"Perhaps. But it didn’t seem so then. And anyway it is how my story begins…"

Peeling and torn, her tiny fingers claw at the ground, shredding themselves further on gravel and glass as she drags herself up the steep hill breaded with debris. She reaches for the top. She loses hold and slips, spilling back and down into the scorched hole that was once the glistening transport tube gateway. At first she lays crumpled, sweating, trembling. She cries. No one hears her. But she hears the dream- explosions, screams, the hiss of the snake at her neck, with the feeling, the certainty that they’re after her. It drives her on.

The environmental controls are out. Where once was displayed a golden-rimmed azure sky is now just the towering dinge-green of the dome. At its zenith, a hole blown through exposes the one level and dome above and beyond. Like a bubble in a bubble in the waters of her bath. The illusion gone, the vertical structure of her world, always known but never really seen, now lays bare above her.

But before she can take it all in she is thrown to the ground, knocked down by a streaking body. She looks up and finally notices the people, the adults, running to and fro, screaming, terrified.

"Even the adults?"

A chill grips her heart. Some run. Some stand, mouths loose, eyes bulging with shock. Some lie very still. In the distance, sounds of popping like thunder in a storm without sky. Never before had she been so frightened. Never before had she been alone.

Arayna scurries and dives to keep from being trampled while she tries to clear her mind, to think, to remember home. Her tower, her level. When she was here with her parents, how had they taken her? Where was home? Remember? Remember! Panting, flushed, body slick with sweat, she heads towards the somewhat familiar north towers.

A sea of feet, legs, elbows, bodies, rushes past her, over her, jabbing, kicking, suffocating. She still screams for help even as she pushes ahead. But no one stops. No one can.

Then in the crowd one familiar face. Red curls, yes, her friend, being bundled off in the arms of his mother. Arayna screams his name. The mother turns. Her glazed eyes see Arayna, note her, and choose. She puts her hand to her neck, shakes her head and lets the fear move her away with all that matters to her in her arms under red curls that turn back over a small freckled waving hand. A choice. A lesson for Arayna.

She starts to fall down and cry. But then, mimicking the mother, she puts her hand to her neck. She’s cognizant for the first time of its painful tightness. Her fingers gingerly feel the half-dried blood and frozen flaps of skin gashed loose down its side. She had thought it was just phantom pain from her dream, but the snake must have gotten her this time. She swallows hard. This time she drives herself on.

An explosion. She is slammed to the ground. Her wind is knocked loose and her eardrums beat with pain. Wheezing for air, she looks up. The dome cracks further. As do the marble and crystal towers and buildings around her. Most of the people have been thrown down too. But there is one boy, eagerly, stupidly, standing. With a strange grin under his prominent nose and bronze curls, he snaps away on his holo-camera. She follows his gaze. There! The other way! Her home, her tower! Or what’s left of it. Stiff, sore, she wrenches herself up and heads to its entry tube.

Barely audible…

"What the hell?!"

"Found bullets and traces of a bomb…"

"Survivors?"

"A few."

Voices race through the smoke…

"Where did they come from?!"

"Below."

"Below? Below!"

"The Lows?! I heard this kinda thing had been happening in some Middlelevels but this High? What…"

Amidst shouts and wails…

"But what happened to the security codes?"

"We may never know…"

"Random guerrilla attack?"

"Maybe not so random. After all the victims were mostly…"

"We’d better inform the Council, Chairman Onar…"

"We’ll get ’em for this! Make ’em pay!"

Arayna finally reaches the shouting, scrambling officers. She drags herself, over the injured, down the charred wreckage of her own hallway, past the purple uniforms of the Highlevel Officers, past and beyond- to the hole that was once her door. Breathing hard, she pushes between legs. For one horrible moment, she sees…

Then an officer shoves her aside as he snaps a disk of crime scene photos. He leaves one copy in the camera and slides another surreptitiously into his pocket.

She runs. She runs as fast, as hard as she can. To the place where I wake up! The place where this day never happened! There has to be that place! Flashes of the rambling ruins of her home streak through her head. The covered bodies on the floor, the desiccated inner-circle garden (was her lizard still alive?), and something else, something as wrong with the images as they were themselves. But she couldn’t quite catch it and couldn’t care now about anything but running as far and as fast as she could.

Suddenly a heli-lift rises near her, its four black wings whipping the wind around her, razoring it through her wounds and dark, matted hair. She only briefly sees a symbol on its side and two silhouetted figures in its transbubble before being blown back to find one foot in mid-air and herself teetering over a chasm blasted through from below. Far below. She looks down, level below level, dome below dome, each upon the other, stacked, blown up from somewhere beyond the farthest down her eyes could see. The depths make her head spin. Nauseous, queasy, blackness swarms. She slips…

At the last second large course hands catch her and toss her roughly in the back of an LMT. In the dark, dank metal hold of the transport van a dozen other kids just like her, injured, orphaned, yes orphaned, surround her, screaming. She wants to join them but can’t. Instead she looks through the slits at the crowd outside as bits of the structurally-damaged towers, dome, and level beyond continue to tear off and fall apart like crumbs off old bread.

But as they move back through the square, the people are changing. Their panic is lifting, transforming. Their faces hardening. Fear becomes anger.

With an expression matching theirs she looks up to the driver, his purple uniform, weathered face, and newly scar-filled eye. But a man, an adult.

"What happens to us now?!" Arayna wails.

His one good eye looks sadly back at her. And with icy terror she realizes… he doesn’t know.

CHECK IN NEXT FRIDAY FOR EPISODE 2: THE DIN OF INIQUITY