text: “Just sit and watch,” Alexi said. “Don’t go anywhere, alright?” He said it with a smile, but I knew a command when I heard one. I also knew the way mama would scream if he came home without me. Without waiting for me to answer he trotted off back towards the beaten patch of dirt where his friends waited, the tallest one tossing a ball back and forth between his hands. My palms itched just looking at it. On our way over to the court I’d asked him if I could play this time. I always asked him, and he always had some excuse. I was too clumsy, he said, I’d fumble the ball. They didn’t want new players, he said, because someone would have to give up their position. No one wanted to give up their position. Not to some kid. Not to me. So I had to sit and watch them throw the ball against the glass over and over again. I watched and watched and watched so the day Alexi said yes, I was ready. I would be the best they’d ever seen, I was sure of it. They’d see what I could do and invite me again, call me off the sidelines and -- The ball flew inches from my head as it careened out from Alex’s hand. I flinched as it rebounded off the glass behind me, and went rolling back towards the court. My heart racing from the close call, I got onto my knees and turned to face the surface I had been leaning against. The glass was dirty, stained with layers of smog and graffiti. Paint made of ochre and stolen metal, curling letters in languages I could read, and some that I couldn’t. Even scraping my nails against it yielded nothing but more grey. I pressed my forehead against it, felt the roughness graze my skin. Mama had told me that it wasn’t always that way. There was a time where the outer windows were bright and clear, and the sun would stream in even brighter than the lights on the ceiling. She said she’d never seen the sun, but her grandparents had. Or maybe she had said it was their grandparents. Whenever it was, it was a long time ago. I looked back to the court and saw Alexi focused on a strong defensive move, his arms spread wide. The opposing team let out a scream, and I knew he was distracted, too much so to see me slip away. Pushing to my feet I ran off towards the nearby neighborhood, enticed by the smell of cooking food. My stomach growled, a beast even louder than the constant yelling and shouting in the lean-houses. I ducked into their shadows, hiding from the dimming lights beneath the scarves and shirts made into roofs. The only thing on my mind as I ran through those tight corridors was the sun, whatever that might have looked like. If I ever stole away from the game I went hunting for food, but today the questions hurt even worse than an empty stomach. So I pulled my eyes from the dirt and looked for someone, anyone. I knew she was the one to ask the moment I saw her, tripping over myself as I came to a halt. She had wrinkles so deep I could have lost my fingers in them had I tried. Her eyes were hidden in the folds, but I could feel her watching me nonetheless. “Mem, have you ever seen the sun?” She laughed, and I knew she would humor me with an answer. “Once.” Her voice was raspy, choked by decades of smog. “Just a little. The South window cracked a long time ago. They repaired it when they thought no one was watching. But I was watching. It was the brightest thing I’ve ever seen. Gold. The sun was gold.” Gold was something I knew. And I knew the ceiling lights were not gold. I stepped closer, wanting to hear more, anything more. I was stopped in my tracks by a hand wrapping around my arm, so tight that I felt a flash of pain. The rough grasp yanked me around where I stood, and I found myself staring Alexi right in his eyes. There was no question he was angry. “Just listen for once, Matvei!” He shouted, pitch raising almost as high as mama’s. “Stay put when I tell you.” He dragged me back to the court, but the thought of gold hanging in the air carried me on light feet. Alexi didn’t understand that even small things were grand adventures, even fleeting memories. And he most certainly didn’t dream of something beyond the walls. Of the sun I knew there was. **Adolescence** With every breath daylight slipped away, and growing shadows obscured the words on the page. I reached behind me and flicked the flashlight on, only to turn it off a heartbeat later. I had nearly burnt through my whole month’s battery ration over just a few late nights of reading. Just as I resigned myself to inevitable nightfall, a voice grabbed my attention from just outside. “Matvei, you home?” I could have recognized my brother’s rasp anywhere. And true to form, he didn’t wait for my response before pushing through the entrance of the lean-house. It was that very impatience that got him into trouble, his toes catching on the scraps of metal I had laid out in the waning light. In the next moment he tumbled headfirst towards me, curses filling the air as he crashed to the floor. “The hell is all of this?” He shouted, indignant as he struggled to raise himself from where he had fallen. “Work,” I said, my mood instantly soured by his arrival. Alexi never understood what I was tinkering with, and it was a waste of time trying to explain. It didn’t make sense to him, and likely never would. Just as I expected, he grumbled in what I assumed was confusion as he pulled himself off the floor. “It’s not good for you to be in here studying all the time. You need to go outside, play ball with friends. That’s what I did when I was your age.” “Yeah, and look at you now,” I muttered, creasing a dog ear in the page before snapping the weathered book shut. Even in the low light I could see what had become of him, how the recycling plant had ground him into a husk of his former self. His skin was stained grey from the smog of the city and his forearms were crossed in fresh lacerations. The skin around his eyes was textured with wrinkles, his eyebrows singed from hours spent alongside glass-melting heat. Alexi had never understood that studying was an act of rebellion, more than playing ball ever could be. I knew better than to believe I was invincible, having seen my entire family take slow steps towards an early grave. Alexi was hardly seven years older than me and already had the deathly cough that came with long days working in the plants. My studies were my only shield from a similar fate. “I’m just here to make sure you’re not losing out on everything else,” he prodded. “Like what?” “Well, you’re a man now. Hell, you’re almost as tall as me. I want to make sure you’re taking time to do things outside of studying, or whatever the hell this is,” he said, nudging some of the scraps he had just tripped over. “I don’t know what you mean.” “Well,” he stammered, eyes suddenly focused elsewhere. “You know, if you ever need to talk to me about girls, I guess. It’s normal to have questions.” “No, no!” The words exploded from my mouth before I could stop them. “Just, I don’t want to hear that.” “I don’t mean to say that it’s only girls. If it’s guys you can talk to my friend-” “Alexi, stop!” I cut him off and tried desperately to contain my mounting frustration. “I don’t want to talk about girls, or boys, or playing ball. I need to keep studying so I can get a job, a real job, not one at the plants. A job that will get me out of here. Maybe you too.” “Those books won’t give you a way out of here,” he said. His usually deadened eyes had a spark of something like anger in them. “Becoming a Fixer isn’t some miracle. You might eat a bit better, but you’re not getting off this Floor.” “I’m not just going to be a Fixer,” I growled, grip tightening on the book. “I’m going to be a Mechanic. And I’m going to have the keys to every door in this tower, and I’m going to leave this Floor for good.” “Maybe you’re not as grown as I thought. Hope won’t save you,” he sighed, anger gone. It was replaced with the same defeat that had overtaken his own youthful ambitions, apathy which had snuffed out the flame of dreams. “Hope is naïve. But this isn’t hope, it's hard work. I’m going to get out of here. Just because you gave up on that dream doesn’t mean I have to.” Alexi blinked, and turned back towards the entryway. Those few moments together had cost us the last slivers of daylight, leaving the air thick with his skepticism and disbelief. So out of spite I grabbed my flashlight and let its soft glow illuminate my pages. It was my only way out. **Adulthood** I drained the last of the coffee from my flask and set it down on the floor, its bitterness persistent on my tongue. It had been almost twenty-four hours since I last slept, and most of that time had been spent hunched over the current switchboard and output projections for the Twentieth through Twenty-Fifth Floors. I was on the cusp of a breakthrough, if I could just figure out -- “Hey boss, you busy?” The call pulled me from my concentration, all but shattering the line of thought I had been clinging to. Biting back a sigh I turned around to face the junior Mechanic standing at the threshold to the operating room. “What is it?” “Management says they need you to check on a Plant outage on the Fifth Floor.” Again I had to swallow a sigh, this one out of frustration. As the only Mechanic who had come from the lower ten Floors, if an on-site visit was ever required they would only send me. It was as though they were afraid their status would be tainted by so much as a short visit down. “Sounds like a job for a Fixer,” I responded, hoping to dodge the excursion if I could. “Fixers have been, almost six times in the last two months. Keeps going out. Said it was time for a Mechanic to check it out.” “Alright,” I said, resigned. “Tell them I’ll check on it tomorrow.” The acrid smoke of the recycling plants bit into my lungs the moment I stepped off the elevator and into the crowded quarters of the Fifth Floor. But no matter how much it burned my eyes in those first few seconds, I quickly settled into the memories of a long childhood spent among the sprawling streets of lean-houses with pollutants assaulting my senses. Behind me I pulled a mobile diagnostic lab packed with tools of my trade and let the haphazard structure of the foremost recycling plant on the Floor consume me. Even rooms away I could feel the heat meant to melt glass and metals down to their usable forms, later to be transported out for processing at manufacturing on another Floor. But I grit my teeth to the sounds of a life of labor I had fought so hard to avoid, settled into the Mechanic’s quarters, and got to work. A few minutes into my analysis a hand tugged on my sleeve, and I whipped around to be met with a familiar set of tired blue eyes. “Alexi?” His weathered features were all but unrecognizable, but his voice was the same as ever. “Hey brother. It’s been a while.” “So the outages have been you this whole time?” “Not just me,” he said, a smile lingering on his lips. “There’s a whole lot of us. We’re working to bust out of the lower Floors for good. But we need a man on the inside. I figured if we shut down the plant with enough errors, they’d have to send a Mechanic out. And I was right.” "You’re an idiot to tell me about this so readily,” I answered, my brows furrowing. “My responsibility is to the Tower now. I could report your and all of the other workers at the Plants and quash your movement before it even begins.” I watched the shock cross his face. It was as though the thought of my reluctance had never even crossed his mind. “But you wouldn’t do that, right?” Fear bled through his words. “No one knows what they’re doing really, but I said you would. I said you’d have a way out. Hell, you’re the only one I know who ever has.” Silence hung between us, split only by a rat darting through the tight quarters of the lean-house. It had been so long since I had seen one that I nearly flinched, but I managed to keep my face neutral. Finally I spoke, running my fingers across the keys on my belt as I did. “No, I wouldn’t. You were right to trust me, but this blind faith will get you killed if you don’t learn to keep quiet. There’s danger in opportunity. I know that better than anyone by now.” The tension in the room lifted and he smiled again, a whisper of glee working its way into otherwise deadened eyes. “Then let me tell you what we have planned so far-” Before he finished I pulled a key from its loop, and showed him the engraving in its brass. By his wide eyes I knew he recognized the symbol immediately. “The resistance is so much bigger than you could imagine,” I whispered. “And it’s about more than just the Floors. If you give me some time, we will break out of the Tower altogether.” **Seniorhood** vibrant-shadowsr/InTheShallows 1 point just now There was a rumbling in the basement. It began as a low growl, but slowly grew into a deafening roar. Matvei watched the lights of the Tower flicker as energy surged downwards, wrenching open an egress which had been sealed for generations. The Mechanic felt the trembling of the earth beneath his feet, a grand awakening he had dreamt of for many years. He thought of the building swaying above him, of worried mothers clutching their children, of chaos as the Tower's citizens realized that change was finally upon them. It was euphoric. In his mind’s eye he could imagine the metallic beast pushing its way through layers of dirt, a portal which opened to golden rays of light. He had wandered down that very tunnel many times before, treading silently through the quiet passage coated in dust, all the way to its once insurmountable dead end. He had spent years pressing his hands against the metal of the long-closed door, craning his neck to hear the whisper of freedom’s promise. It was the promise of something beyond a life enclosed in glass, a dream the people in the Tower had never given up on. It had never just been about windows. The dirt-streaked, smog-soaked windows of his childhood had never been the endgame. When he had first felt warmth from behind the glass of the Fortieth Floor, Matvei had discovered joy. It ignited a spark in his heart, a desire for freedom which had since grown into a burning flame. This hunger for liberation was shared with many others, but it was not without loss. As a Mechanic, he had always had the luxury of patience: he never wanted for food, never worried for his safety. It was easy to formulate his plan with precision and steal glimpses of sunlight when he could, just enough to get him by. For Alexi, and for so many others on the lower Floors, waiting had been impossible. As the entirety of the Mechanic’s quarters began to shake from the might of the door wrenching itself open, Matvei thought of how the tower had shook like this once before, almost a decade ago. The insurrection in the Plants had made the steel support beams tremble under its violence, a sensation which had only intensified as boots hit the dirt and gunfire rang out. It was only silent when blood pooled beneath broken bodies, crimson dripping like molten glass. And just like that, Alexi had died in the one place he had vowed to escape With the anger of injustice guiding him, Matvei began to walk forward. He was the first, but the others would come soon. They would pour from the lower Floors and into the darkness, following a faith that had not died with their fathers or their brothers. As the trembling came to a halt, Matvei saw the first golden beams lighting his way. Matvei took a deep breath, savoring the fresh air. Each ribbon of sunlight felt like a kiss, every breeze an embrace. The love of the sky above was unlike any other, a love which would never grow old. He knew he only had a few more years left to appreciate the His heart ached knowing Alexi wasn’t there to watch his grandchildren grow. A small boy of only ten years bore the same name, and carried the familiar blue eyes that Matvei had missed so much. But unlike Alexi this boy had grown up under the bright rays of a golden sun, with grass beneath his feet, and boundless opportunity ahead of him. This Alexi had the opportunity to dream. The sound of children shouting filled the air. Young and old together they kicked the ball back and forth between them, running and sweating and howling in elation. His hips ached even watching them run, the health of a youth left behind. It was the same game Matvei had watched with longing in his childhood, too tied up in books and dreams of escape to waste afternoons on the makeshift courts. But there was time now, even if just to watch again. Just as Matvei was about to close his eyes and let the sun warm his bones, he heard a familiar voice call out to him. “Uncle Matvei!” Alexi ran up to him, waving and clutching the weathered ball beneath his arm. Once he got closer he asked his question, still shouting. “Do you want to be goalie? Just for a little?” Matvei smiled and hauled himself out of the chair with a groan, ignoring the protests of his hips and clicking of his knees. “If you’re sure you want the old man on your team,” he said. But Alexi was already darting back off towards the field, without a single wall in sight.