She was at the helium bar, she was sick, Sideshow Sally was performing his/her spectacle, pink synthetic feathers landing in her hair... Katerina passes the junkyard and turns toward her building, quickening with residual paranoia. The smell of dust is comforting. There are still dishes in the sink that need doing but she slumps into the green armchair anyway. She likes the view from the middle of the warehouse, low, relaxed in the tattered, antique-green, springless chair. The windows are like white tiles with the early morning overcast creeping in. It makes light-rays in the dust way up high. She can't see the wood and steel beams of the ceiling for the haze. She pretends the obscured ceiling is the night sky and the windows are hanging tetherless in the air. They are miniature wormholes to the place she goes when she feels the panic coming on, the vague and desperate Video Game land. She changes her mind. Beyond the windows is where her brother is. He's playing in a City garden, ripping perfect petals from perfect flowers and laughing when no one comes to scold him. Maybe, she thinks, this is what he is dreaming right now, down there, in the Underground City, in a perfect bed with a perfect family. She imagines her brother dreaming imperfect dreams of her. Katerina stares hard, her pupils constricting, up at the milky windows. No, they are just plastic squares spliced into the brick around her. Distractions. They help you forget.

    The helium, mostly worn off, and the running force her to drag herself to bed, ignoring the dishes. She decides not to hang around with Sideshow Sally so much, too many wild nights. She's not thirteen anymore, she thinks, it's time to take better care of herself, start getting things done. She will go to the lake tonight and visit Sam; he always makes her feel better. Maybe he can help her find her brother. She goes to bed for a while. She dreams that Sam is her brother but still really old and that she is really old too.

    Sam was twenty when the New Holocaust happened. He worked as a messenger for the corporation until they found out he was selling secrets. He was not much older than Katerina is now. This is a sobering thought for her. They found out he was selling secrets to the government and they tortured him for twenty-three days in the cells and left him for dead. Katerina has heard all his stories, most of them several times. He comes from a long line of holocaust survivors, he says. It's in the blood. He'd said that there were lots of people who survived the first one, not just his grandmother, but most did not. Katerina knows that Sam never lies because no one else has ever seen him, he's just a myth to people. She knows his stories are true because he's too old not to have been there for it all. She also knows that Sam is the only one. He's never told her how he made it out alive. It's in the blood, he says.

    The evening is pungent with spring. The thaw always resurrects things that ought to stay dead. Slush and clay seep in through Katerina's boots as she makes her way across the beach. Sam's shack is buried within a dump of old building materials, mostly reinforced concrete and UltraPlast. It's through the opening just to the right of the fifth overturned toilet, close to the rust-stained, reinforced concrete dolmen. But she can see Sam is not at home. He is sitting on a rock by the shore, writing in his notebook. She pretends to sneak up on him but she knows he sensed her coming. He acts surprised anyway, to make her smile.

    "Oh, it's you. What's up, kiddo? You in trouble again?" Sam fixes his cloudy, grey-blue eyes on Katerina, unflinching, too steady for an old man.

    "Of course it's me, who else? Trouble. Hmph. And stop calling me kiddo, it's a vulgar word." She looks out at the lake; it's like oil tonight. She wonders how far voices carry. "The flashback/panic attack episodes have returned. And I think I want to start looking for my brother."

    Sam coughs violently and shivers. "Let's go inside. I'll put on some tea. It was so, well, relatively, nice out earlier. Getting chilly now. When I was your age we used to go swimming in that old lake, y'know. Yup, can you imagine? It wasn't safe then either and there were signs warning against it, but, y'know, we didn't listen to anyone. We used to have these huge bonfires and drink beer in glass bottles sitting on picnic tables..."

    "What's a picnic table?"

    Inside it's warm and dry, the shack hermetically sealed from the elements and contaminants with UltraPlast remnants. Sam is more susceptible since he was not born in this time. Katerina sips her vaguely berry-and-something-mentholish-flavoured tea. She talks about the boy that appears in her episodes. She has decided that is what she will call them, but she doesn't like the sound of it, too clinical. She doesn't think there is a word for the experience. Sam says they sound like what he used to call a bad trip, but he knows it's different. He tells her to be more perceptive, more intuitive, and not to analyse or dwell on the episodes. He calls them a gift. Katerina tries to understand how this could be so. He tells her to explore the giver, not the gift. She decides to go down into the City and asks Sam if he'd ever been there.

    "No. You can't hide there. You can't go around unnoticed. I've got no need for that place. It's hell, I'm telling you. Actually, I have been there, a couple of times, and when they were building it, but not since it became the City. When it was just shops and subways I had to be there sometimes. No sunshine, man. Not that we get much either, but anyway... well, no cancer either, I guess... Oh anyway, it's not a very nice place."

    Katerina asks what they might know about the people who live above ground, where she could get City clothing, how to camouflage herself.

    "They don't know we exist, you goof. Well, I suppose they probably think there are a few old, dying bums left. They believe the climate and pollution is so bad that no one could live up here. You'd better be careful, kiddo. Old Samuel here doesn't want you risking his life if they figure you out."

    Sally could probably put together or make some clothing, she thought. It's still early for her/him. She'll go there, then below to the City.

    The torchlight is deceivingly soft on the roads and sidewalks, warm and orange and blurring the edges of things. The Last Place On Earth is open and patrons are spilling out onto the street, enjoying this first taste of spring. Their raucous voices are muffled by the moist and tepid air.  Katerina walks briskly, breaking a sweat. She notices a new gang outside the bar, young kids, younger than herself. No one up here is over thirty. Everyone is orphaned sooner than later. It is not surprising they think Sam is a myth.

    She feels the sickening in her gut that stares bring. The gang is laughing and shouting. Katerina pulls her jacket tight around her chest and walks faster, the beads of sweat on her face growing cold in the breeze. The way down is not far. She hopes she is out of anyone's sight. She passes a growling, spiky-collared dog, chained and padlocked to a fence. Its leash is long enough for her to be afraid, and she stops instinctively. She is standing still, not breathing, the muscles in her abdomen stiff, playing dead. She doesn't know if this does any good placating angry dogs, it happens by instinct. After a few seconds she forces herself to look at it. The dog is mangy with matted fur and is missing a leg. Her limbs turn to jelly with relief and embarrassment as she turns the corner and spots the way down.

    She has walked by this place hundreds of times, indifferent, acknowledging it only as the way to somewhere she dared not go, did not want to go. She wonders what her brother might look like now. She can only remember a baby with lucid, piercing black eyes that would follow her everywhere. He was almost a year old when their parents died and Katerina cared for him for two years afterwards. A lot of babies go missing, sold to infertile couples in the City. She was seven when he was taken and naive and confused. Sideshow Sally lived above the pawn shop then and found Katerina crying outside on the step. He/she took her in for the night, gave her some dinner, let her stay for five years.

    The way in/out is unguarded. There is no activity to police. A long and narrow corridor of black marble, lit by bare halogen tubes, leads into the City. It becomes a kaleidoscope of Katerinas and lights, an antiseptic funhouse hall of mirrors. Her reflection disturbs her; it is a self with no context, no background for the subject. She realises that her body is its own background, both subject and context. Tingles creep up her neck and she shivers, her heartbeat races, she wonders: Do other people think like this? Can people feel physically what they think intellectually? Is that what this is? She struggles to walk faster without letting her boots make too much noise against the polished slabs. City people must not need boots, she supposes. Finally she reaches the thick metal door at the end. Through its small window she sees a courtyard terrarium lined with ornate benches. There is no one around. She has to push hard on the door and her feet slip back a little on the marble. It opens with a sound like entering a vault.

    The courtyard is pristine. Trees are geometrically manicured and shrubbery sculpted into people walking, carrying bags, a child sitting, an old man feeding birds. Katerina even hears the sound of birds and running water though these things are nowhere to be seen. She sits by the meticulously designed flowerbed and thinks it looks like a painting she once saw in the bathroom of The Last Place On Earth. Some of the petals have fallen off and lie dried up on the soil. She does not understand why they have not been cleared up. She takes off her jacket, ties its arms around her waist and gets up. Five paths of the same black marble branch out from the courtyard, other paths intersecting them, lined with colourful shops and cafés, all closed.

    Down one hall there are moving walkways and carpets, fatly stuffed couches and glass tables, elevators intermittently along both walls. Tall glass doors with a card-key slot prevent Katerina from entering. She sees the numbers above the elevators light up and realises that there are still people about. She mustn't look conspicuous. She turns back to walk through a different aisle, this one darker and booming with the sound of nightclubs. She wonders if City people call these streets. The nightclubs are of about three discernible types and offer only silver and gold doors with holographic signs above. This street feels familiar. The throbbing music echoing through the hall makes her dizzy. She recognises a vertiginous flying sensation, a lilting of languageless voices, an invisible push against her back. She is rising and falling at once, choking and screaming silently and she must get out of here. All of the paths lead back to each other and that-which-she-must-not-look-back-at is chasing, gaining, will always be behind her whichever way she turns. She begins to run. She is breathing heavily and awkwardly with breath that is not air. In the distance is a figure in black, a boy slightly older than Katerina, leaning against a wall, motionless. The wall gives way to a corridor made of wooden beams and branches that catch in her hair and on her clothes. The long-haired boy with deep, sunken eyes appears again beside her, static but following her as she madly tears down what now resembles an alley above ground. She is aware of this boy, recognises him not only because he is beautiful, but because he is alive, unlike anything else in this Video Game land. He has reappeared now but is running with her, not watching. The dim haze of the edges sharpens a little but she continues to run. The semi-buoyant leaping that is her running in this state grows heavier and the ground feels harder and she looks behind her for the invisible enemy in this aimless pursuit and sees clearly only the watching boy, running. He is shouting, reaching out to her, pleading. Katerina Supernova stops and falls on the black marble floor of the underground City and looks up at the boy, catching her breath. She realises that it was for real this time.

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