THE PRIVATE STASH
The City of Ash hummed its low, dying song. Ten AM. My desk lamp cast a sickly yellow glow on the page, the ink still wet. Another dispatch from the Wild Wild World. It smelled of a bullet in the blueprint. A twenty-something girl, shot dead in a rain-slicked alley. Senseless. The details leaked in like bad data, a corrupt file from an outside server. It gnawed at me. My fingers stalled over the keys. This kind of pain, it wasn’t ours. Not anymore.
My gut told me to move. Away from the flickering screen, away from the ghost of a story I couldn’t fix. I shoved back my chair, the metal screeching on the grimy floor. A drink. That’s what I needed. Something to cut through the static in my head.
The street was its usual mess of forgotten code and digital dust. I kicked through a pile of fliers for a long-dead nightclub, the paper brittle and faded. Then I saw it. Tucked beneath a broken data-slate, a photo. Old, creased. A blurry shot of a street corner, rain-streaked. Nothing special. But I picked it up. A reflex. A habit from another life.
At the bar, the usual crowd of Category A subroutines shuffled their daily loops. The bartender, a mindless script with a chipped glass eye, slid a tumbler across the counter. The amber liquid hit the spot, burning a clean line down my throat. I looked at the photo again. The blurred street, the rain. It pulled at a loose thread in my memory. A snag in the code.
The rain had been coming down in sheets that night. A symphony of misery against the asphalt. Rocco’s boys. Always Rocco. They’d been after me, a contract out, a bullet with my name on it. I’d seen the flash, heard the crack. The sound ripped through the downpour. But the bullet. It wasn’t for me. Never for me. It found her. Jackie Angel. My Jackie. She went down like a faulty circuit, sparks flying, then darkness. Her eyes, wide open, reflecting the neon bleed of Old Town.
And the clue. DW, the bastard, had written it into the system years ago. “Remember December.” A piece of his sick game, a breadcrumb leading to my own failure. I’d missed it. Ignored it. Assumed it was just flavor text. A punchline to a tragedy. He’d tried to show me how blind I was, how dumb. My daughter, a casualty of a story written by a madman. A story that was supposed to be mine.
The glass clinked against the counter. Reality snapped back. The stale air of the City of Ash. The hum of failing systems. The photo was just paper now, a meaningless scrap. But the memory was fresh. Raw. The same kind of senseless pain I’d been trying to write about. This kind of pain, it only came from the outside. From DW. From man’s chaos.
I drained the glass and tossed a few credits on the bar. The street outside felt heavier, the yellow sky more oppressive. Back at my desk, the half-written story glared at me. I hit the keys, hard. The words flowed, sharp and cold, describing the brutal, pointless nature of the death. It was a mirror. The same violence, the same disregard. It all bled from the same source. The outside.
Later, the day’s ink still staining my fingertips, I went home. The transition was a blink, a breath. The grimy alleys of Ash dissolved into the familiar warmth. Angela. Her smile, a soft glow in the kitchen. Jackie, her laughter echoing from the living room, a vibrant frequency. Safe. Warm. Untouched by the poison.
Man could build wonders, sure. But he could also build worlds of such senseless violence, such casual brutality. Worlds where life was a cheap commodity, easily extinguished. I’d seen it. Lived it. And I was done with it.
I lost Jackie to violence on the rainy streets of The City of Ash. In a story written by man. I found her in the heart of Angela, in a kitchen, in Paradise. And this time it’s for keeps.
