Page 4 of Godslayer
“Well.” Her smile is real and big. “I’m going to take a shower. I don’t know what ‘deployment’ actually entails, but I’m assuming that hot water will be a luxury.”
Which is true, but not for her. Clara Birch can heat water with the spark inside her body just by standin’ next to it. But she’s not saying this to be literal. She’s extending an invitation.
She pats my chest, then slides around me, heading for the bedroom.
I watch her with side eye, grinning a little.
This mission is gonna be a test for us. A big test.
But the mission doesn’t start until tomorrow.
So I follow her into the bedroom.
Later in the evening,after the showering, and lovemakin’, and the easy talkin’ that always comes afterward. After the sleepiness, and the holdin’, and final kiss of the day—I lie in bed lookin’ up at the ceiling and see somethin’ that isn’t there.
Except it is. Because I’m lookin’ at it.
In my old room, back in Tau City and inside the god’s tower ruin, there was a lot of graffiti on the ceiling. Specifically, a tower with a banner and the words, ‘Sparktopia was here’ written across it in grungy letters. I looked at that image and those words every night for seven years wonderin’ about them.
Who got up there, lyin’ on their back on some makeshift scaffold, and painted the tower with the banner and the words?
And why?
I guess it’s easy enough to figure out a ‘why’. People like to leave a mark. They like to feel bigger and more important than maybe they really are. So it could a message to the future. A message to me. Or to whoever is living in that room right now.
Or maybe they’re one of those creative fucks. Like the people who lived down the tenth-floor hallway from me. They were always paintin’ murals on the walls near the stairs. Sometimes it was messages. Political, social, commentary about life in the tower. But other times it was just pictures.
I never paid much attention to the murals or the people who painted them, they were just something that was there.
That’s how I felt about Sparktopia.
It was just… there.
But isn’t it a little bit weird, that here in Delta City, thousands of miles away, that very tower is on my ceiling again?
Not literally, of course. That would be easier to explain, actually.
It’s there… energetically.
That’s the word I’m using to describe the overlay into other… dimensions? Realms? Times? I’m not really sure what theseplaces are, I just know they’re both real and not in the same instant.
So I lie here, looking up at my ceilin’, And that very same tower, with that very same banner and those very same words, is staring right back at me as a glowin’ cyan-blue outline.
Sparktopia is here.
And I think… it’s kinda right. Because the air in Delta City is clogged with it. The spark is everywhere. Even though they can’t see it the way I do, every single person living here is breathin’ it in, all the time, all at once.
Sparktopia.
It means ‘spark place’. I looked it up. It’s a made-up word, but the suffix –topia comes from the root tópos, which means place. One thing about Delta City that’s nice is the infonet. Tau City had a good one as well, but oddly enough, Delta’s net is comparatively unregulated. I did a lot of searches to test the boundaries and never once did it refuse to give me an answer or give me fucked-up results that made no sense.
So I found that word tópos, which I had never heard of, but the entry explaining it was… well,odd. Because it comes from a language called ‘Greek’. And I have never heard of this language called ‘Greek’.
Which led to more searches and what Delta’s infonet spit out at me was nothing short of confusing. Because it was an entire history that I had never been told about.
And I’m not saying I’m the world’s most educated man or anythin’ like that, but I am very fuckin’ educated. My entire childhood was spent in Delta’s home for boys and it was a lot of schoolin’. A lot of history, a lot of math, a lot of everythin’. And it didn’t stop when I was sent to the Sweep. There were years of school after that and almost all of it was history and culture.
So how didn’t I know that the cities along the train line are named after the Greek alphabet? Delta is a letter. And so is Tau.So where the hell has this Greek language been hidin’ that I haven’t heard of it? It kinda blew my mind.
