Author’s Note: This is just the start of the first chapter. I will update this chapter in a week when it is finished.

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The gentle curvature of the horizon spoke of falling. The strata hung low and ozone blue, clouds playing out their endless, unresolvable dramas below.

Above the strata hung a leviathan named Aegis 7. It was a stratacitie of dense spirals and sweeping vistas, honeycombed with structures that bled and flowed into one another, always shifting and reforming to meet the needs of its millions of citizens. Bridges formed ligaments and connective tissue that made the whole city seem almost alive.

Almost.

The Razor was the longest bridge in a stratacitie composed of thousands of bridges. A mad geometry of other bridges cascaded above the Razor, none more than a quarter of its length, creating a lattice of small neighborhoods, but this bridge at the base of the city was the longest. It spanned the hollow centrifuge of Aegis 7 at it’s very base. No struts supported the Razor-- it simply was: a thin ribbon that arrowed through the void that made Aegis 7 hollow, the bridge trembling and quicksilver and the strata and it’s clouds opening below, andthe Nowhere a full stop nightmare at the bottom. No one had built the Razor. It existed simply because it filled a need. No one built anything in a stratacitie-- that’s what the Aegis was for. The Aegis knew that citizens of Aegis 7 needed a place to gather and stare into the void, to gaze at the empty Nothing and celebrate their abundance and future ascendance.

Today, fifteen thousand citizens came to the Razor to throw flowers into the void. Well, about a thousand of those fifteen thousand actually came to throw flowers. Others were there to gawk, or perhaps to seek answers-- but most came in protest. Among the slim thousand walked a woman who felt as if she were there for every reason possible. To mourn, to protest, to gawk, and… to find answers.

Still, and even though she shouldn’t, Geist wore a white flower on her lapel.

Why had Fallon jumped? Why did the Aegis allow him him to fall? How could he betray his cause with such a seneless act?

How dare he.

Geist whispered those words to herself as she stepped on the Razor, Twist-side, careful not to look down into the void. She didn’t want to look at the thing that had killed Fallon. Not yet.

“How dare you,” she whispered.

Fallon’s funeral was perhaps the best attended in modern history. At least that was the sense the Geist got, studying the crowd. Best attended, but for all the wrong reasons. Suicides were rare, and always attracted the political sorts.

The Agoura side of the Razor was packed with demonstrators holding signs painted with broken links of a chain in silent protest. No one would dare yell before a funeral-- the riot would come after, of course, but their presence was enough to let those who had come to toss flowers into the void know that they were watching. Conservative old Prosesneus party were taking note of who was there, and how they swayed the Consensus. Behind the protesters, the Agouran complex spread out in all it’s splendor, white stone veined with quicksilver metal, it’s spires capped with gold. It seemed to lend the demonstrators an air of weight, like they had the whole physical power of Aegis 7 behind them.

The other side of the Razor opened into the Twist, a trendy district that attracted people from all over Aegis 7 with it’s proximity to the Razor and the draw of the void. It had been a fashionable date to walk the Razor, of late. The crowd Twist-side was a mix of citizens, craning necks and jockeying for a glimpse of the sorts of people who would wear a flower to a suiciders funeral. Geist didn’t need to connect to consensus to feel the morbid curiosity of the crowed assault her senses-- not that she could connect to them even if she’d wanted to. Sometimes… only sometimes, being Aegiless was a blessing.

The bridge itself was filled with people who bore white carnation on their lapels. White for death, for nothing. That was the way it should have been, but here and there Geist noted knots of people who had dyed their sunburst flowers blue.

Bearers of these blue flowers never walked alone alone. They stayed in groups of three or more-- groups that swelled sometimes to dozens. Geist stared at these blue flower bearers, a white blossom displayed on her own coat lapel, gray eyes hard and mouth drawn into a frown.

Geist stopped near the Razor’s center, slightly apart from a familiar knot of people speaking quietly at podium that had sprung into being, each step molded seamlessly from the bridge’s surface. Aegis 7 never left its people wanting. Need a new room in your house? One would spring into being at the moment of consensus with those nearby. Need a podium to stand on and give speeches about a man who had killed himself? Aegis knew just what to make.

Geist was not a part of the group by the podium, for she could never really be a part of those people who knew Fallon in the various ways that were acceptable to know the deceased: family, mentor, colleague, lifelong friend, lover. Even if she fit several of those categories: colleague, friend… lover. At least none of the select group of people near the podium bore a blue flower-- if they had, Geist supposed she would march over, rip the flower from its buttonhole and crush it under the heel of her sandal.

Her fingers found the explosion of silken white petals and she brushed flower. Today was to be a day to put aside factions and politics, at least among the flower-wearers. It was the first time she’d been back to the Basket since Fallon’s death a cycle ago-- his suicide, she reminded herself. Had it really only been seven days since he had jumped? Today, before the funeral, she had begged the suffragists not to dye their flowers blue. For Fallon’s sake.

They’d laughed at her. We are suffragists for the Aegiless, for you, one of the politicos had said. We will always fly our colors. It was what Fallon would have wanted. Geist wanted to break the politico’s nose who’d said it.

“Or is it for your sake?” Calla had asked on the way over to the Razor, once Geist had quit arguing. “After all, Fallon’s dead. Nothing’s for his sake anymore.” Calla was blunt and smiling as ever. Like the blue flowers, Geist wished to wipe that smile off of Calla’s face and crush it under her heel.

But, she was right. Fallon was dead, so it didn’t really matter. Memorials were for the living, after all. The bereaved threw flowers into the void, as an offering to the Nowhere, making a connection between collective memory and the Aegis. That Geist wore a flower was sacrilege. Aegiless did not wear flowers to funerals. Aegless did not connect to the Aegis.

But Geist had always been good at faking consensus, and those who knew what she really was, like Calla, didn’t care.

The Revered stood with the others in her rarement of silk and fine chameleon cloth, the gray of the fabric shifting and attempting to match any other shade of gray or silver it came near. The Revered did not wear a flower, being above such mortal gestures. Ironic how not wearing a flower put you either above, or below.

Calla stopped suddenly, a good few yards from bereaved family and the Reveared. “Relax,” she drawled, smiling. Geist assumed she was trying to sound soothing, but it just made her sound as if she didn’t care about anything, which Geist knew was a lie. Calla’s smile was slight today-- usually it was spread ear to ear. She was feeling the loss.

Geist turned restless gray eyes to her friend. “Pisses me off how many blue flowers are here,” she said and didn’t bother to keep her voice down.

“Technically I should have dyed mine as well. It was a fine sentiment, doing away with partisanship for the ceremony,” Calla sighed. “A pity there’s no room for sentimentality in politics.” The smile faltered and then returned, fixed as the two of them watched the bereaved mount the podium. The crowd erupted into a roar of approval, and Geist struggled to keep her frown from deepening.

“Fallon never captured this sort of interest while he was alive.”

“Time makes martyrs of us all. We can use this, Geist.” That look was in Calla’s eyes, that of scemeing.

Geist shook her head, just slightly. “I don’t want to use it. I want Fallon back.” She jumped slightly as Calla placed a hand on her arm, squeezing slightly in a gesture of… what? Sympathy? That was unlike Calla. Solidarity? Perhaps. Geist shrugged her off. “You can stop trying to manipulate me, Calla. You better join them before they really get going. I know how you hate to miss a speech.”

“The Revered will take forever,” Calla said with glance at the dais. “She’s nearly two hundred, moves like wood grows-- slow.” Calla’s eyes shifted along the crowd, as if counting blue flowers. “Hey, listen, I need you to run some things for me tonight. Cache is in the usual spot. And… I wouldn’t stick around.” Her eyes slid over the swelling crowd of Prosensus protesters at the edge of the bridge, and then locked on Geist. For a moment, she felt the weight of Calla’s power, her intellect and cunning bear down on her. “There’s going to be a riot.”

Then Calla pressed something into Geist’s hand, and then she was gone. Geist didn’t watch her go, and wasn’t fool enough to look at the bit of paper out in the open-- she didn’t need to out herself as Aegiless by reading. Not with so many blue carnations about. Suffragists might support Aegiless rights, but they did so in such a way that would incite the Prosesneus, and Geist was not going to be the one to start the impending riot-- not one that she would be stuck in the middle of, at least, and not one that would make her the target.

No, that would be Calla’s job, if the Prosensus didn’t do her work for her.

The Revered started a silent blessing, withered fingers touched to form a circle with her arms out before her. Others-- not many, but some, formed a smaller gesture on the same shape, fingertips and thumbs touching, invoking the Aegis which sustained them all, held them in the city and kept them in the sky, waiting for the dawn when the Giver would come and ascend them fully unto their eternal heaven.

Fallon would have laughed at it-- a priest of the Aegis leading his memorial service. The man was as areligious as you could get as someone who could join consensus-- he had believed, but not deeply. He never made any decisions based on faith. It was what Fallon’s mothers wanted, of course-- one of them weeping, the other with an arm wrapped protectively around Fallon’s father who stood hunch-shouldered between the two women. Such a pretty family. Calla mounted the dias and pressed her hands to her forehead as the Revered began to speak.

A ripple went through the crowed and Geist knew then-- consensus. It pulled across the bridge, and even if Geist couldn’t join she could sense it-- what she was missing. They all mourned together, even the suffragists would join with the conservatives to honor Fallon.

“Life is precious to the Aegis. To take life: one’s own, or another’s is the only sin in the eyes of the Giver, for taking a life means taking a mind from their Consensus. Enlee Fallon took his life on this very spot, seven days ago. For seven days, I have meditated on his death, on the choice he made, and asked myself why he would have done such a thing.

“Theolee Fallon was a peacemaker. He loved all the Giver’s citizens, no matter their politics, or what they believed in consensus. He even loved the Aegiless, those who were not recipients of the Giver’s gifts. A man of such wide reaching compassion, such studied wisdom should not have done what Theolee did, but it is sometimes the most empathetic of us that are the most vulnerable...”

Next Chapter: Glossary