The chronometer read 0300.
He had not slept. It had become progressively more difficult to sleep over the last 11 months and 13 days. In the background a broadcast muttered something about the very first “Martial Assimilation” hailed all over the pro-militarist media as a “milestone in martial history.” As the pixie-faced anchor on the holoscreen nattered on, his focus shifted from the naked reflection in the glazing to the full view of the inner sky city from the top of the high-rise. The full moon was high and large and shone like a spotlight through the translucent wall. He stared directly into the light savoring the scent which rose from his body breath by slow breath.
Jasmine.
A ruffling noise came from behind. He looked over his shoulder. The jasmine woman with the ebony skin and emerald eyes and the long woven locks of hair like bullwhips, and the thick scars on her back that looked like they had been torn by blade-ended flails sat bare-breasted on the bedside, her back turned.
As she got dressed, he recalled the flows and motions of the previous three hours with curious reflection. There was something very different about this martial woman he could not quite place. Each climax had heightened his fascination with her, and increased her aversion to him. But that smell…
“What is your name?” he asked.
The emerald eyes looked up and studied him.
“Does it matter?” she laughed softly.
“I would like to know.”
She looked askance.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer.
He watched her get dressed, trying to fathom what it was about her that had so roused his fascination.
“My name is Cassius,” he blurted as she stood.
“Sure it is.”
The jasmine woman took out a black canister, rolled the tablet into her hand and knocked it back and swallowed and exhaled. “That was good,” she said. “Maybe too good.” She screwed the cap on the canister and tucking it into her coat. She ogled him sternly. “Don’t look for me if you know what’s good for you.”
She fastened her coat around her and left without more ado.
He followed her with his stare right until the moment the door closed and waited for the sound of the footfalls to fade down the corridor. When she was gone, the holoscreen turned off. He put on some clothes, lifted the bedding off the floor and laid it on the mattress in a bundle. He looked back up at the moon with a tired groan and examined the fraying gauze around his arms.
The light over the dispenser shaft was green. He took out the day’s provisions and set them in the refrigerator, sat down, took out a cigarette, lit, inhaled, bowed his head into his hand and rubbed his black-rimmed eyes, blowing out the smoke in slow-flowing wisps that thickened in the fingers of light. When he looked up, a twinkle of something caught his eye on the floor at the foot of the bed, something small and iridescent, just under the lip of the loose bedding.
He squinted through blurred vision, took another drag of his cigarette and waited with queer hesitation. Eventually, he laid the cigarette down on the ashtray and rose from his seat, his eyes fixed with intensity on the twinkle in the bedding. Leaving a trail of smoke in the shafts of moonlight, he sauntered over to the bed and looked down at the floor. He cleared the bedding away with the tip of his foot and picked up a small luminescent trinket.
A pendant hung by a thin silver chain in his fist and swung hypnotically before his eyes. He turned to the door on reflex, but the jasmine was long gone, and the golden pendant settled in the palm of his hand, still lukewarm with the heat of her flesh, and the feel of it ignited a frightening clairvoyance.
His fingers glided almost on instinct over the depression on the back of the pendant.
The locket clicked open.
A small, folded piece of paper was pressed in the small space.
Gently, he took it out.
Carefully, he unfolded it.
Slowly, he brought it up to the light.
His fingers went limp and the pendant slipped and fell. The image of the little girl revealed in moonlight reached through his gaping eyes and seized his mind with a single purpose. He lapsed into a trance which held him frozen for a long while before he turned his mesmerised eyes up at the moon.
He put a coat over his bare chest and ambled robotically up to the door.
As the capsule descended to the streets, he fixed his gaze northward to the valley hidden in the gloom of night. He marched till dawn broke, and then through morning and noon and dusk until night fell again, over the teeming streets of the inner metropolis, brushing past thick crowds of machine men and over long, mirage-layered, traffic-ridden roads, through rugged brush and woodland his legs bore.
When he stopped a full day later, he was at the edge of the valley, looking back at the point where he had started, never to return. The moons became suns and the suns became moons again as he waited and waited, at their place, eyes turned up to the heavens, never once allaying. Until his flesh fused with bone, he waited. And with each inch he crawled toward death the prophecy became clearer – visions of the future disclosed in the past – a vision of Sodom and the martial world itself crumbling in a hail of purging fire. And he remembered. He remembered the promise. He remembered who he was waiting for. He remembered who he was – a name that would be remembered forevermore in annals of the new world.
– END –
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