fitting all twenty-seven sleeping boxes in a roughly cubical space.
He raised a quiet finger of pause, creeping down the small aisle to peer out the narrow window slit.
From outside in the hallway, Rolf and Elizabeth both accessed his visual feed, gazing out the window with him. He'd been right - over the endless span of jumbled buildings and interconnected walkways, the southern horizon shifted ominously with an immense line of burbling darkness. The Stonework in the distance traveled right up to it, beneath it, and beyond, disappearing into a hazy sheet that glimmered with constantly shifting prismatic colors - the ethereal dance of an ever-shining Sun against ever-present rains.
The man sleeping on the top cot near his head grumbled and rolled over.
"Sorry…" He crept back out of the room with a sheepish grin, finalizing their claim to two spots with a few flicks of his eyes. "Looks like this is home. Whole building's more than full on Morning and Eve shifts, but in those eight long sweet Night hours, we've got two cots."
Elizabeth glared. "It's you and him."
"Great. You better not punch me in my sleep."
Rolf examined the room with his typical deadpan expression. "No promises."
"So what's this about a promise to change the world?" Ragni asked, handing each of them a half-loaf of cricket bread as he sat down at the long steel table. "I made something of a similar boast when I was young. What's your plan?"
Getting comfortable on the bench, Og looked first at Elizabeth, then at Rolf, then back at his father. "I… guess I don't really know."
Ragni's wrinkled face curled up in a knowing half-smile. "I didn't know either, when I was your age."
"What did you end up doing?" Elizabeth asked, taking a bite of her bread as she leaned in, visibly interested.
"Let's see…" He eyed the patterns in the stone ceiling overhead for a moment. "When I was your age… that's forty years ago next month. 265… is that right? Has it really been that long?" He took a moment to access his own past lifelog, giving a small laugh as he watched his younger self rioting. "Yep, that was it. The end of the Tyrant's Decade, and the last days of government in any meaningful sense."
At the word government, various men and women eating nearby turned and watched them with concern.
"Just talking about days gone by," Ragni responded, his hands raised. "No worries."
Og tuned out for a moment, watching his father's riotous ancient actions with a grave look of introspection.
"What was it like, after?" Elizabeth asked, fascinated.
Rolf turned away, his cricket bread still half-unfinished in his hand.
Ragni mused aloud. "The Age of Gangs… ah… it didn't start well. We didn't have a name for it then. We couldn't have known how well the big cultural families were going to consolidate power in the new vacuum." He paused for a moment, considering. "Still, it was better than living under the Tyrant's brutal rule. I guess that's the struggle, though - slowly working toward a better life for your children." He seemed to glance at his son with an almost apologetic expression, barely discernible underneath a veneer of nostalgia.
Og let out a long, dismayed breath. "Where do we go from here, though? Twelve years of anarchy… it's all we've ever really known. It doesn't seem too bad, compared to how people speak about past Ages."
"Eh," Ragni shrugged. "You could always keep your head down, just carve out a little pocket for you and yours. Try to keep them safe."
Og glanced over at his friend, expecting some negative comment, but Rolf just stared down at the table.
The old man paused, taking in a long sibilant inhalation through his nose. He let out a heavy breath before speaking again. "Yes. Things change when you've got a family to protect, and when that riotous youth within has been tempered by decades of struggle. But I don't expect you'll actually keep your head down. No son of mine goes without making a mark in this world."
At his father's compliment, thinking of his brothers, he made a fist. "Yeah, I was thinking. We're the young generation now, but we don't have any Tyrants or Gangs to suppress us. We can do it right, live right, make things the best they've ever been."
Elizabeth nodded in determined agreement.
"That's a nice dream," Rolf said, his voice low. "I hope you're right. I really do. I wasn't sure you were serious, with all those promises."
"A month ago, or even a week ago, it might have just been mouthing off," he admitted. "I like to boast, I know. But coming back here after two years away… it's weird, the things you can take for granted. The things you can remain oblivious to, or just get used to… and then to have all that thrust in your face again… you feel like an idiot for ever having missed it."
Ragni straightened, a subtle look of pride crossing his weathered features. "You sound just like your mother." He laughed, his whole body shaking with humor, nostalgia, and faded sorrow.
"What if - and get this," Og whispered loudly, raising his arms dramatically as he walked. "What if - we cross the Shield Mountains, and find out the barrens aren't so radioactive anymore? That could be our grand undertaking!"
Following him through the dim tenth-floor hallway, Elizabeth frowned. "Sounds ambitious."
"They said three hundred years, right?" he asked. "Well it's been three hundred and five. Why isn't anyone checking into it?"
Rolf brought up the rear. "Do you have extra food and time to just climb right over the Shield?"
"Think of all that free space," he continued, oblivious. "We wouldn't have to build a single meter of land. It's just there! It's just sitting there!"
Elizabeth chuckled. "The construction companies would have a collective fit."
"Oh, you're right," he responded with dismay, scanning the results of prior expedition attempts - all quashed by major construction groups intent on protecting their profits.
They came to the room at the end of the hall. The dim light filtering in through the slit window at the back illuminated an array of cots now mostly filled with Night shift sleepers.
As he'd promised and reserved, the two highest cots on either side of the window lay open.
"Home sweet home," he murmured happily, moving inside and approaching the high cot to the right. Climbing up awkwardly, angling his long limbs and frame between the stone ceiling and the cot, he rolled in with relief. Sighing along with the warm draining sensation of much-deserved respite, he scooted over to make room for Rolf.
Across the small aisle, Elizabeth climbed up into her cot and lolled her head against the synthetic fabric.
He rolled over in confusion, realizing Rolf was still outside the room.
One of the sleepers had woken up and joined him at the door. The two young men spoke in hushed tones.
Standing with no small consternation and cursing his promise not to look at Rolf's visual stream, he walked over to them.
They both stopped talking abruptly.
Closer now to the woken sleeper, he realized the young man also had blue streaks in his black hair - he was from the same culture as Rolf.
"Hey," he said warmly, surprised. "I've never seen another -"
"I'm Dierk," the newcomer responded, smiling and holding out his hand in the old style.
Rolf interrupted them both with a forceful whisper. "Look, it's fine, he's already agreed to find somewhere else to sleep."
"That's ridiculous!"
Thinner than Rolf, but very direct with his curious gaze, Dierk tilted his head slightly. "He's right. Two of us in the same room is risky. People don't react well."
Og shook his head. "Bullshit. This is the Main Hub. We're Scientists. You're a Scientist, right?"
Dierk nodded emphatically. "Engineer on the solar cells project."
"Seriously," he insisted, his thoughts still caught up in the grand things his father had said. "I don't give a damn what they think. We're not going to let this be a thing anymore, especially not among people that are supposed to be enlightened. From now on we're not Nords, Anglans, Oranis, or even Subians. We're just S
cientists."
Dierk stared curiously at him for several moments, considering. "Alright."
"Shh!" someone lying on the cot next to them complained.
He nodded again, insistent, and Dierk hesitantly returned to his cot.
When he was sure the young man was going to stay and sleep, he looked over at Rolf, only to find his friend watching him with the neutral gaze he always donned when he wasn't certain of the motives of others.
He shrugged, riding high from saying such grand things to Dierk. Rolf had no other option but to follow him to their cot.
Lying back to back on the slightly stretchy material, struggling to find a comfortable position, he began to wonder what his big talk might have meant to Rolf. Had anyone ever treated him like that? Rolf's childhood, whatever it entailed - and he could only guess, without looking at his lifelog - must have been a far cry from his own. The Main Hub, as people often said, was a rather posh place to live.
For the first time, he began to wonder about life growing up on the streets, and about how the hell an orphan had survived it all… he realized with some gloominess that, while he had been proudly making a game of memorizing building colors and names, Rolf had been living on the street alone.
He turned on one shoulder and looked past the back of Rolf's head, studying Elizabeth's sleeping form across the aisle. Not alone, he corrected himself - not entirely.
Lying there in the darkness, he felt a certain revelation about his ever-recalcitrant friend hovering at the edge of his thoughts, but the grand reveal stayed annoyingly out of