Trial #109

The forge was a steady presence at her side. Long off the clock, the cradle of flames burned only for light. For company. It breathed heat into the tiny space, encouraged the wall of bright yellow slips to curl. It cast the head bent over a single work desk in an adoring orange glow.

Fire light painted loose pieces of silver hair and gilded the sweat shining across Juno’s brow, down her neck. In near reverent silence, her soot-stained fingers turned an aging piece of copper over and over. With a well-worn cloth, she polished the shape of a heart. Over engraved surface, down braided chain, tarnish gave way to fresh red metal. She smoothed a careful thumb over sealed edges. For a moment, she only held the locket in her palm, warming the captured memory within.

For the first time in hours she rose. The patient bench beneath her groaned into the silence. With stiff hands she exchanged the thick, leather apron around her neck for polished copper chain. The heart found its home at her sternum against flushed skin.

Juno plunged both hands into the water basin and let cool, clear blue swallow her up to the elbow. She closed her eyes against delicious reprieve. They opened to a crooked square of mirror. Two yellowing irises stared back from fogging glass. The yellow of accelerated age. She watched her own throat bob.

Her face rested in dripping hands when the mail slot punched in. She looked up in time to see the tiny rush of chemical-stained air push in behind the package. Rogue toxins stole into the shop on a purple haze, dissolving as quickly as they arrived.

Juno chased the last of the lilac draft away with a resigned exhale—her usual greeting for the familiar fat envelope. With a parting look at tainted eyes, she sought the letter opener.

The daily syringe thunked onto the table behind a wrinkled slip. Juno frowned. She lifted the clear cylinder up to the flames, watched a thicker, darker liquid shift back and forth. Something in her stomach flipped. She smoothed the dose notice and eyed the flat black text.

“EXTENSION OF LIFE” TRIAL #109

DOSE #148

A scan of the familiar warnings revealed nothing. The new serum came unannounced in the wake of its brothers. Light winked at her from the tip of the unprotected silver needle.

Juno pulled in a long humid breath and faced the yellow-papered wall. Doses 15 to 147 stared back. She flexed restless fingers at her sides.

The three fates of the contaminated city rotated in her mind like bullets in a revolver:

The fog outlived you.

The trial outlived you.

You outlived the trial.

No soul won against the fog alone. But one day, a trial would. The day someone lived past 30, a new generation would begin.

She pressed a hand flat to her sternum, felt the locket steady between her ribs. She’d made a promise.

“Okay, Jade,” she breathed. “I know.”

With hammer and nail, Juno locked the next thin, yellow slip in place.

A flowering of dark bruises marked the injection site hiding in the bend of her arm. Dose 148 sat heavy in her hand, but she let the metal mouth find its mark.

She inhaled. With a release of breath, needle pierced skin. She watched the piston dig lower and lower until the syringe hit home. Only when the darkness had emptied into her bloodstream did chaos erupt.

The city-wide siren roared to life.

Juno jarred and sent the needle sideways. She gasped against sudden pain as blood rose to meet broken skin. A howl like that of an injured beast rumbled through the shop.

The deep, wailing warning of high concentration.

The syringe broke free with an exhaled curse. Adrenaline following the call for evacuation flooded her veins. She fought to focus through the muffled alarm, but her world was tilting sideways. Numbing legs dragged her to the hooks bearing her patchwork jacket, her mask. Juno shoved one weak arm into a leather sleeve, a second. By the time the mask was waiting around her neck, darkness was clouding her vision. She blinked hard against the veil, made to drag the mask to her mouth, but the body beneath her gave way.

Juno woke to the kiss of poison on her skin. Flat on her back, the shop rose around her decorated in a thin layer of lilac dust. On her jacket, in her hair, stinging her cheeks. Her bare mouth and nose. She lay cocooned in ringing ears, trapped behind heavy eyelids.

Crackling coal was the only sound in her world.

Yellow eyes opened wide. Silence.

The alarm had stopped.

Panic surged into her waking body. No one made it out of the quiet.

Mask met mouth. Stiff black fabric sunk hard into the skin below her eyes, and her first filtered breath was full and grateful. Too long exposed, her mind whispered, too long. Juno heaved to her knees, leaned hard into the sink, and forced her body to rise. Purple dust jarred with every stiff movement. She got her feet beneath her only to flinch. In the square of mirror she met a monster: drained, lifeless skin; bloated, iris-swallowing pupils.

It was a face she fought to forget.

A tight breath constricted her chest as an automatic hand felt for the locket lost beneath layers of clothing. But Juno tore herself from the phantom reflection to face the door. Weak seals surrounding the ancient wooden frame, the crooked mail slot, struggled against air pressure charging from behind. She approached the trembling hinges and laid stained fingers on the handle. Contaminated draft ruffled her hair, stirred her jacket. With a steadying breath, she plunged into the toxic storm.

Juno had never seen the world so violet. The remnants of a decade of biowarfare flooded the street before her, reached high overhead and filled every inch of space below. Near opaque clouds brimming with chemical flecks swallowed the squat buildings of the Industrial Sector whole. Nowhere she looked could she see sky. This lilac dawn rivalled the worst she’d ever seen in her twenty-seven years.

But worse than the mass of fog, the lack of people.

Not a soul called into the silent street. Not a single pair of feet fled over damp pavement. The purple world around her was empty.

Her stomach twisted with more than low-grade exposure. With every step she took into the dense violet haze, her grasp on survival loosened.

Not half a block to safety the mask began to clog. Her own breath struggled to leave the overworked filters. Exhales danced around her in uneven white clouds as her heavy feet made slow progress. And beneath those feet, a crunch.

Loose paper caught under her boots, blew against her ankles. The same yellow of the dose notices. Ice shot down her spine. Full-size notices.

The loose papers dripped with drain water and running ink. Illegible. She held the damp scraps in a futile fist until the same bright yellow peaked through violet to her right. A loose corner waved in the rippling smog, its body plastered to a door. She reached for it through air like molasses.

Clear black lettering turned her blood cold.

“EXTENSION OF LIFE” TRIAL #111

TERMINATED

Dark eyes widened even as they stung with toxin. As if in answer, the tender skin of her inner elbow burned.

Juno dropped to her knees. She fumbled through lost notices drifting under the fog, tearing through the unreadable. 109. 109. 109. Two numbers surfaced on freshly fallen paper.

“EXTENSION OF LIFE” TRIAL #111

TERMINATED

“EXTENSION OF LIFE” TRIAL #107

TERMINATED

Both legs turned numb beneath her as cold fingers crumpled canary yellow.

Multiple terminations.

Violet haze nearly carried Juno back to the shop. She was weightless as she drifted on poisoned air, as she sank further and further into fear.

Until she came face to face with yellow marking her own door.

“EXTENSION OF LIFE” TRIAL #109

TERMINATED

Ruined paper fell from her hand.

The trial outlived you.

She dropped her mask and stared.

The trial outlived you.

Juno nearly fell through the door. A rush of violet followed her in, curled around her legs like a cat. It seemed to cling to her, to brush her face and twist her hair, as if offering sweet goodbyes.

She fought with the jacket, struggled to strip her arms bare only to find a massacre waiting beneath. Fresh bruises mingled with thin rivers of dried blood reaching for her palm. But stark even against red and blue was a frightening black. Night dark veins webbed from the injection site to climb her shoulder, to pollute the blood beneath her wrist. Death chased her under the command of a final dose.

The trial outlived you.

Silence swallowed her in the four walls that smelled of coal and forged metal. Stillness overtook her body even as it began to burn.

Terminated.

She could look nowhere but the mirror. She could see nothing but the face that haunted her nightmares and soured her dreams. But below the sallow skin owned by two, a copper chain.

One heave of a hammer inspired the tiny heart to give way. Two copper halves spilled open, and inside, a distorted mirror. For the first time in months, Juno looked her sister in the eye. From a clouded slice of photograph, Jade grinned back. Stripped of illness, stripped of wear, their shared face was radiant. Vibrant. Pupils the size of coins drank in the smile stolen by the fog.

Juno closed her fist over the freshly polished heart as a drop of blackened blood fell from her nose.

One life taken by the fog. One life given to the trial.

In the dying light of the shop’s last fire, Juno cradled twin halves of the copper locket. And whether it was the pulse pounding in her palm or Jade calling her home, that red metal throbbed with the beat of a heart.