your body against mine.

Bone came with the bar when it changed owners.  The former was her lover, a young man who promised to whisk her away from the city and take her to a land where they could flourish.  He had been saving up for a vehicle and a decent amount of gasoline when he was hit by a truck of commanders and their blue shirts on the way to arrest another political prisoner.  Bone found him sprawled out on the concrete surrounded by the other inhabitants of the lower city, wondering who he was.

“He was mine,” she had whispered to herself.

The new owner bought the bar from her with the promise that he’d make it the place her lover had, but it was all a lie.  He was a fat man bent on gaining money and bedding whores.  Bone assumed it was because he had hopes of moving up the ladder rungs, to a shiny apartment up on the hills and away from the grime they suffered through against the walls.  She didn’t argue when he pushed her around.  She kept serving drinks in the hopes that eventually he would go away to the high rises and never come back.

He stayed for three years until she got a chance to leave it all behind.

At first she only heard rumors of strange happenings.  Guards at the walls were falling to their deaths.  Everyone blamed ice from the cool autumn nights until there was a witness.  A man was running around the top of the stone behemoth, sending a message to the big men in the penthouses that not even their men would be safe.  

A drunkard with no hair and enough teeth to speak with slammed his mug of ale on the counter boasting of the criminal’s bounty that would set any man up for a life in the hills.  The new owner heard this and promised he’d double the reward.  Bone knew better.  He’d promise one thing and kill the true hero to get it all to himself, the same way he held onto the most of the money she'd been promised for the bar.

The rumors continued to spread, even though Bone’s cramped apartment building.  A commander had been strung up by his ankles in the old town, underneath the railroad bridge, and skinned alive.  It was all too gruesome for Bone; she’d sworn off blood ever since her lover’s stained the sidewalk.  All the more reason to leave, but she still had no choice but to stay.

She walked home from work late one night, rubbing the bruises on her arm from the hands of her boss, when she spotted a group of drunken blue shirts up ahead under the streetlights.  Usually Bone didn’t encounter many problems in the dark corners of the lower city; she had a knife in her hair disguised as a clip.  Blue shirts were different.  They left a twisted feeling in her stomach, something to do with how they’d only pulled her lover’s body onto the sidewalk instead of taking it to the crematorium.  It’s too much of a bother, they’d told her, and there were better things to do.

She switched sides of the streets in the hopes of avoiding them, but their leers still found her.

“Ah, it’s Mal’s wench!”

She instinctively reached up to feel the clip in her hair, and kept her hand on the blade as she continued to walk, just in case.

“Come back here and pour me a beer!  The city commands you!”

She’d been so focused on getting away that she hadn’t heard the gaggle of them come up behind her.  They didn’t waste time and pushed her against the wall of the old laundromat, a for rent sign now in the front window.  Bone lost the hold on her knife and it slipped from her hair to the ground.  The blue shirts didn’t notice.

“Please don’t,” she pleaded.  Would they know who she was when they found her body in the streets?

“Didn’t you hear the streets are dangerous?” one taunted.  “People are dying.  There’s a monster on the loose; it flew over the walls.”

“We can protect you,” another breathed on her face.  “We can save you.”

One more grabbed her bruised wrist.

“Let me go!” she shouted.

Someone heard her.

The blue shirt on the edge of the group was pulled to his feet, his right cheek slamming into the rough asphalt with a yelp.  Bone barely noticed that, but she saw another grabbed by a calloused hand, and punched in the face by another so hard that he joined his unconscious compatriot on the ground.  The three remaining blue shirts turned their attention to what was happening, and Bone slipped from their grasp, running home faster than she had ever run anywhere before.  She looked back once, to see five men sprawled across the road, and one shadowy figure standing over them all.

She woke early in the morning after an hour or two of sleep and five hours of restlessness, to enjoy a cup of tea on the balcony before she had to drag herself back to work.  Waiting for her on the rickety plastic sitting chair, damp from the morning dew, was the knife she’d left behind.

Her boss and the rest of the lower city’s scum had heard all about the attack by the time she came in to the bar, ready to serve.  The vigilante had roughed up five blue shirts and they were lucky to be alive.

“I don’t feel safe here,” the owner grumbled between sips of ale.  Bone was already filling up another mug for him.  “If the blue shirts aren’t safe, why are we?”

In the next week, three more guards fell from the wall, one crashing through the roof of a brothel and killing a prostitute and her trick in the process.  The next event was not a murder or attack, but a warning.  The city woke to see words where there had once been a simple slab of concrete that separated them from the outside.  In a bold red (the man on the radio said that they were testing to see if it was blood) someone had written You Vs. Me.

Bone had a good view of it from the front window of the bar, where she could see right to the wall while wiping down tables.

“We’re all going to die,” a drunken old man told her as they both looked at the words again, Bone refreshing his drink.

“He hasn’t hurt anyone except them,” she said.  “His war isn’t with us.”

“We’re all going to die,” he repeated.

Bone knew better, and she also knew the layout of the city.  The highest building on the hills should have been able to see the message on the wall.  It was directed to the men in the penthouse who ran the city from a round oak table.  It was a threat.

A week later, there were more words.  Time to go.

“Go where?” the bar owner quipped.  “Fear is doing us all no good.  I want him dead.  My reward is tripled to whoever brings me his head.”

Bone was watching television in her apartment that night when the events of the past week were brought up once again.  A wrinkled man in an ill-fitting suit said from behind his desk, “This city will fall at the hands of men like this, who get off on inspiring fear in the masses.  No one is safe here.  We must destroy him before he destroys us.”

In the wee hours of the morning, a dull shake through the building woke her from her slumber.  From her bedroom window she could not see what had happened, but she could see an eerie orange glow from the far left.  Getting to her roof to see it wasn’t such a bother, as she was one floor below the top.  In a sheer white nightdress, cold wind blowing as she poked her head through the door at the top of the stairs, she saw the patrol airships drifting towards the tallest building in the hills, where a fire had broken out on the top two floors.  They’d probably be able to save the building, but perhaps not the men who had been inside.

Bone did not mourn them, if they were dead after all.  She’d known since she was a little freckle-faced girl that these men were responsible for the filth she lived in.  They’re the ones who sent the blue shirts into the lower city, promising safety, but it resulted in more fear.  They kept the food and water in the hills in the winter, when scouting parties did not dare to trek through the deep snow beyond the wall.  They denied the sick when the lower city hospitals overflowed with patients.  They’d built their own smaller wall around the hills, to keep them all out.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a voice spoke from the shadows of the roof.  Bone stepped out of the stairwell and found a shadowy figure leaning against the vent outlet, admiring the view of the burning building, gallons of water being sprayed on the blaze by the hundreds.  Bone kept her distance.  After all, he was a terrorist.  “Sometimes change needs a large spark to start a movement.”

“Will this change anything?” Bone found herself asking.  “There were more men where they came from.”

“People need to leave this city.  They’ve put false words into your heads, speaking of dangers beyond the wall.  I’ve been out there, and I’ve seen nothing but untouched land.  It is better for everyone out there, than to starve and die in here.  Man wasn’t meant to be confined.”

“They’ll guard the exit much fiercer.”

“When enough people leave, they can push through any barrier.  When one body is against another, the strongest always pushes through.”  His head turned to her, but Bone could still not make out any discernible features.  He was deep in the shadows.  “Will you leave?”

“I want to.  I’ve always wanted to.”

“I can take you from all of this, to somewhere safe.”

“I’ve been promised that before.”

“And what happened to the person that did?”
She swallowed a hard lump in her throat.  “He’s dead,” she answered, with a noticeable shake to her voice.

“No one else will die.  I’ve done all I can now.  It’s up to the people.”

“They don’t understand your message.  They’re afraid of you.”

“They will still leave, even if it’s out of fear of me.  Either way, I need them to leave somehow, and I had to make sure no one would orchestrate their destruction.  It will take a bit of time to replace the men in the penthouse.”

“Not long.”

“Then you better get going.”

This was her chance.  Bone knew the end was near, but she still had a pang of fear in the pits of her stomach, twisting the organ nearly the same way that the blue shirts did.  “I don’t know what I’ll do out there when I’m alone.”

“You won’t be.”

He stepped out from the shadows, and into the glow of the orange flames from the hills.  Even under some light, his identity could not be known.  He was dressed in all black, a hood pulled over his eyes so Bone could not see them, only a trace of a thin smirk on his lips.  He wore something over his clothes that looked like a harness, which she guessed had to do with him getting to the top of the wall or her building, twelve stories above the street.  He took her hand and led her close to the edge of the roof, with enough space to keep her from being fearful.  They were looking to the section of the wall where dark letters faintly reminded her that it was time to go.  

“I can understand if you don’t, but do you trust me?” he asked, hand delicately squeezing hers.

“Is it really better out there?” Bone asked in return.

“There’s as much food and water as you can have, and no risk of a flood with heavy rains.  You won’t be sequestered from the rich, or lumped in with the scum that occupies the lower city.  It’s exactly what you make of it.”

“Then I trust you.”

And with that, he grabbed her body and pulled it close to this, and before she knew it, he sprung from the roof.  Bone wasn’t sure how they were doing it, but they were not falling.  She could see the wall getting closer.