City of the Falling Sky

by Joseph Evans

  “Brace yourself,” Tenk said miserably, and he slowly opened the door to B12.

  Seckry was imagining the room to be silent, and for him and Tenk to have to explain themselves in front of this dreaded Mrs Cutson, but to his surprise, and Tenk’s, the class was alive with chatter.

  “She’s not here . . .” Tenk said in disbelief. He turned around to Seckry and grabbed him excitedly. “She’s not here! We’re not in trouble!”

  “Who is not here?” came a sharp voice from the corridor that cut through the commotion like a guillotine.

  Tenk’s eyes widened. “Quick!”

  Tenk and Seckry shot across the room and landed in a couple of seats towards the back, and everyone else flung themselves into their own seats. A mid-flight paper aeroplane hovered dangerously close to Cutson’s desk before someone grabbed it and stuffed it into their pocket.

  Through the door came a frail looking middle aged woman with a skewed grin, holding a cage by its handle with a plump, furry creature inside which must have been her gimmypug.

  She eyed each pupil individually before plonking the gimmypug in front of her and sitting at her desk. Seckry thought that her eyes lingered for slightly longer on him than the others.

  “I see we have one missing,” she said, and her voice was thin and cold. “Mr Tippian Furst. Has he decided that education was finally beyond him and left to work in a . . . shop all his life?”

  “He’s really ill, miss,” Tenk said. “Last night he was vomiting everywhere. He’s really sick.” He leaned closer to Seckry and whispered, “Lovesick, that is.”

  Mrs Cutson stared at Tenk with that lopsided grin still on her face. It looked very unnatural, as if her skin were being pulled into some awkward position. She eventually turned around without saying anything, and on the whiteboard she wrote ‘The Importance of Transistors in Electronic Circuits.’

  “Copy the board,” she demanded in a stern tone. She began scribbling at an incredibly fast speed in miniature writing.

  “I hate copying from a board. I switch off completely,” Seckry whispered to Tenk.

  “Me too.”

  Nevertheless, Seckry began noting down, his writing becoming scruffier and scruffier as he struggled to keep up with Mrs Cutson’s furious notation. It wasn’t long, however, before Tenk was tapping on Seckry’s arm and pointing towards his bag under the desk.

  “Have you got your avatar with you?” Tenk whispered.

  “My what?” Seckry whispered back.

  “Your avatar.”

  Seckry frowned. He had heard the word avatar before; it was the name given to digital versions of people in 3D chat rooms and online forums, but he had no idea how he was supposed to be carrying one on him.

  The boy blinked very slowly. “You know about Friction, surely?”

  Seckry had nothing to go on. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Wow. Have you been living in a cave all your life? Friction is like . . . the biggest thing ever. In Skyfall at least. Don’t they have Friction in Marne?”

  “No, what is it?” Seckry asked.

  “It’s a game. But it’s not just any game. It’s the best game ever. And I’m pretty much the best player in the whole city. Well . . . maybe not the whole city. But definitely the best player in my district. Although Lessana wouldn’t agree with that. But screw Lessana.”

  “Who’s Lessana?”

  “Lessana’s like, the original player of Friction. No one’s ever beaten her in a direct duel but people don’t take into account the team battles.”

  Seckry was aware that he had lost track of Mrs Cutson’s lecture, but this game sounded much more interesting.

  The boy looked up at Mrs Cutson, who had her cardigan-covered back facing the class, then quickly whipped out a small, flat object from his bag. It was the size of a paperback book, but thinner, with a couple of buttons at the bottom and an LCD screen.

  “This, here . . .” he pressed a touch sensitive circle on the device, “is Basher, my avatar.”

  A digital creature appeared on screen, and waved at the two boys. It was a blue ogre, with big, muscular arms, a small head with a few missing teeth, and most notably, a pair of pink fluffy slippers on his feet.

  “He’s in ‘recreational mode’ right now,” Tenk said. “Those blummin’ slippers . . . the programmers must have had a right laugh when they were making him. But when he’s in ‘action mode’ they disappear.”

  The creature was beaming at them like an escaped inmate, his teeth (what little there was of them) dripping with saliva. It reminded Seckry of his distant aunt Pennypinkle.

  “I’m saving up for a new creature,” Tenk muttered, covering the screen with his hand momentarily so the beast couldn’t see him.

  “So how do you play Friction?” Seckry asked. “Does Basher . . . bash other people’s creatures up?”

  “Man . . .” Tenk shook his head. “I can’t believe there are people out there that don’t know anything about Friction. I’ve got a lot to teach you. But we can’t do it here, I’ll take you to a booth one day.”

  Seckry and Tenk had both been staring at Basher under the desk, and neither of them had noticed Mrs Cutson’s shaky form appear in front of them.

  “Gentlemen,” she said.

  Seckry jumped in his seat and his pencil nearly went flying out of his hand.

  Mrs Cutson waited in silence for them to regain their composure.

  “Intrigued by the wonders of technology, are we?” She looked at Seckry with that faint, false smile. She had seen the avatar.

  “Wonderful isn’t it? To come from nothing, to . . . this. A few years ago we wouldn’t have allowed someone like yourself to live here. Some would have called you an outlander, a farm boy.”

  So she knew who he was and that he had come from Marne, even though she hadn’t bothered to introduce herself to him. But what was she getting at?

  “Of course, now we have the Outsider Initiative. We welcome . . . people like you.”

  She sputtered the words ‘people like you’ as if she was about to choke on her own bile.

  It was then that Mrs Cutson’s absurd smile fell comfortably into what seemed like its natural position – a lopsided grimace, her bottom lip poking out like some bulbous blood sack on a hanging piece of ham.

  “You’re a fool to think you can come into our city and have the audacity to be rude to a teacher on your first day.” Her watery eyes narrowed into bloodshot slits. “And with all the financial help our government gives you.”

  Seckry began to feel adrenaline firing around his body. Financial help? It was the city that had forced his mum to move here. If the Endrin Corporation had just left Marne alone they wouldn’t have had to leave. He felt like standing up and walking out, but his mum would’ve killed him if he had. So instead, he hung his head down and hoped she’d just carry on with the lesson, releasing his anger by squeezing his pencil underneath the desk so hard that it snapped.

  When the lesson had finished, Seckry could barely remember what had been said. His mind had been racing. He had never been spoken to like that by a teacher back in Marne. He had never felt so unwanted and embarrassed in his life.

  “That was way out of order, that was,” Tenk said, as they rode the pneumatic pod back up to the ground floor. “She doesn’t even know you, and she goes off like that, saying about how you should be grateful and all.” He was shaking his head.

  “Are there many people in the city who don’t like outsiders moving in?” Seckry asked miserably.

  “Not really, it’s just this cow. Besides, you’re practically city folk anyway. You can almost see Marne from the top floor window of the library, for Gedin’s sake! What would she be like if someone crossed the Phary Ocean to enrol here? She’d have a heart attack.”

  The canteen was one of the numerous separate buildings to the right of the school that was linked to it via a transparent corridor. As they arrived, Seckry stopped in awe and all his thoughts of Mrs Cutson vanished.

/>   The canteen was unlike anything Seckry had ever seen in his life. The most notable thing about the place was that a huge conveyer belt was snaking its way around the building, and was filled with plates of food, all of them covered with translucent domes. Seckry watched the food going past him and was sure he spotted something moving in one of them.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” said Tenk. “You just take whatever you want and you pay for it later.”

  They sat at a couple of stools and Tenk reached over the table, snatching a plate from the conveyer belt that was filled with pasta and meatballs. Seckry watched a few go by until he spotted one with some fish and chips and a wedge of lemon inside, which he whipped off and began eating.

  “How would anyone know if we just decided not to pay for this?” Seckry asked. “We could just walk out of here with a free meal.”

  “Believe me,” Tenk said, after slurping a string of spaghetti. “People have tried. But there’s some kind of scanning device in the ceiling, it clocks your student ID number and tracks what items you’ve taken from the belt. If you try to walk out without paying, this electromagnetic thing stops you. It’s like walking into an invisible brick wall.”

  “The conveyer belt is pretty fast,” Seckry noted, as he watched more plates of food go by.

  “Yeah they’ve been having trouble with the speed settings recently, I think. It’s probably on the blink. Or maybe it’s just never recovered from Callam Butchon’s prank last year.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He got into the back somehow and cranked the speed up to max. You can imagine the mess. The teachers were frantic. They couldn’t tell if it was blood or pasta sauce they were cleaning up.”

  There was a short musical fanfare from the other side of the canteen and the shouts of, “Yes! I won!”

  Seckry glanced over and saw a young boy jumping up and down in front of what seemed to be some kind of crane arcade machine.

  “Oh no,” Tenk said. “He’s gonna be so sorry.”

  “What do you mean? What is that thing?” Seckry asked.

  “That’s Food Grabber,” Tenk explained. “You catch the plastic balls inside and they’re full of different items of food. But if you’re wise you’ll never touch that thing.”

  “Really?” said Seckry. “It looks like fun.”

  “Trust me. They all get sucked into it. All the first years. Just be glad that you’ve got me to ward you away from it.”

  “What’s so bad about it?”

  “Well, to begin with, the crane is rigged so that it never closes properly around the balls. And when it does, which is like about ten percent of the time, you pretty much always get a Nasty.”

  “A Nasty?”

  “Yep. They put these joke ones in there called Nasties that look like ordinary food but certainly don’t taste like ordinary food. There’s supposed to be a random one here and there but I reckon more than half the balls in there are Nasties.”

  “Have you ever had a Nasty?”

  “Yep. Back in my first year when I was just as gullible as the rest of them. It was a slice of cheesecake. I was so pleased I had won something that I scoffed the thing down without even stopping to smell the stench that was coming from it. After spending three days worth of lunch money on it, who would?”

  “What did it taste like?”

  “Like beef gravy.”

  “Oh,” Seckry said, his stomach churning slightly.

  “I just think of myself as lucky actually. At least I didn’t get a chili sandwich. Seen a few of those come out of that thing. Poor first year kid had to be taken to hospital after one of those.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “Yep.”

  The slowly chewing face of the triumphant first year over the other side of the building had now transformed from a gleeful smile into horrified realisation.

  Tenk craned his head to see.

  “Ooh!” he said, cringing, as though he was feeling the first year’s pain. “Looks like that was a . . . horseradish muffin.”

  When Seckry and Tenk had both finished their meals they paid for them at a coin operated booth and returned to the main building.

  “So what part of the city did you move to?” Tenk asked as they were walking.

  “We got a flat here in the east partition. It’s in a place called Kerik Square. You know it?”

  “You’re kidding me? That’s where I live,” said Tenk, exasperatedly.

  “Really? Which block are you in?”

  “Block seventeen, third floor. How about you?”

  “I think it’s block twenty two.”

  “Man, we’ll have to catch the monorail to school together tomorrow. We must have been on the same one this morning but in different carriages.”

  “Actually, I saw you this morning,” Seckry admitted. “You had your headphones on and you seemed to be enjoying the music.”

  “Oh, yeah . . . I was listening to Graveturner. You heard of them? They’re this doom metal band that’s just burst onto the scene. One of the tracks on their new album is a two hour long epic. It’s insane.”

  “Haven’t heard of them,” Seckry said. “I mostly listen to a band called The Broken Motion.”

  “The Broken Motion? You’ve got good taste. The Broken Motion are awesome.”

  Seckry smiled. The Broken Motion were his favourite band of all time, and he’d never met anyone who’d even heard of them, never mind liked them too.

  Their next lesson was geography with a gentle, old fashioned man named Mr Pegglewim who appeared to be in his fifties from a distance, but was actually only in his early thirties. It didn’t take long for Seckry to realise that he didn’t have much control over the class and as soon as the first paper aeroplane had been thrown into the air, it was just a downhill spiral into complete chaos. By the end of the lesson, the poor man had looked close to tears, with an ink stamp floating in his coffee and a giant drawing of an anarchy symbol on his whiteboard which someone had actually signed at the bottom.

  Their last lesson of the day was inverse mathematics with a professor named Cookrook, but Seckry just wanted to go home. As much as he was enjoying Tenk’s company, he was missing Marne like crazy. He just wanted to go back to his old living room and chill out on his sofa watching the TV. He hated maths enough in his old school. Now he was dreading it.

  Their room was locked, so a small queue had formed in the corridor. Seckry and Tenk were just in front of a big, awkward looking boy with unfocussed eyes and a mouth that hung slightly open from the weight of his chin. Another kid with a ton of freckles and a chunk missing from his right ear seemed to be harassing him.

  “Oi, Conker, what you drooling at?”

  There was no response.

  “Looking at my missus, is it? Think you can have a piece? Got no chance mate.”

  The large boy named Conker looked away.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me.”

  “I didn’t.” Conker’s voice was guttural and heavy compared to the freckly faced fast talker’s.

  “Yeah you did, I saw you. Don’t think you can cheek me. Why’d they call you Conker anyway?”

  There was silence.

  “You deaf? I said why’d they call you Conker?”

  The boy huffed. Evidently, he had to put up with this quite often.

  “Just leave him be, Snibble,” said Tenk.

  “Shut it, Friction head. I can do what I want.”

  Seckry recognised this Snibble boy’s face from Mrs Cutson’s class, but he had been silent during that along with everyone else.

  Snibble was trying to hold a girl but she was pushing him away and slapping his arms, saying, “I ain’t your missus, Snibble, you can carry on dreaming.”

  “Stupid cow,” Snibble said vehemently, and pushed her back.

  After a few moments, a teacher appeared with a clipboard.

  “Mr Cookrook is very sorry but he cannot make it today. You’re all free to leave, although I’d advise you to use
the time wisely and head to the resource centre to do some work of your own accord.”

  A couple of kids cheered, and everyone began swarming out of the corridors. Seckry felt like cheering himself. That was it. He had got through his first day.

  When Seckry and Tenk reached the gates, someone was waiting.

  “Tipps!” said Tenk. “What you doing here? If Cutson sees you you’re doomed! Oh yeah, Tippian, Seckry, Seckry, Tippian.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Seckry said.

  Tippian was a frail looking boy with heavily magnified, round glasses, shorter than Seckry, and with hair so fair it was almost white.

  “I had to show you this new mechapack I got for Apocalyptia,” Tippian said to Tenk. “My dad gave me ten notes. Check it out.” He pulled an avatar from his backpack.

  “What did your dad give you ten notes for? You didn’t tell him you needed it for a geography trip again, did you?”

  “Nah, for helping him fix his computer. He thought the thing was broken, but all I needed to do was disable this dodgy driver he’d installed. Some third party networking thing for his work that was just really badly programmed. So, you a Friction player?” Tippian asked Seckry.

  “He will be soon,” Tenk answered. “I’m gonna train him up.” He turned to Seckry. “If you need any advice on upgrades, Tippian’s your man. This freak has got everything catalogued in his head, he’s like a walking Friction encyclopaedia.”

  “He’s right. And if you need any . . . you know . . .” Tippian winked, “Specially modified items, just give me a call.”

  Seckry looked at Tenk for an explanation, but Tenk looked furious.

  “I haven’t even got him playing yet and you’re trying to sell him illegal items.” He turned to Seckry. “Don’t listen to him, it won’t do you any good buying any of that homemade crap, it’s all banned in the official tournaments and it’s really heavily regulated so no one can cheat.”

  “No homemade crap,” Seckry noted.

  “And anyway,” Tenk said to Tippian. “Since when have you got time to be building black market items? I thought you had a girlfriend now.”

  “Not anymore,” Tippian replied. “She dumped me last night. I made the mistake of sending her a real photo of me. She took one look at it and signed herself off Messenger. Looks like she’s blocked my IP address as well so I can never try to chat to her again.”

  “Ah, sorry man.” Tenk slapped him on the shoulder. “So, you gonna go back to scanning in those catalogue pics of male models?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Tippian, looking dejected.

  After showing off his new avatar equipment to Tenk, Tippian decided to make his way back to his own district and Seckry and Tenk caught the monorail home together.

  “I live in that block, just over there,” Tenk pointed, as they reached the rusty old fountain that was situated in the centre of their square. “And the arcade is just there, right on our doorstep. I spend more time in the arcade than I do at home. They’ve got two Friction pods for training. They’re pretty old and battered now and one of the doors is hanging loose but they do the job. Anyways, catch you tomorrow.”

  The flat was empty when Seckry got in, but a message had been left on the fridge for him.

  There’s some food left over for you – low fat vegetable pie. Mum bought some doughnuts but I chucked them away – they’re full of chemically altered fat! If you want some dessert there’s yoghurt in here and fruit in the bowl.

  Leena x

  She threw away doughnuts? Why was she always doing that? Seckry would have loved a doughnut right now. His sister was a health extremist, although she insisted she was perfectly normal. She was always ripping food out of their hands and telling them not to eat this because there were chemicals in it or not to eat that because it was linked to some rare disease. All Seckry really cared about was whether it tasted good or not.

  He reheated his sister’s pie and put The Broken Motion’s latest CD on, setting the player to repeat tracks 2 and 5, his favourites of the album. Hearing their music reminded him of home and he found himself welling up. It was strange how music could do that. It was the chorus of track 5 that did it, as soon as it kicked in, vivid images of his bedroom back in Marne flashed into his mind and smells and tastes attacked his senses; his mum’s cooking, the carpets, the fabric conditioner, the sticky tack on his walls.

  It wasn’t long before his mum, Coralle, came through the door, followed by Leena. Back in Marne, they had both been working for the same printing company, and had both been allowed to transfer to the city’s branch when they had moved.

  “Hello, my love,” his mum said affectionately. “So, was it as bad as you imagined?”

  “Hmm,” Seckry thought. “I’ll get used to it.” He knew his mum had tried everything she could to keep them in Marne, it wasn’t her fault they had to move, and he didn’t want her to feel guilty.

  Leena slapped her satchel onto the settee.

  “You’ll never believe what I just saw, Seck. A kid, about this high, he must’ve been about ten, and he had a cigarette in his mouth!” She stared at him incredulously.

  “Thanks for the food,” said Seckry.

  Leena was too outraged to respond.

  They spent the rest of the evening playing a board game in the living area whilst their mum watched some television. It was about eleven o’clock when Seckry found himself struggling to keep his eyelids open.

  He said goodnight and entered his new bedroom. It smelled different from his room back home and it had a strange ambience that he couldn’t put his finger on, but he just hoped that one day he’d get used to it.

  Before pulling his curtains together, Seckry gazed out over the hazy, colourful nightscape.

  It was buzzing with activity, even at this time of night. There were fire jugglers dancing through the alleyways, animated neon lights advertising shops, a few fireworks exploding in the sky, and one of the giant blimps he had seen in the morning, floating sluggishly through the smog. There was an electronic sign flashing on the blimp’s body that projected in huge letters a familiar word:

  Friction

  The Mega Meltdown returns this winter!

  Prepare for battle

  Friction? Event? Seckry realised this Friction thing wasn’t just some game. This was a sport.

  He closed his curtains and went to sleep feeling exhausted and homesick. But somewhere, deep inside of him, was a tiny tinge of excitement.

  Chapter Four

  Snibble Knotting