Ragamuffin

chapter one It had been three hundred and fifty-seven years, three months, and four days since the emancipation of humanity. And for most, it did them little good. Nashara walked down the dusty road of Pitt's Cross reservation, her scaly leather boots biting into her ankle. Log houses and refugee tents dripped acid water from a recent rain, and the ground steamed. It was a desperate assemblage of buildings that dared call itself a city, and all that did was remind Nashara of what a city should really look like. People could be more than this. She flagged down a van bouncing through the wet street. The mud-coated van, yellow paint flaking off its sides, stopped by the bench outside a community center where a long line of ragged and desperate faces lined up for the soup kitchen. Nashara could smell whiffs of fresh bread and body odor. A few eyes darted her way, seeing the functional but new clothing and no doubt wondering what she was doing here. And whether she was carrying money. It was just as likely surprise at her skin, as dark as the shadows these people seemed to try to sink into. Her hair, tight and curly, but shorn military short. Old habit. Pitt's Cross consisted mainly of the light-skinned. Or maybe, just maybe, someone was already tracking her, ready to shoot her and drag her body to the edge of the reservation for a bounty. She turned her back to it all and got in the van. What was done was done, and now it was time to keep moving. "Could rain again," the old man driving the van commented as Nashara threw a stamped metal coin into the small bucket by his seat. "I get more passengers if I wait around for the rain, charge more when they're desperate not to get stung by it." Nashara sat down on the cushioned bench behind him and threw several more coins in. "Let's go." "Where to?" "Security gate." The old man cleared his throat, leaned closer to the window, and looked up at the sky. Nashara tapped his back. He turned around annoyed, then flinched when she stared directly into his slightly clouded eyes. "I shit you not," Nashara said, "I'll break your neck if you don't start driving." He swallowed. "Right." The van quietly lurched forward down the street, then turned an easy left. They edged past a large cart pulled by fifteen men, all yoked to it by wooden harnesses. How far humanity could still fall. Nashara folded her arms. Two years mucking about in Pitt's Cross, building contacts, until she'd found a job that would make her enough to leave. She watched a landscape of ruined housing and people slide by the dingy windows of the van. The buildings petered out until nothing but bare, scorched ground surrounded her. The reservation's wall crept into view over the horizon. The black and smooth, two-hundred-foot edifice spread for as far as she could see in either direction. Spotlights stabbed at the ground and sky. It was scalable, she'd done that to get over last night, and back over in the morning. Though not without trouble. Her left shoulder had a cauterized hole through it as a result of getting back over. "You have a pass?" the old man asked, incredulous. "Or will I be waiting at the wall for you?" "Are we not emancipated? Can't we travel anywhere we want?" "Don't spout that crap at me." They both knew they needed a "human safety pass" to be allowed out there, and passes were rare around the reservation. "Even if you get through, how far canBuckell, Tobias S. is the author of 'Ragamuffin', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765354105 and ISBN 0765354101.