THE PLATINUM RAVEN

26 Scent of f'd-up dark devouring hunger

26   Scent of f'd-up dark devouring hunger

In the late afternoon the Chocolate Raven feels herself drooping with fatigue over the lists of urgent corporate expenses she has been battling with for several hours today, here in her office room at home. She goes to the kitchen to make her tenth coffee of the day, in a bid to keep herself awake after her sleepless night of tower-watching. As she heaps in her customary four sugars and starts grinding the metal teaspoon distractedly around the mug, she finds herself recalling the man who approached her in the hotel bar and introduced himself as Jaymi. She recalls her feeling of disappointment when he absented himself after only a few words. She also realises she made an assumption he was rich. This may be unjustified: by no means do riches attach to everyone who crosses her path here. Still, for some reason she finds herself imagining this Jaymi's generosity towards her becoming quite notable—not just in material terms, but in his doing her bidding in a manner both gallant and efficacious. She even pictures his becoming almost genie-like for her. Yet along with this picture comes a sense that he wouldn't really feel under her sway at all, but would be doing her bidding only in order to facilitate some opaque desire or agenda of his own... Anyway, these ruminations are silly; he's just someone she once met in a bar. She picks up her mug of coffee and heads back to her desk.

...But that's not quite going to cut it, is it? It's not going to cut it, because let's remember he was the figure who gave her the mysterious red card-key. She hasn't been able to make any sense of that key. It doesn't appear in any of these expense lists that she's been ploughing through today; and among the hundreds of room bookings she becomes aware of every week, she still cannot remember or find any record of having anything to do with that unusually elite corporate suite, so very high above her own apartment on the Burj Khalifa. Furthermore (and most importantly, to be frank), the suite in question then became the location of her witnessing, without warning, the explosive unfoldment of a convulsion, tiny in the far distance, between four iconic figures in a tower across the desert, that was destined to re-slant her own life forever—first on account of the convulsion's very nature, and then on account of the shocking desolation and sadness of its escape from her grasp this morning, with such an intimation of permanence in the escape. Could she ever have witnessed that from any other terrace, from any other suite, than the one on the 152nd Level? Either way, how could those events not have left Jaymi elevated in her memory, standing up there staring down at her from the still centre of an aura as strong as a whirlwind?

Soon she decides she can do no more expense sheets today, and pushes the whole heap of them away from her. She leans back in her chair and turns her head to gaze through the window, at the Gulf. She becomes aware of something just below this sight-line, lying on the window sill. That red key again.

There's only one thing to do.

She checks that she has both the red key and her own, leaves the apartment, takes the lift down to the main lobby and crosses to the lift serving the upper corporate suites. She enters the lift-car, watches the doors close, and rests her forehead against cool wall of the lift as it ascends.

At 152 she steps out into a small, quiet lobby where several unnumbered but differently-coloured doors present themselves—one of them red. She tries the strange card-key in this door, hears the lock click open and pushes the door inwards.

Inside, she is expecting that internal hallway with its neutral luxury she has seen in a thousand upscale corporate suites. Instead, she recognises an avenue she once drove through, located in the grim labour-camp district hidden at the centre of the vast industrial expanse of Al Quoz—its dismal concrete bunkers now deserted. The hallway door snicks shut again behind her. Empty lots of wire-mesh and gutted cars slide by her; the pavement is overrun with grass and weeds waving restless in the wind blowing in from the Gulf. A low repeated squeak cuts the breeze, where a rusty sign swings from a metal pole. She hugs her arms around herself and darts on down the hallway. Ahead the warehouse looms, its tall chimneys black upon a sky-glow coloured like a bruise. As she finds the warehouse door and slips inside, a dog bays savagely a block away.