A.Journal

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Medium

Stranded on the island of you.

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Her body conforms to the shape of the recliner, the recliner to the shape of her body.

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Novessa sputters beneath an implacable leaden sky. Smoke billows from Obrekh furnaces. Stone gryphons leer down on Kalandar Square. Rail lines thread through blocks of dark slate and vermillion-streaked towers. The streets teem with people -- an endless, thrumming patchwork of crimson, charcoal, and indigo.

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That's twice you've been saved by a trash animal. Kin?

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Get them out of here. You're all going to be crushed.

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These people are like human dowsing rods for architecture that wants them dead.

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Imagine yourself as a bird, and the labyrinth grows familiar.

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You can tell he cleared off space for his elbows here. Leaning on the counter, no chair to be found. To the left of his left hand -- the packet of cigarettes.

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Dust gathers on the polished surfaces around her.

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The streets breed a bone-deep distrust of people who ask too many questions. Each secret you withhold lessens her suspicions.

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The Palace of Culture in Novessa is grand, imposing, and in a constant state of renovation and expansion. You've never seen it without at least one wing closed for construction.

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Back to the nearest wall.

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An offering will be made to Rotanev the next time she can get out to the Pitol Tract.

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He will starve to death or get crushed by the building if he does not tear his jacket.

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PSEUDOPOD's usually slack-jawed stare is focused, unblinking. Something about this man has set off his spy-senses.

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A subaquatic passage? Now we're talking.

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The planet's surface may blister, but the clay beneath remains ever mutable.

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A banner dragged down one of the support beams. The ceiling stays in the air out of sheer will.

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From this distance, Portofiro is just a cluster of dim lights in early daylight. Mist clings to it.

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A secret meeting within a labyrinth of aerials, sending and receiving...

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A coastal wind slips through a ground-floor window and brushes a man's thinning hair. His eyes open, awash with impossible colours swirling like oil in water -- before closing again.

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Time and neglect have taken a toll, but it's only stood here for about a half-century.

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She's often lingered in that doorway here, after you've gone to bed and in the odd hours of the day.

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Some days pass without a single customer.

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The image in her mind growing fainter, like it might disappear the second she stops believing in it.

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Stuck in a metal box moving at 55km/h in close proximity to the enemy. No way to call in backup, no way to jump out.

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Beyond the curved windows, fields and suburbs of identical single-story houses. When they dim the coach lights, stars come out in force.

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The view was tremendous, best in the district. Well worth the climb.

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Such majestic buildings always have multiple points of access -- better look around.

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This has to be Reno's pied-a-terre. He's one of the only people in Portofiro who can afford such material luxuries.

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Either she can see in dark, or she's got every inch of the terrain memorised.

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She's wearing rain boots. Odd choice for an office job, unless she spends a lot of time in that secure basement.

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She's wearing wading boots. Odd choice for an office job, unless she spends a lot of time in that secure basement.

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They no longer notice its presence, but they'll feel its absence -- a hole in the city's memory.

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Rows of cables, desks and shuttered windows above a very cold basement.

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Also, notably, hidden out of sight in the back somewhere.

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The echoes fill the empty space perversely. It used to be a palace.

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It's getting harder to tell where you end and where the streets begin.

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Satellite Facility B -- a suburb-sized arrangement of honeycomb structures.

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Your gaze turns instinctively toward the ginkyo plaza.

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In the auditorium of a decrepit movie theatre, a young woman staves off sleep with a continual drip of artificial dreams...

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In an unmoored houseboat, windows lit with strobing lights, a bearded man prepares once more to sacrifice his body for the sake of prophecy...

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In the bottom of an old rocket silo, a man in an eccentric bathrobe waits in his messy room for someone to save him from his own thoughts...

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In the spare room on the ground floor of a twenty-four hour photo shop, a fleshy vessel that used to contain a man waits for someone to breathe new life into it...

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You'd guess a penthouse like this probably goes for about 6 million sol. This one is not currently fit for human habitation.

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Three people lived here: two adults, a child approaching adolescence.

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They knew they weren't getting the deposit back. Why bother.

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Septimus presses it a lot.

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Different to the rest of the screens, calmer yet with more potential.