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

The Dusk Amber Digit (Halfstreet Archives)- part the 3rd

'Sit,' comes the scratching key-clanging croak of the gridine, her thin head capped with father's sky-pointing invention. Father's metal spirit-trap. Her eyes, cold, palest red, remind me what I am here for; snatching the pretense of ease it's taken hours to construct since the rays of the sky's flame tapped my eyelids, coaxing me from dream.

I lower to the steel-barred chair beside her, placing the twin of the metal shard tower clasped to her head, onto my own crown, expecting no sympathy from the girl-thing. And receiving none when the first whimpers of my spirit's shell froth to the surface of my mouth, under her impatient psychic tugging, like she'll lift my soul out, whole.

It stops. It resumes. It stops; just when my consciousness goes out of focus.

I'm not fool enough to mistake the concern in her eyes as feeling. There are rules. Ways to collect fuel. Fuel cannot be collected from the dead.

Her thin greying ice fingers adjust my face, turn it to the left.

I don't have what I need to react.

The blurs of the room, won't recede just now. No matter the trickery of clarity's seeming brinks of return. The ebb and flow of absent self, blinks in and out. The ice of non-death does not know this word, plea. The warmth skirts the borders of me like a frightened thing displacing memory of home.

I snap to. Blinking rapidly; feel an attendant lifting my slouching head; hear the slide of the antennae off of my earth-clothed skull; taste the bamboo slipping between my lips.

'Drink,' comes the child's voice.

The brewing rising up the bamboo's length wets my tongue, inching over its entirety; trickling finally; finding the slide of my throat.

I blink again.

The child is gone.

The room has fled.

Only I, now

I lift myself from the stretch-cot, berating the quake of my arms,

placing my feet in the shoes on the floor at its side.

'You may collect your replenishments in the seconding room,' a fragmented voice informs, cutting sharply through the phonet-tubes, into the ether of the exit hall.

My fingers raise to the flow key at my neck. They abandon it swiftly; feeling around me for the petalcoat, pulling it on.

Undeath's cold stays to press ice into my heart's chambers.

Warmth not yet finding its name.

The seconding floor meets my neglect, my attentions turned to the back foyer of the registry satellite, determined, even strong, as my legs quiver beneath me.

I push through the exit into ice wind.

Eye-scalding light.

Rocks and pebbles beating through the shoe soles.

I snatch the flowkey from my neck, and toss it over the bridge, into Neona the sacrificed.

Her splash sending a shudder through me.