous jingling as he went.

A plume of smoke just so happened to intersect their path as they navigated the labyrinth of pipes, nearly toppling the minister as he swerved to avoid it, and evoking silent amusement from Garrett as the minister raged at a nearby worker. Dusting himself off, the minister proceeding with the walk through the claustrophobic space, ducking every so often in order to dodge a low-hanging pipe. Upon meeting a sealed door with various signs of precaution and twice the number of locks on any cell, he simply gave a shove, and the door creaked open, all locks negligently unlocked. They came upon a precipice overlooking the clouds below, the view blocked only by a mechanical complex of thrusters whose rancid lingering of oil could almost be tasted in the air. 

“Welcome back.” The minister spread his arms seemingly in a gesture of welcome, but Garrett returned only a vacant look. Holding his stance for a moment, the minister smiled, then briskly walked out and slammed the door. The only remaining company Garrett had was the behemoth of a contraption before him. It seemed to almost pulse.

“What kind of abuse are we going to continue suffering?”

The crowd looked around hesitantly, both seeking confirmation from their peers and watching for the inevitable appearance of a dreaded guard. 

“Why do we bear this?” The man stood upon a wooden crate, filled with a fire and plenty of alcohol.

“Just stop. You know this is a bad idea. Stop before you get hurt, or worse, somebody hears,” a woman from the crowd said.

“Why? Who cares if they hear?”

The woman shook her head in resignment, too tired and indifferent to continue to protest. Bleak skies seemed more mundanely grey than usual, not that anyone had the time nor motivation to look upwards anyway. A cart rattled through the small gathering; some moved aside to allow its wooden frame to pass, and the others simply looked on to those inside—a terrible, broken people they were, inside that cart. Through the metal bars one might notice their roughed hands, chafed to a degree in which blisters had come and gone, and only small tatters of skin remained to shield their flesh from the shackles. None for the better could be said for their clothing. More holes than fabric, they could hardly be called dressed, and more so covered by an old second-hand sheet. 

Newly captured felons, or at least, that was what they were meant to be. A more probable summation of their wrongdoings could be called ‘defamation of the tax collectors’, or some event regarding public speech and slanderous thinking. 

Therefore, as the cart left, and the crowd reformed, the man who had previously been fueled by vigor was now burnt out. Dejected, but mostly frightened for his well being, he stepped down from his makeshift stand. It was a correct decision made too late.

The armoured guard menacingly threw up a clenched glove at the cowering huddle of people. 

“Disperse, or face the punishment of the law!” he shouted. The group began to splinter off, individuals running from the guard with heads lowered and hands shielding themselves. It thinned to a measly sum of three; the scrawny man standing between the guard and his family only being one of the remaining protesters. 

“By what right do you have to interfere?” James Fabble yelled back, his voice a mixture of false confidence and terror.

“Minister’s orders. You’d best leave now; I’ll give you that advice.” The guard slammed his fist into an open palm, attempting to intimidate James. His boots slowly clanked against the cracked cobble as he advanced. James, blinded by a sudden upcoming temerity, ran forward and gave a great big fist to the breastplate of the guard. The only affect was a sharp pain in his knuckle as the metal of the armour stood put, and the man inside shoved James against the ground. 

“Not a good move, you lower-city scum. ‘Assaulting an officer of the law.’ That’ll earn you a nice little stay in the prisons.” Without hesitation, the guard bound him with a pair of handcuffs and began to drag him away. The child who had been hiding behind her mother began to cry, and made a start for James, but was reluctantly held back by the woman with an expression of melancholy. 

James was thrown without regard for comfort nor safety into the stone wall of a prison cell, experiencing the feeling of at least one bone fracture. He groaned. Without the generous padding provided by a nourished body, every impact was felt to a magnified scale. He surveyed the room, glancing over the tattered pile of rags meant for sleeping and a small basin no doubt used for egestion. Without further inclination for his next actions, he chose to sit on the rags and wait.

Garrett growled, slamming down the wrench and waving a hand to dispel the smoke. 

“Emilio, that bastard.” He examined the inner mechanisms another time. Under normal circumstances, there would have been a casing around each piston to regulate its output of power, and smoke, apparently, as there was an obvious lack of casing and the suspicious presence of smoke. An easy fix, really. All it would have taken was five minutes with a half-decent, barely competent set of hands to replace the piece with another, yet it seemed the goons at the top were neither. 

They had lost the last original mechanic when he was unceremoniously deranked and thrown into a cell. It hardly required substantiation; one could take a whiff of the air and decipher that the burning smell was quite different opposed to the usual burning smell. Given more time, Garrett most likely could have mustered a solution, but the majority of his time was spent on a project not under the eyes of Emilio. 

Tucked away in a small alcove along the curved walls of the platform was a contraption of sorts, one intended to save him. It would have been a bit of a stretch to call it flight-worthy, but it would do. A single pole bolted to a makeshift seat was warped by canvas stretched along its length, forming the ‘wings’ of his machine, and the blades of the front facing propellor were fashioned of the scrap metal pieces which he painstakingly molded. It was nearly finished: his flying machine. Flight implied a controlled descent, whilst his was to be more than likely turbulent or fatal, so a more apt term would have been ‘falling scrap sculpture’. Not that he would have immediately left anyway, as he had matters to attend to. Namely, one that was probably sitting behind a desk still trying to fit his hand around a revolver. 

His fuming demeanor was interrupted abruptly by a sharp rapping upon the door. Without further warning, the door swung open, and in stepped the man of the hour, Emilio himself. 

Oddly enough, the minister was clothed in formal attire, each piece impeccably spotless despite the airborne grit. He quickly looked about and found Garrett hunched in the corner, then motioned with a gesture of the hand to follow him. The minister smiled and prompted:

“Why don’t you come with me briefly; we can discuss the terms of your service and perhaps negotiate a couple of conditions you may find attractive.” 

Garrett rose to his feet with a grunt, dusting himself off and shuffling toward the minister. A pair of clippers rested in his pocket, the outline of it so temptingly close; with only a few steps he could snap them from their place and into the cold, perhaps not even beating heart of the minister. The suit the minister donned was oddly reminiscent of another time, upon the same city he once loved. 

Although slightly blurred around the edges, he could still see it vividly. A ballroom with arched ceilings of grandeur gildings, whose stained glass windows each had their own accompaniment of rutilant tassels, and which housed a congregation of the newest and most prestigious residents of the city upon the clouds. Garrett stood among the crowd of gowns and suits, bound with not chains but a form-fitting tuxedo and the air of hostile, mutually enforced formality. He plucked a pastry from the tray of a passing server. Just before he made the first bite into the pastry, he was greeted by a hand around his shoulders.

“Quite the spectacle, isn’t it?” Emilio came to face Garrett, and spread his hands, gesturing to the crowd. “An entire gathering of elites, miles from the corruption, war, and poverty of the ground.”

“Bit of a pain to board them all, though. An entire horde of myopic, deluded brats,” Garrett replied, not bothering to mask the animosity toward the crowd.

“Well, be a bit sympathetic. We’ve let the people perform a process of selection among themselves—those who can afford the next frontier shall pioneer it. Only the qualified have come aboard, and we can weed out those who don’t deserve it later.”

Garrett held a bit of disdain at the word ‘qualified’ when describing the people of the room. Standing with them, all dressed up nice in his suit, he could almost pretend that they were his friends. The only person that he considered close to him was Emilio, the one who took him from his inescapable, debt-ridden job and raised him to work on the project. Garrett and his family were able to clean their slate and reinvent their lives due mostly in part to Emilio’s intervention. As such, Garrett held a reluctance to grouping him with the remainder of the elites; although he was just as economically free as the people around, Emilio didn’t seem to pertain to the type of person Garrett was accustomed to addressing as rich. 

He glared at Emilio, silently cursing him. Once he left the engine chamber, he was bound in cuffs by the guards, who stepped from the shadows, and escorted along the winding ways of pipes in a direction oddly familiar to him. 

By the time the maze of pipes had slowly transformed into walls of greater grandeur, Garrett had traveled such a distance that had taken a noticeable toll upon his underutilized legs; he highly suspected that they had already made a substantial crossing of the city’s underground. The width of the corridor, though gradually, had increased to accommodate the squadron of escort guards surrounding him. The air no longer had a lingering taste of acridic fuel, rather, the cleanliness seemed to have its own distinct domain as they continued forward. At some point, the guards suddenly jerked to a halt, rebounding Garrett from his pace as the chains pulled him to a stop. Overhead, an archway with inscriptions of some cryptic language defined an entryway into the room where something important surely awaited him; any other outcome was improbably given the ends made to bring him here. Twin doors of finished oak stood as sentries guarding the contents of the room, and the guards quickly moved to push them open, revealing a sight to behold.

Rows upon rows of wooden contraptions lined each wall of the chamber, and at each stood a shackled man, methodically driving a handle downwards. Every machine trailed to the centerpiece of the room: a massive gear which turned with the synchronized work of every unit in the room. For what purpose it spun remained a mystery, as Garrett saw no practical purpose in maintaining a large-scale workforce for the sole reason of rotating a seemingly useless and disconnected gear. Every time the gear turned, a great groan would emanate from its depths; the sound of wood straining. 

From the left of the room entered a woman in clothing certainly not suited for the current environment, with a suit and pants that would have gotten ripped or stained within the first few moments of doing actual work. She greeted Garrett.

“Welcome! I’m so glad you could make it, Mr. Langston. It’s great to meet you; you can call me Victoria.” The woman extended a hand. Garrett made no move to shake it until a guard encouraged him with a hearty prod. 

Emerging from the same door came Emilio, dressed in similar attire, revolver holstered ridiculously at the waist. 

“Let’s make ourselves comfortable and have a nice conversation, I think you’ll find it very appealing,” Emilio said, walking to a furniture set in a small alcove inset in the wall.

They sat in plump chairs, soft to the point that Garrett was uncomfortable, behind a table gilded with art of giants and mythical creatures. The feeling of it all; while completely foreign, also was familiar. 

“You probably already have some notion of why we’ve brought you here. I’ll cut it short, there is a miniscule chance this city will continue on in this state,” Victoria said.

“And what am I meant to do about it?” Garrett responded. She smiled.

“I’m glad you asked! You see, the present residential population isn’t quite what we envisioned it to be, as we expected more than the current pitiful trash,” she said, disgusted. “We originally brought a special breed; one that was the peak of mankind. After the Great Plagues essentially killed the entirety of most functioning civilizations, we were stuck.”

Victoria raised a teacup to her lips and sipped slowly. Emilio began to speak.

“The original intent for the city was quite simple and elegant: filter the remaining population to create a civilization independent and superior to the decimated remains of the land.”

Garrett nodded, slightly suspicious of their affable nature.

“I do recall the day we loaded the city. It was a surprisingly low amount of people for the millions that supposedly signed up. Must’ve been some filtration system,” Garrett remarked, settling into his seat.

“Absolutely ludicrous screening process it was. Took ages to do them all. You know, it was the funniest thing. The way they begged,” Victoria said, smirking slightly. 

Garrett sat up. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the screening process was mostly efficient, save for the common factor of nearly every non-selected individual refusing to accept their fate. You should have seen it, their faces before they were cut down.”

“You killed them?” Garrett stood abruptly, knocking over the table settings. “I knew you were low, but this is unacceptable.”

“Calm yourself,” Emilio said, unfazed. “And I’d advise against any violent gestures against us, unless you’d prefer a repeat of last time. You’re more disposable now than before.”

Garrett clenched his jaw, lowering himself into the seat that felt rock-solid. A rush of memories engulfed him.

“What’s this, Garrett?”Emilio probed, gesturing at a photograph in his hand.

Garrett desperately looked about for assistance, none was available in close proximity. 

“See here, Emilio. It’s not quite what it seems,” Garrett pleaded. Emilio smirked.

“Is that so? For what it seems to me is that somebody allowed, if not encouraged, illegal passengers aboard the city.” 

Garrett remained silent, and Emilio continued. 

“It is unfortunate that nobody has stepped forward as the perpetrator, we have absolutely no clue as to who committed such a heinous act.” Emilio grinned, clearly aware of Garrett’s uneasiness. 

“Well, I—”

“No need to fear, Garrett. I’m sure you’re entirely scot-free; we’ve already found the culprits!” Emilio said, becoming excited as he noticed Garrett’s confusion. 

“Who have you found?” As soon as the words left Garrett’s mouth, Emilio lit up with glee, delighted at being able to deliver the news.

“Well, I regret to inform you,” Emilio said, not regretful in the slightest, “that we’ve caught your close family in the act of the crime, and as such, subject them to fitting punishment.”

Garrett felt a burning sensation within him, one that both fueled his rage and burned away the confidence he had preceding the conversation. His life, constructed from nothing, was crumbling before him as the foundation it was built upon was whisked away. 

“What have you done, you bastard?” Garrett could only muster a whisper. 

Emilio couldn’t contain himself any longer, and burst into a fit of laughter. The flame within Garrett surged and he lunged at Emilio, only to stopped by a pair of armoured guards. He fought at them, punching uselessly at their metal armaments and thrashing in their unyielding grasp. 

“I’ll kill you!” Garrett shouted, still violently making movements for Emilio. 

Emilio smiled. “You may find doing so difficult behind bars, my friend.”

A bloody and battered Garrett emerged from the doors, coming upon an unimaginable, dystopian city, the same one which hours earlier had been relatively tranquil. From every point in his vision raged a pillar of flame, consuming the vague silhouettes of barely standing buildings. People, mad with confusion and fear, ran screaming through the streets, whilst other stood and gazed vacantly at the ruins of their home. The ground rumbled, each tremor signaling the loss of another engine. And with each shake that coursed through the flaming city, a churning feeling could be felt; a mixture of despair and the complaint of the stomach at the descent. It was undeniable. Through the billowing smoke and ash formed a vision-inhibiting canopy, it was evident that the city continued to fall, marked by a faint feeling. Garrett ran down the steps and fought against the surging mob, attempting to push through. He had formulated a plan. 

It was inevitable that the city was to die in a fireball of massive proportions, but the slim chance of potentially moving far enough from the resulting explosion upon contact with the ground existed. Without the use of a flying machine like the one which still laid hidden beneath the ductwork of the mechanical underground, it was essentially impossible. Making his way to the edge of the city where the precarious, mangled remains of a restraining barrier had been ripped off from the strain of the fall, he peered over the precipice. A swift gust forced him back, but in the momentary glimpse he managed, he had seen the form of a large cloud, or more frighteningly, the ground. A piece of the street to his right crumbled away, plummeting down to the same fate that awaited them all. It struck him all at once; both the realization that he probably was not to survive and the hopelessness of the situation. He fell to his knees against the coarse stone. 

Was it futile, the entire thing? From the day that it first rose up from the scarred earth, to the moments before meeting the same surface it departed for survival, now in a more pathetic state than it had fled—was it all to come to this? How unfair, he thought. That some overwatching presence might spare them from one catastrophe, only to deliver them to a end twice as cruel; how unfeeling, that one could envision it. And if it were to come down to a choice, one between a death at the hands of a cruel, all too cruel fate and his own, he was to fall by his own means. The precipice was far less daunting than it had been before. Behind him no longer laid doubt, hopes that he could pin his indecision on; two crushed dreams were the only remaining friends.

He waited for what seemed the last crowd to hurry toward the center hall. The first step was the hardest, but every following foot on the ground was easier, and he was insouciant as he met the final step onto not stone, but open air. His surroundings became streaks of color as he descended the sky with increasing speed, the force of puncturing the air around him pulling away the tears he hadn’t even noticed. The underside of the city was finally visible, clear among the unfocused silhouettes in his vision; from a view such as his, minute intricacies in the framework and design were pronounced: catwalks constructed of steel spanned the entire structure, forming altogether a spider web of sorts. Shattered remnants of supporting girders were splayed across the remains of the bottom, painting a mangled portrait of fractured melancholy. The city seemed pathetic; pathetic truly being what it was. Looking upon it now was comparable to seeing a war-torn prisoner and being aware of the former youthful vibrancy it once carried. 

And without a drip of remorse, it was all erased. Blossoming from the center, a fireball grew, feeding upon the splintered pieces of the city and engulfing the mass in a light too bright to even squint at. Shortly following the flames came a thunderous sound that impacted Garrett not only with the physical shockwave, but also the piercing din of the city ripping itself apart. When all the commotion came to a standstill, and all that remained was him falling through the air and the burning, charred remains, the lull in time seemingly recompensated itself with a sudden impact. He plunged through the surface, a jarring cold shielding him from the pain of every shattered bone, and drifted slowly into the abyss. It was difficult to pinpoint an exact timeframe, but he remained in the chronic state hanging tantalizingly between life and death for a time enough to notice. The border was so indistinct that he felt absolutely nothing as a pair of hands steadily dragged him back to the surface, and set him aboard an awaiting vessel.