A.Journal

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Challenging

The body of a teen girl slumps against the window, kept upright by a huge piece of shrapnel wedged into her skull.

Challenging

You recognise the empty features in the drawing. A feeling like an itch in the corner of your mind.

Challenging

A place designed for long shifts, with a hidden geometry of efficiency.

Challenging

Idiot, why would you tell him? This man clearly loves collecting post.

Challenging

Especially when they're in a place that makes it seem so unlikely for them.

Challenging

All around you, thousands of copper strands reach out in as many directions. The electricity buzzes softly with unheard voices.

Challenging

The Reality Situation is gone. It only exists in the airwaves now.

Challenging

You glance upwards, as though expecting to see a cage fall down around you. One doesn't -- at least not visibly.

Challenging

Control of the docks and market have been passed back and forth between rival gangs for decades, but she's survived them all.

Challenging

It seems nowhere is sacred enough to avoid the grip of automated money-making.

Challenging

You can almost see it -- behind all earthly plots, a vast, meta-plot opening up before him.

Challenging

You picture signals, fired from the thermosphere, spearing through noctilucent clouds as they fall toward Portofiro.

Challenging

Your throat the dark silo of your own forgotten body.

Challenging

A whole room of this tiny houseboat is dedicated to a person who never visits.

Challenging

A geometrically precise matrix of cocaine.

Challenging

Not just to your apartment. He's asking if he can live your life with you.

Challenging

In his head, the city's alleyways and vacant lots are assembled like a criminal line-up. In each of them, a cadaver, grimly laid out.

Challenging

A hush falls over the city. Two million bystanders, eavesdropping.

Challenging

For fuck's sake. Leave these people to their madnesses.

Challenging

Challenging

This came out of nowhere, but stick with it. Do not get distracted by, say, a strange crack in the floor.

Challenging

Unlikely to be a coincidence that he's now occupying a place of reflection.

Challenging

Sat at the top of the world, he is free to judge anyone without repercussions -- yet his ire is reserved for those who violate health and safety regulations.

Challenging

But across an ocean, the moment contorted into legend.

Challenging

Suspended above, satellites blink slowly, as if on the edge of sleep.

Challenging

Its smell is the same as all port cities -- damp concrete, diesel exhaust, drifting mats of golden-brown sargassum.

Challenging

What began at one shrine ends at another.

Challenging

He's leaning against the wall for support, pressing his mouth to the receiver. He stirs the dark water with the tip of his foot.

Challenging

He's leaning against the wall for support, pressing his mouth to the receiver. He stirs the dark water with the tip of his foot.

Challenging

Underground caverns filled floor-to-ceiling with cultivation beds, fat larvae munching on mulberry leaves.

Challenging

Beyond the walls of the dingy bar, the city breathes.

Challenging

The outline of a small alcove with seated patrons shimmers in your mind.

Challenging

Slowly populating itself with your crew members, around you the Fogged Mirror begins to take on the appearance it had five years ago, before your network collapsed.

Challenging

Empty of the other members of your old crew, the Fogged Mirror feels barren, infinitely distant from what it was five years ago, before your network collapsed.

Challenging

The flight path from Luz's costal airfields to Portofiro is approximately 60 kilometres, or 3 minutes at supersonic speed.

Challenging

Behind you, a hundred black-and-white faces regard you with the sublime indifference of the dead.

Challenging

As much as 75% of the world's commercial jasmine is produced in this vast field. Children as young as five work alongside their parents, wiping pollen and pesticides from their cheeks.