You have to walk where the wind is. It comes round that corner there and is squeezed between these two pillars of glass and steel. When it comes round that bend and slices through you it's cold, it stings, and it moves through you to somewhere else. I don't know where the wind goes but I know it takes a bit of me with it. Day to day commuting is harsh when your shoes are worn and getting more worn by the step. It can get pretty bad is your scarf isn't wrapped just right and that wind gets inside your coat like it's try to cuddle up and get warm next your skin. Wind burned cheeks are sore even before I open the door in the morning to go out. But it's not as bad as the chapped skin on the front of my thighs. I get that from not having enough layers to my longjohns. Pants are too snug to layer more than twice. The wind steals all the heat and moisture from whatever it touches as it whips around the builds. I try to forget about the cold and the ice when I get to work finally. The building is heated but not enough and drafty so even though I shed my coat I need a pretty thick sweater. Running back and forth on the cat walks is really what tears through my shoes so fast the textured metal seems to wear everything down. I run checking pressure gages from the top and shouting orders for adjusts for the girls below. This is light machine work adjust knobs and watching for breaks on the precision needles. The men working the furnaces I envy this time of year most walk around shirtless and many with cigarettes in their mouths. I'd kill for a fag but there's no smoking here it's too close to the final product. The tapestries we can't even see as the tiny needles fly up and down and back and forth pulling thousands of threads following the patterns they are fed from the cycling metal plates filled with holes. I'm told we're embroidering a landscapes with medieval castles and rolling hills this week. I don't know, I never see the finish product. They're marked for export to somewhere across the sea where they fetch a pretty penny as authenticate Old City productions. But I don't know anything about that I'm just a guage reader with bad shoes.

Samson and Margery

Samson was eighteen when he got the call to serve. The physical training went quickly and so did the first year of professional training. He went to school to be an officer, but even on his graduation day decked to the nines in medals he could not look his mother in the face. She would not look at him as long as his uniform was black and red. She refused to speak with him. He'd been away to long, he didn't understand what it meant to her. She was so heart broken and so sorry she had not found a replacement father finger when he was a child. She was beating herself up over this again and again. It killed her inside to hear of the gracious news of her son. News she could never be proud of.

He was to be shipped out, sent for the coast. Samson lied to his commanding officer, something he had never done. A two day pass with the promise to be at his post Monday morning, were all he took with him as he snuck into the old city. He had to see his mother, he had to understand why her letters stopped.

He walked the old familiar streets. Their smells were comforting and yet so very foreign to him now. In civilian clothes, he walked not understanding. This place was supposed to be the crown jewel of the river cities. It was dark now, it wasn't deserted; it was inhabited by the achy silence of fear. Men in black patrolled the main thoroughfares. Ration cards and work papers were more common than currency in the hands and pockets and minds of the city's denizens. This was not the home he had left, nor was it the home he had been told about the boot camps. He had been told the city prospered; he had been told he was fighting for a brighter tomorrow. That was not what he saw.

Margery his mother stirred a pot too large for what little portions it contained. Cabbage, cabbage was all she could afford tonight. Her son looked crestfallen; his hands were cupping his forehead, his elbows all that were keeping him from crashing down to the table. Monday came and he was in uniform.

He was wearing tan and blue of the lily men. He would be at the coast but he would fight for his city.

Margery was never the same after that week. She stood taller than she had in years. She stirred her pots and smiled with the pride of a mother even though there was no one else in her kitchen.

The brass lilies, that were brought back in place of her only son, she now wore close to her heart, regardless of who saw.

Margery doesn't eat alone now; no now she cooks in even bigger pots for the lines of men, women, and children who come to her hungry. Her kitchen is rarely empty as she houses all passers who see her her brass lily pin and know what it means. She is a widow and she is strong.

The Deal

The cigarette was dark and smelt of cloves; it was expensive and difficult to come by even in this port town. The one called the widow held it's long ivory holder to the side of her mouth. Her business suit was black with pale cream pinstriping.

Max had never felt so uncouth in all his life. She exuded an unusual presence from her green chair by the fire. This was his neighborhood. The broken bottoms were his and yet he had no strings to pull when it came to her. Her eyes flashed from the light of the fire. The snow outside was swallowing the city. Max waited while she considered his offer. He had never been a Patriot but she was no fan of his ruffian outfit. He was an old school gangster who made a lot of money even in these desperate times. Despite her dislike of him, he had a purpose and a place, in the world she was building.

"You will aid the resistance." She said it as a declarative sentence not as a question.

Max nodded humbly.

"You can keep your docks, and your army of thugs but in Broken Bottoms you answer to me. Thirty percent of all protection money from local businesses and forty percent of your income from abroad goes to me. Making your life a living hell, would be easy. Know that, killing you is low on my list, but piss me off and you'll never walk through the old neighborhood again." The small man beside her showed an evil grin and raised an Aspen bat into view.

The cigar shifted from the side to the front of his mouth. He pretended to contemplate the options laid before him.He agreed and reached out to shake hands a sign of a completed deal. She did not reciprocate; instead she merely she rose and disappeared her man in a blue hat pushed a pile of documents his way. He couldn't look at the photos. He simply nodded. He was outnumbered, outgunned, and half his men had converted to her outfit now.

As he climbed back into his stretched Citroen he tried to regain the calm he had known. He tried to fix his mind to that place that had allowed him to stare down so many gun barrels. He even tried to chuckle thinking back to how he had cornered the other Administrators into giving him Broken Bottoms and the surrounding areas. He tried to return his thoughts to back when he was blackmailing Patriots not being blackmailed.

Max was in his late fifties but you won't have thought it though. He was built wide across the shoulder, narrow at the hip. He had dark hair and amber eyes that glistened at the thought of money and extortion. Broken Bottoms had been his childhood home and he had worked hard to become it's keeper. He had broken many knees, threatened many dealers, and shot a great many people to get to where he was today. He was in no way thrilled to know that she in a few short months had taken the reigns of his empire out from under him.

Half his men worked for her now. Nearly every thug knew working for the widow meant better pay, and greater benefits. Her acts of terrorism had united people faster than unions and personal threats ever could. She did have a style all her own though.

There was no guarantee the woman he had just met with was her, no one saw the widow and lived.

The problem was now he was in a tough place. Twice since the dock bombings the other administrators had tried to weasel him out of the Broken Bottoms, but he had outwitted them at every turn. They might have succeeded if they hadn't hey needed him, revolt if it was to come, would come from that sector, and they needed someone with a firm hand. If the crime is organized then the general people are not was the notion. Oh, if only they knew. If he was to keep his lifestyle and his hold in Broken Bottoms he was going to have play by her rules at least for now.

The photos in the envelope were not of him, but to be used by him. Several, Patriots on her payroll seemed to have forgotten their place. They had led the round ups on Charleston St, the western edge of the Bottoms. They needed to be put in their place. The photos were of certain Administrators with a man named Jessie. The kind of photos that could end any career in this tight laced political powder keg. One thing he did like about the widow was her ability to twist people, it was a trait to be admired and feared from his angle.

The driver was taking it slow with the threat of black ice on these back streets. This was a night for dark things, dark plans, dark schemes. A perfect night to find the idiot who had thought about sending coppers into Max's territory.

Dr. J, Released

His name was Jensen, or Jenkins, or something like that, back when he had a name. Now he was just a number printed in black on his jumper.

0224569-1A.
Patient.
Prisoner.

Some days he wasn't even that. Most days in fact he was a room number, a check on a log, and just another door in another hall. Those to whom he had once mattered had moved on; they were somewhere else in another world. A world he was beginning to think had just been another drug induced fantasy.

He sensed before he saw. He heard before he was sure. It was a sound he had not heard in nearly ten years. The steady confident click clack of a woman's high heels on the tile floor. It wasn't on his hall but it was a definite change. Someone was here. Someone who had not been here before.

There are other noises now. A wave of change is moving through the building, it is careening down his hall. It is coming towards him. It waits impatiently on the other side of the door. There is the metal click of keys in the locks and the pulling back of the barricades. What greets the eyes of the man that no one remembers, is the vision of an angle.

The men in their white lab coats and the orderlies in their pale blue uniforms frame her aura. Her business suit is black and constrained. The jacket with it's long sleeves is tailored to follow every curve. It's perfectly tailored. Just like the black woolen pencil skirt that goes just past her knees. Her dark hair is pulled back and up. The fluorescent light behind the crowd flickers giving her 5'11" stature a dramatic spark not unlike a halo. Her age is indeterminable.

As the humble patient of room 1242 of the east wing stares up at her from the floor he sees only his salvation. She smiles cooly and approaches. She gestures for the orderlies to lift him up. As the patient is carried out of the hospital her heels clack with clarity. Her eyes shine with authority. The red stripes of her lapel pin sparkle at the very notion of her presence here.

In a long black car she rides back to the offices. Her cellphone rings and she pulls it out to answer.

"Yes."

"It is done."

"In due time."

"Of course."

She clicks it closed and puts it back in her small black hand bag. From a brown leather satchel satchel she draws out several folders. His name is Jarrins. His work was halted by a loss of funding at the end of the coast wars. His experiments were gathered up including himself. The extent of his work is not known as the cypher to his work has yet to be discovered. She scans through the photos of the hidden labs and the remains of his subjects. She smiles to herself with a few secrets filling her with mirth. In the satchel is also some the man's notebooks as of yet not deciphered. She flicks one open and scans the page reviling in knowledge her predecessors could not discover.

The precious cargo, a mad man, is carefully sedated before being placed in the white sleeper cell that would ensure his safe transport to the docks and then to administrators.

Jeffery, The Jar

Some say life began with the primordial ooze, for Jeffery it began with a sticky vitamin rich pink fluid and bubbles. He had been very small then. Too small to understand the significance of the fluid and only that he enjoyed the bubbles; they tickled. By his twelfth week of gestation he was moved into a long glass cylinder and the pink fluid became much more gelatinous and gray. Now his environment was changing as he was exposed to a display of lights in varied but warm soothing colors and patterns all around him. These colors were soon accompanied by sounds.

His deliverance into this world wasn't nearly as tranquil. For the first time he was solely responsible for breathing on his own, maintaining his own body temperature, and well everything. He was awake, he was cold, and everything was too bright.

A metal bracelet was slapped on his wrist and then he was wrapped in warm blankets and whisked away. He liked being held. It was like being back in his jar, warm and safe. His nurse had a kind face and she rocked him gently as she did all the babies in the nursery. In the weeks that followed he grew by leaps and bounds. His nurse was a mechanical wonder built only to provide comfort to the 'little ones' as she called them. They were her only concern as her clockwork ticked soothingly. Her mechanical voice sweet, sincere, perfect in Jeffery's world. She was all the love he needed and all he ever knew.

He was back in the laboratory supervising the rows upon rows of his siblings through their gestation when the ground had started to shake, when the great roar came and broke his world. Under the ruin that now composed his entire world he waited. He didn't know what else to do. He was pinned. He watched as the dark figures took away his brothers and sisters. He watched as they deactivated the nurse and seized the remaining jars. He waited for a long time. He waited after the time of quiet. After the green things had begun to grow in his crumble down world. He waited. The Doctor would he home soon. He would set things right. He would be home soon. He needed only to be patient and wait.