The Dusk Amber Digit (Halfstreet Archives)- genre: Steam/Otherworld Teen

Archive transmission: The dusk amber digit

Case file: (roughly translated) The dusk amber digit  

Writsmith: (Aetherist) D.Zoem(c)2010  

They've took him to the Registry. Against his will. Imagine anything managing against his will. I can't stay here now. They'll find out about me if I do. My fingertips've gone dusky amber with Lore resin.  

My tongue is darker than it should be.  

...her eyes flash recognition at the oft-closed position of my mouth.  

But she's not yet aware of my fingers. I've stained them purposefully with imaging inks. Even if it cannot be overcome that I do not work the visigraph at weeks end, and come afternoon tomorrow, there will be no camouflage.  

I wonder if she spots contempt, beneath the withholding glances; the age old, perfect obedience?  

Can she see her child? 

Can it be I am truly her child?  

We sit as opposing planets, making 180 degrees, across from the other, divided by plates of stuffed mushroom steak, meme sprouts, and red tart. She, veiled in order, I, no more significant than any of that in her possession. 

Clean, polished, and shining when asked. 

...as careful with her dishes as she. 

Crumbs of red tart fall away across the table, flicked from her cronish digits. Rooibus tea next rushes down, captured in the soundless fluctuations of her wood-brown throat. The tea gourd is also soundless meeting the coaster shell.  

'Nemik's accepted into the Aqueous program. We visit tonight before the barge submerges.' Her words cousin courier-type on letterhead. I wonder how she meets my eyes, or indeed any eyes without meeting them; in the air she's stirred pregnant with the scent that precedes the cold remembering of my youth; the warning of square licorice sugarglass, lifted from half-moon gourd bowls on the port window's mantles, crunched carefully and unoffensively. 

'After Monday's incident they won't allow him personal belongings. Change into trousers without pockets. The aetherists are busy enough.' 

* 

She leans to whisper 'Onida Sawetu and child', following it with a creole phrasing I've never learned the meaning of, into the gate's post of metal trumpet-petals outstretched as a bloom frozen in place. A clanging release answers her, stretching into the screeching of mammoth scraping metal, parting its middle. 

Averted eyes best serve a passing through the bronze ivy gates of the registry. I glance the tiles of sculpted petals at our feet, speckled in green and rust oxidation. They press flat beneath the thud of mother's converter heels, and the scrape of my own; configured to their lowest setting. 

Several skywaymon patrol the inner court tonight. 

Two of them, star imprints clear on the bald brown skin of their crowns, clink amber bottled-fizzies by the fountain rooted to the right of the main doors, where the likeness of a fish-scaled lion stares lazily ahead, and the discordant winding melody of a terra-docked sky-cart seizes the air in echo. 

'Pretty *nonea like you without delights to fill dulling hours?' come the words of its cheerful vendor; the bass of them trembling the ether.

My eyes flick to mother's, whose own rise to size the vendor, and then away to gaze the round measure of time kept at the top of her half-vest, dangling from a chain of silver. 

'Be swift, hear? You have 10 *flows on the family account. Get something also, for Nemik.' 

She presses the flow key into my palm. 

The vendor's eyes follow her swift-steps toward the registry doors. 

'What will stop joy neglecting your eyes, then? Mulberry sugar glass, you like? Caramel chews?' asks the man astride the chocolate-brown cycle, lanky legs clad in pantaloons of pinned stripes, lifted at one ankle, where his black shoe, suited in brown spats, taps restlessly on a pedal. His eyes flick to the cooler bolted to the seat's umbrella pole, from which he will eventually pull my selection, for effect. By now any patron knows a registrant-vendor's wares crystallize in his palm at his beckoning once he places his arm out of sight, hiding the process in courtesy. 

'I... hmm.' 

'-aren't often asked what you like?' 

He meets the tightening of my expression with knowing eyes that do not press my own.

I divert my attention to the menu jutting out from the top of the pole, beneath the azure glow of its umbrella. 

'I'd like raspberry sugarglass. A small bag, thankyou,' I decide, passing him the cord from which the iron flow-key dangles. 

'As the girl-child wish,' he says with a nod and leisurely smile, inserting the key into a lock beneath the bulbous clock now clicking to life; wildly spinning its arms. He meets my eyes amused, when he reaches beyond it to unlatch the cooler's door.