I have to get to my mates before they are gotten to by Zeal.
I have to save them from my treachery, and I have to… it’s too much. I can’t think about everything else I have to do.
First things first. Got to get off the island. That’s going to be hard. We’re not really supposed to get down. There are airships and things that travel between the islands, but not many that go off the side.
Got to go to an illegal dumping point. To the place the fridges fall.
That’s the part of the island where there are warehouses and technicians. There’s a lot of machinery involved in keeping a city this size functioning in a generally pleasant way. The people who work in this part of the city are actively encouraged not to go to the sides of the island where the people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated live.
I catch a few strange looks on my way down there. Could be because I’m dressed a little differently than most. Could be the big foam bauble keeping my skull intact. I guess we’ll never know.
I go toward the edge and walk along it. In the richer parts of town, the edge is very well barricaded off in ways that are designed to look sleek. Kind of like a whole border of sceniclookouts. People go there to eat lunch or date or brush their hair or whatever.
That’s not what people here do. Here the barricade is just big slabs of metal riveted together and decorated withEdgesigns.
But there’s a breach in the edge, where the wind is blowing through, and there’s a man sitting on a chair that looks like it is on the precipice of collapsing completely. He’s wearing a dirty old hi-vis vest, and jeans that look stained with oil and paint and dozens of other working chemicals. He’s got a bristle brush mustache, a twinkle in his eye, and a stack of what I mistakenly assume to be backpacks next to him. There’s a sign, too. It reads:Jump For Free!
I walk up to him, hardly believing someone is actually doing this. I shouldn’t be surprised. If there’s one thing being alive for all these years has taught me, it’s that someone is always doing something.
“Jump for free?” I read the sign out loud as a question.
“Mhm. Costs nothing to jump,” he says. “Might be the last real free thing we have.”
“That’s dark,” I murmur to myself.
He chuckles. “You want to jump?”
“I need to get down to the ground,” I tell him. “Not sure how to do that except by jumping.”
“Want me to push you off?” He stands up and stretches. I take a big step back, in case he’s got some kind of insanity. The kind that makes him push people off the side of the island. People used to get that kind a lot. That’s why the barrier was built in the first place.
“Is that safe?”
“I mean, not particularly,” he says. “I could sell you a parachute that would help.”
“Oh, you could? Yes. Why don’t you do that,” I say, playing along at first, until I look at the stack of bags next to him and realize that he actually does have parachutes.
“Oh, they’re real?”
“They’re real if you have money,” he says shrewdly.
I pull out my credit card. “You can have all of this if you give me a parachute that works.”
“No way for you to know if it’s going to work or not,” he says. “Once I’ve got your money, and you’ve jumped, it’s pretty much over.”
He’s got a point. I have to trust in this back alley parachute salesman because that’s what the world has come to. I know every second that passes is one second that my bosses are probably capturing my mates and taking them off to a laboratory somewhere, or worse.
“Take the card,” I say, grabbing one of the parachutes and putting it on my back. I snap the straps into place, ensuring that it stays on my back while I am hurtling toward the ground at terminal velocity.
“Fuck it,” I say.
“Wait!” he shouts, just as I am about to step over the ledge.
“What?” I pull back, heart thumping.
“Do you know how to pull the cord? That’s a really important part,” he says. “Some people don’t pull the cord. Don’t wait too long. A couple of seconds at most. The fall isn’t as far as it looks.”
“Now you tell me this.”
