Sebastian hadn't opened his eyes yet, but even if he hadn't known where the Gate led, he'd have known exactly where he was. The air stuck to his skin like flypaper, a cloying humidity that was instantly and unpleasantly recognisable. As he took his first gulp of the feted air, his lungs burnt and his eyes watered. He opened his eyes – his tears felt like grit as they ran down his face and carved a path through the soot that had accumulated in the short time since his arrival. Sebastian stood ankle-deep in an unidentifiable collection of filth and debris that covered every square inch of the small alleyway, its brick walls chipped and coated in slime and the splashback of overflowing dumpsters. Rats danced and cavorted in amongst the swirling pools of filth and treated the invading stranger with little to no regard.

  The alley stood in complete darkness, bar the scattered rays of light that filtered down through the metal canopy of walkways and fire escapes above him, and the partially opened gate. He waded towards the gate. His head and shoulders grew wet from what he initially assumed to be rain water that had snaked its way through the metal foliage above; it wasn't until he reached the gate that he realised it wasn't actually raining. He ran a hand through his hair and took a smell of his fingers, then recoiled and wiped his hand on his trousers. The rotting filth he waded through had condensed and coated the entire alleyway, precipitating down once it had reached the cold steel of the walkways. He couldn't have smelled any worse if he'd swam in it, which technically speaking, he had.

  The giant conga line of cars toing and froing twisted and snaked off into the distance on either side of him like a tinplated ouroboros. The snake spat its customary clouds of dense black smog out into the atmosphere – some of which so dense that it immediately fell to the ground or atop the cars behind them. He took a mask from his pocket and unfolded it; the filter was ashen and barely much use, but he expected he'd get another ten or twenty minutes out of it before his lungs started to hate him. He needed to get back to the ever-dark.

  He was the most wanted criminal on this side of the exclusion zone, so sooner or later someone was going to recognise him, and he didn't have the luxury of being able to hop into a car and just drive there – he had neither the money nor the paperwork for that. Sebastian didn't really have the paperwork for anything, which made simply being out on the street something immensely dangerous. His was a life lived in fear of a mandatory ID check, which would have then become a mandatory execution and a mandatory cheap funeral, and though he’d done his best to memorise checkpoints and patrol zones, they always moved every couple of weeks. The girls came through around here, and he knew they weren't in Trinity Park. He had no way of knowing if the state police picked them up or if they'd just wandered into the bad part of town. Bad was relative – all parts of town were bad, it's just that some were slightly worse. Sebastian put his head down and his hands in his pockets, and started walking towards the centre of town.

  He didn't know what time it was; the concept of day and night had died a long time ago, not just in London, but everywhere the burnt-orange touched. Shops were always beckoning you to come inside and spend the money you probably didn't have, there was always a traffic jam that spanned the horizon, always a job to be done. You slept when you could, worked when you were told, and trusted the state broadcast system to tell you when sunrise and sunset were. Sebastian knew what time it was when he left, but time didn't correlate exactly, and it was possible to go from night to day and back again in a single round-trip.

  The streets were packed with like-minded folks, each with their head tilted towards the pavement and their hands in their pockets. They had places they had to be, but never any places they wanted to be, so they walked collectively in a slow dirge, never really caring how long it took them. In contrast to that, Sebastian walked at a brisk pace and weaved between the maudlin crowd of commuters. He stood out like a sore thumb.

  People muttered, to themselves, really, as he passed – no-one in the swirling throng of humanity really cared to speak to one another. “Look at him. Thinks he's important.” “Got somewhere to go, nice for some.” It wasn't disdain for him as such, more for his appearance of having a purpose, and he did have a purpose; the first step of which being to find a payphone that A) hadn't been used as toilet slash bedroom slash bedroom with an en suite toilet and B) that actually worked. This in itself proved to be a challenge. Even a hovel proved too expensive in some areas for most people and, with land being at a premium, that sometimes meant there were more homeless than there weren't. It wasn't uncommon to see two or three people try to cram themselves into a phone booth because it was the only available roof for miles. To make room for that, of course, the actual phone was stripped and discarded or sold for scrap.

  Sebastian walked for more miles than he'd have cared for and inspected every phone booth he came to for a working receiver. His mask had become noticeably heavier as the filter became more and more clogged with the thick layer or carbon that passed for breathable air. He unclasped it, removed the filter and quickly discarded it atop one of the many man-sized piles of waste that had been swept to the side of the pavement. The mask was of little physical use without a replacement filter, but it provided the protection he needed the most – not being recognised. He was getting closer to the furthest edges of the ever-dark, but trying to navigate it on foot wasn't just bordering on suicide, it was crossing the border and putting up a flag.

  He needed a vehicle, but he couldn't quite bring himself to steal one. People had little to begin with, and taking a vehicle was a death sentence – both for him and the person he took it from. A taxi was still his best bet, and he’d almost run out of phone booths. The concrete boa loomed high in the distance, so large and tall that it blotted out the sun and challenged flight paths to a fight. There was a cruelty to it, yet he always saw the small amount of kindness it brought; the ever-dark was the only place where night truly existed any more, and while there was far too much of it, it was better than the alternative. Going to sleep in the light and waking up in it did unhealthy things to a person – tiredness, irritability, a permanent mind fog. Days ran into days and hours lost any sense of meaning – and with it came an almost suicidal lack of purpose. People that lived in the ever-dark but worked outside of it tended to be some of the more sane and adjusted people in the metropolis, and a sane and adjusted person would move away from the ever-dark as soon as humanly possible, which brought about the aforementioned decrease in mental function and them moving back. It was a vicious, very stupid circle.

  Sebastian approached the last row of phone booths on the street; the first two had been fitted with privacy shutters and a padlock. Must be the upmarket area, he thought. The last one, however, stood unused. The glass was smashed and the door was missing, and the insides, as was to sadly be expected of anything in the area large enough to be used as a toilet, had been used as a toilet. The coin box door had been forced open and peeled back at the corner, a considerable amount of blood stained the door and the parts of the floor that weren't already stained with something else. The phone itself appeared to be in a state of repair just the right side of not broken, though it was filthy and if you used it, you'd probably die twenty years later from the medical complications.

  Along the back wall of the booth, pinned around the telephone, were various business cards and advertisements. Most of which promised good times at low rates, but there were some that promised mediocre times at high rates with a guarantee of not being mugged for your organs afterwards. He went through the tightly packed collection of cards and made sure to drop the ones that he thought deserved it into the waste below. All that was left when he finished were a couple of classifieds and a card for a taxi company.

  Sebastian braced himself against the side of the booth and leant across to grab the receiver – he smelled bad enough and he wasn't sure the sludge wouldn't just soak through his boots. The coins clanked into the box and immediately fell out of a hole he hadn't seen and into the sadly identifiable soup as he dialled the number. He was greeted by a badly-recorded voice that he swore belonged to some celebrity he couldn't quite remember, but when he did eventually get around to remembering them, he promised himself that he was going to hate them.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  “If you are phoning to complain about a fatal accident, please press 1. If you are phoning to complain about an unfair incident of organ harvesting, please press 2. If you would like to book a taxi- Why would they want a bloody taxi after the first two? Fine. What? No, just edit it out. If you would like to book a taxi, please press 3.”

  Incredicabs was one of the few taxi firms left in the city, partly due to the vast majority of fatal accidents involving their business rivals. Or their wives, kids or distant relatives that they were quite fond of even if they hadn’t seen them for a long time. And if a business wasn't organ harvesting anyone foolish enough to fall asleep on the back seat, then they just weren't trying hard enough to cover their overheads. He pressed 3 and waited for the chime before he started to speak. “I need a taxi from- Where am I?” He scanned the crowded street for a landmark, anything to differentiate this particular slum from the dozens of near identical ones that surrounded it. His eyes settled on a small, brightly lit building across the road from him. “Across from the Recruitment Centre.”

  The Recruitment Centre worked like this: if you got too close to it, someone would billy-club you across the side of the head and recruit you. It was situated between quite possibly the only homeless shelter to ever exist and a bakery offering free strudel. The homeless shelter had never been used and the strudel tasted of deception and not apple. Every few months, they would pack up shop and move to another part of the city, feeding on the gullible and desperate. “Drummond,” he lied. “Taxi for one.” Almost as soon as he hung up the receiver, though he had no idea why he went to that effort, a small, battle-scarred black cab pulled around the corner. One headlamp, though it mostly wasn't a concern, was missing; a piece of sheet metal had been welded over it like an eyepatch that both served to make it look more intimidating and very cool, frankly. Incredicabs was emblazoned proudly across the side doors, and it wore a sheet of overlapping number plates across the bonnet that presumably belonged to rivals who’d had tragic accidents-and-you-can't prove-otherwise.

  The cab pulled up to the curb and splashed a consolidation of rain water and human waste over the unfortunates that huddled along the periphery of the road. They leapt back in shock, some startled awake, and spat a collection of curses and invectives – many of which had been invented for the occasion – at the driver as they skulked off. The driver leant across the front passenger seat and wound the window down as Sebastian approached.

  “Dummoned?” he asked.

  “Drummond.”

  “That's what I said, Dummoned. You him on not?”

  Considering the driver was probably a man with more confirmed kills than confirmed brain cells, Sebastian nodded and hopped into the back seat. The door, along with the rest of the interior, had been lovingly reinforced with metal plating and roll bars; the plating on the interior alone was worth more than most people make in a year. The partition between the driver was, he noted, solid steel, with a small hatch cut in it to slot money through.

  “Nice cab. Do a lot of dark runs?”

  “What gave it away, mate? You going under, then? It'll be extra.”

  “I have extra,” Sebastian replied confidently. “Blackout.”

  Rather than risk the oncoming traffic to turn around, the driver pulled onto the pavement and sent the vagrants he’d just evicted stumbling and scuttling away as he uprooted the last working phone booth for three miles. “It'll be a long trip, you might-”

  “-Want to have a nap?”

  “Never mind, then.”

  Sebastian checked his pockets and flipped through his credit strips. “Listen, in a bit of a hurry. How much to turn the light on?”

  “More than you've got, mate.”

  “Try me.”

  “A grand.”

  Sebastian skimmed a small red card through the slot in the partition and waited for the reaction, which came in the form of the driver almost choking on his tongue and crashing the cab. “Very sorry, your majesty,” he managed to splutter in a mostly non-sarcastic way, and put his foot down. As they entered the ever-dark, he flipped his remaining headlight to high-beam – he was the first person in a very long time to not only gaze upon the street signs but actively use them to find his destination. Somewhere a city planner rolled over in his grave and cracked a contented smile.

  The road surface had deteriorated into a pockmarked river of rubble and concrete, with potholes so large that the fall could kill a man or leave a car permanently stranded, which would also have the effect of killing a man. The streets swam with litter that had mostly rained from gaps in the boa and caught the wind. He knew what he would see, the corpses of rats and cars and people alike that had been claimed by the night, so he kept his head down and said a quiet prayer in the hope that the air filter wouldn’t break down. If the driver cared, he didn't let it show – he just drove into them or over them and nudged them aside, the only indicator of which being a slight bump or flash of sparks.

  They passed the occasional startled driver on their commute to work. Some paused their already sedate pace to adjust their eyes to the glaring brightness, others took no such precaution and put their foot down in the hope of shaving half-an-hour off their journey by availing themselves of the blinding light as best they could. The warm neon glow of Debbie's came to meet them long before the Blackout came into view. Debbie's was the closest thing to home that Sebastian had these days. No-one cared who he was, even if they did recognise him, which most didn't; all they cared about was him paying his way and causing no trouble, and he was adept at both.

  The cab pulled into the lot and Sebastian hopped from his seat and flicked another credit strip through the slot, this one a pale blue. “This cover it?”

  “Far too much, but I haven't got change. Sad, that.”

  “Yeah, a tragedy. Put your kids through college or something.” Sebastian slammed the cab door behind him, inclined his head towards the sign and let the light wash across his face.

  “Don't make me throw you out,” called the burly man from the shadow of the doorway, who immediately realised as soon as he said it that Sebastian was already out.

  “Just as well they hire you for your looks, eh, Keith?”

  “I know what I meant, smart arse.”

  “That makes one of us. Family keeping all right?”

  “Wife threatened to leave me again, really got my hopes up.”

  “Well, keep at it, mate, it'll happen eventually.” Sebastian put his hand in his pocket and routed around for the remainder of his change. “There you go, mate, buy yourself a personality. I'll see you later, yeah. And for the record, the rest of me is quite smart as well.” He disappeared into the comparative darkness of the diner, hands in pockets, his childlike grin being the last thing to disappear out of sight.