The breeze blew from the North, through the bellows of the Red Desert and over the city of Atunda, dusting the dawn in an unnatural copper glow. Had Declan been looking up, he might've bathed in the impression of sunlight and compared it with memories of the day—something he hadn't seen in almost two years. Instead, he walked to his bus stop with his head down, threadbare canvas shoes crunching gravel as he passed between the gravestones of Memorium Cemetery.

Something was about to happen. He could feel it the air, the way it seemed to crackle with static and hum with the vibrations of change. It was something he'd always been able to sense, ever since he was a child. Tommy called it his 'dung beetle' talent—to always know when the sky was about to dump another load of shit on him.

And sure enough, halfway to his stop, he heard a strange noise—something between a grunt and a cough—and looked up. On the far side of the cemetery, just past the cold marble pillars of the memorial, a shadow moved along the corrugated iron fence and disappeared behind a tapered headstone. He squinted. Was it a bot? Did they know what he and Tommy were planning? Were they tracking his movements? Or were his dung senses distracted by the stench of the dilapidated hospital he'd just left?

A low moan rose from the same spot, easing his paranoia. Bots didn't make human sounds; they moved silently on wings you'd be lucky to hear if you were a dog. No. There was a person hiding behind that gravestone.

"Hello?" he said, drawing closer, curiosity killing his good sense. What kind of morbid individual—besides himself—would be passing through the cemetery so close to changeover? "Who's there?"

In the silence beyond his words, he could just make out the zap, zap, zap of blowflies barrelling into the SolStore street lamps overhead. As his apprehension rose, so did the hairs on his arms and by the time he rounded the headstone, his nerves were strung as tight as his muscles.

He didn't expect the woman to be crouched on the ground, her legs pressed against her chest, hands clasped around her middle. She wore plain clothes—jeans and a t-shirt too tight for an Atunda summer—and when Dec looked closely, he noticed a blossom of blood slowly seeping from her sternum and out between her fingers.

He leaned down to touch her shoulder, an exclamation of concern on his tongue, when her head snapped up and he stumbled back, the exclamation turning to a low defensive grunt. She was one of them—a Northerner. He should've known from the sheen of her raven hair and the stain of her skin which looked as though it'd been dipped in tea. She was just as he'd seen them on the news projections—irises as dark as her pupils, lips full, permanently protruding in a pout. He didn't, however, expect her to be so small, so delicately framed, with features so well-balanced on the parchment expanse of her moon-shaped face.

Her body went rigid and the whites of her eyes flashed in stark contrast to the darkness and shadows around them. Dec knew what she saw. Where he'd once been handsome in his angles and contrasts, he was now angry and pinched. His skin, like all Nocturnals, had become waxy and pallid, showcasing the extent of his sun depravation. His dark hair seemed to be getting darker all the time, as were the shadows under his eyes, giving him the hollow look of someone whose gaze was falling further and further into his head. Nobody would guess he was only twenty. The night had aged him. The horrors he'd seen had added years to his face.

Let her be scared, he thought. It was a small victory for what her people had done to his.

"Fancy seeing a Northerner out after dark," he heard himself say, though his voice sounded far away and deeper than usual.

The woman drew back against the gravestone and whispered, "You can see me?"

It was Dec's turn to draw back in surprise. He didn't know they could speak his language. And to speak it so well, without even a trace of an accent was enough to make him lose his train of thought. "Of course I can see you," he said. "I'm not blind."

But it was as though the Northerner hadn't heard. In fact she was no longer looking at him, but down at her hands which were covered in her own blood. "Something's wrong." Her voice trailed away. "It's impossible. Unless—" Her head snapped up, and her eyes went wide. "Unless you're like me. Unless you're...one of us."

"Excuse me?" Dec said, drawing his words out long and condescending. Like her? That was the last thing he was.

The woman shook her head and her eyes darted over his shoulder. "You must go. Before they come."

"Go?" he repeated, eyebrows rising. They? He shook his palm pod to life and pressed it down against the heat of his skin to clarify the screen—Northerner technology was one of the only perks of their re-settlement. He stared down at the face. 6.32 am. It was still Nocturnal time—his time. She was a Daylighter, as nearly all Northerners were. She was the one breaking the law. "You should be the one leaving. I could have you arrested." Even as he said the words, he knew the threat fell short. The police, like the government and the naval forces were nothing but Northern drones—doing mindlessly what they were told by the powerful elite. There was always the chance they'd take her word over his. Still, the threat lingered in the air between them.

Quick as a viper, the woman reached up and smacked his wrist, disengaging the palm pod. "Leave," she said, dark eyes flicking left and right. "Now." She slapped his wrist again, leaving a smear of blood on his pale skin.

Dec blinked down at his arm, mind reeling. She'd touched him. No, slapped him and left her filthy Northerner blood on his skin. Who knew what diseases she had? It was said their subvessels bred bacterias, of which only they were immune. It was thought that because of those bacterias, Southerners like his mum were falling ill to a mysterious disease that affected their minds, made them go slowly insane. The 'desert sickness' they called it. A sickness that swelled the throat and eyes, dried them up until they cracked and bled. Some, like his mum, experienced mirage-like visions, the kind experienced by severe dehydration. And although scientists had disproved any link of the disease to the Northern invasion and said it wasn't contagious, the fear of contamination was rife.

His hands shook with anger and the smear of blood flickered in the dim light. If he were more like his best friend Tommy, he might be tempted to kill her right there, to push over the gravestone and let the weight of it do the rest. Tommy would probably think it ironic, to kill one of them in the place where so many of his people had died—on the very soil that the March Massacre had taken place only three years ago. She was already bleeding. It would look like an accident.

He shook his head, severing the thought at its root. He wasn't Tommy. He'd once held a dying man in his arms and that was enough for him. But he wasn't a saint either. A saint would've tried to help, would've taken her across the road, back to the hospital from where he'd come.

He decided to do neither.

Wiping his arm on the hem of his black t-shirt, he slowly retreated back to the bus stop, ignoring another raspy moan from the woman by forcing himself to remember the rumble of tanks, the unison tramping of soldiers boots, punctuated by ear-ripping screams. In the film reel of his mind, he watched it happen again, saw it play out from the eleventh storey of their inner city apartment across the street—the place he used to call home.

He remembered pressing his head against the glass, ears pounding with the thrum of his own heart, his breathy condensation steaming the window. He'd watched as they'd surrounded the protesters and flattened them like stalks of wheat in a field ready for reaping. Like a pig in a butcher shop, shot before blinking, he couldn't look away. The chaos that followed, the faces of the Southerners as they tried to run for shelter in the surrounding buildings, barely human, hundreds of petrified eyes peeking out from faces caked with blood, sweat and dust. It was enough to exhaust any trace of empathy he might've had for the one, injured Northerner behind him.

Just as he reached the terminal, his bus rounded the corner and rolled silently down the hill, electric engine whirring. He spared one last look at the far side of the cemetery to find the woman gone, only a slight smear of blood where her hand had gripped the top of the gravestone for balance.

Her strange words flitted back into his mind. What was it she'd said? Something about how he shouldn't have been able to see her?

The fine hairs on his arms rose at the thought. The woman had clearly lost her sense. Probably from the loss of blood.

As he stepped onto the bus, he dismissed the woman, her words and the sheen of her raven hair, and concentrated on keeping his head turned away from the surveillance camera perched atop the concrete terminal, which swivelled to scan the contours of his face as he passed. Facial recognition technology in areas of high people traffic wasn't unusual. It was the Atunda council's way of keeping track of who was out and about when they shouldn't be and who was congregating under suspicious circumstances. But he didn't remember there being a camera on this particular stop the last time he caught the bus. This one must be new.

The hairs of apprehension rose on his arms again and he boarded quickly, keeping his head bowed. Since the bus was empty, he made his way to the back, shook his palm pod to life and tapped the screen twice to bring up his sister, Mel's, phone number. He hit connect. She picked up on the first ring.

"You almost home?" Her tone was abrupt, but it did nothing to hide a strain of worry.

"On the bus now."

"How was mum?"

"They wanted to keep her in observation. But she's doing better." It was a blatant lie. Adele had been worse than usual. She'd had another attack and the nurses had needed him to hold her down while they strapped her to the bed and injected her with sedatives. But Mel didn't have to know that. She worried enough as it was.

Mel was silent for a moment, before she said, "You know it's almost changeover."

Dec checked his palm pod again. 6.39 am blinked back at him. He was cutting it fine. In just over ten minutes it would be daylight again and the Northerners would be coming out of their houses. He glanced at the bus driver, then back at the street, which was relatively clear. So long as nothing broke down, he'd be home before 7 am ... just. "I'll see you soon." He hung up before she could give him the lecture he knew was coming.

Another call lit up his palm pod. It was Tommy, probably calling about tomorrow. Again, he glanced at the driver before answering. "Can't talk. On the bus," he muttered.

Tommy spoke quickly, in that mumbled way of his that sounded like he had a permanent fag between his lips. "Open the window."

Dec slid the glass pane next to him ajar and blinked as the wind buffeted his face. "What is it?"

"I've got everything we need. You still in?"

Dec took a deep breath and pushed down the compounding sense of paranoia he'd been feeling all week and said, "Course."

"Tomorrow. First thing. Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"And Dec—"

Just then, the bus driver glanced in his rearview mirror and Dec quickly hung up. He tapped his ear twice to engage his earpod and sunk low in his seat, letting the brain numbing thud, thud, thud, of the music take over. Leaning his head back, he watched the concrete cityscape roll away and fade into a halo of light.

The bus wound around tower cranes, which swung like giant diplodocuses, grazing on what used to be the lush parklands to make way for shiny skyscrapers. Through the tunnels and onto the freeway, the bus whinnied up the steep hill towards Blackforest Range at a frustrating crawl, passing crooked neighbourhoods, winding streets, and boxy apartments stacked atop one another like wobbly houses of cards.

It was hard to believe that only three years ago, Atunda had been a small city at the base of the Southern Isles—known for its sleepy seaside towns, farmland and mining. Three years ago, that had all changed when the Northern Isles announced its plan to 're-settle' 62 million of its people in the South. It wasn't a question or a choice. It was an ultimatum—agree with resettlement or face a bloody, full-scale invasion.

And just like that, the government of the Southern Isles folded—agreed to the resettlement as though it was a simple bank transaction. The people of the South, however, were outraged and took to the streets in millions. In Atunda alone, 350 thousand people, three quarters of the city's population, stormed Parliament Square in a roar of stones and fire. They barged through the wrought iron gates, trampled the perfect grass and manicured box hedges and shot the city's minister in the head with a gun stolen from his own weapons cabinet. At least that's how the story went.

But nobody expected what would happen next. The military crack down was so fierce, it left even the most fanatic rebels in a daze. The March Massacres, as they became known, were a violation of human rights like nothing the Isles had ever seen. The Southern government's message was loud and clear—do not fight the re-settlement. Do not raise a hand against your Northern neighbours or else ...

It was the 'or else' that kept the Southerners down. In Atunda, the memorium was erected in memory of the thousands that had died on that day and had become a stark reminder of what would happen if they dared to rise up in protest again. For those who didn't care for self-preservation, it was the fear that the military could get hold of their families and take down those they loved that kept them silent.

And so the Northerners came in a flood of fancy sub vessels, their numbers inundating the city within weeks. Everything went into grid lock. Electricity failed spectacularly—in mass blackouts that lasted days. Everywhere the roads bottlenecked, tents were erected on the streets, crammed with so many sleeping bodies that one Northerner became the next, their skinny arms propped against skinny legs. Atunda was rife with chaos and confusion.

It took one month for the Southern government to devise a solution to the sudden influx of people. 'The Solution', as it was ironically named, was a system by which they would run the country in two groups—Daylighters who would live and function during the day, and Nocturnals who would do so at night. Road traffic would be dispersed evenly, businesses would run twenty-four hours a day, and all resources would be used to their fullest potential. That was the theory anyway.

And so it was. Northerners and anyone who held jobs in high office became Daylighters, and Southerners, Nocturnals. The changes were implemented so quickly, and with such iron-fisted cruelty, that anyone who dared raise their voice against the injustice, got their lungs shot out from under them.

In a year, Dec's life was changed forever. And he, like every other Nocturnal, was angry beyond their years. But he, like many others, had been gentled by fear. Fear that was wearing thin and showing holes with every hour he was forced to spend in darkness.

As the bus reached the top of the hill, the sun cracked the horizon, sending a plume of blush pink light into the dusty overcast sky.

6.57 am.

Dec stepped onto his street—a laneway lined with roller door garages on either side, above which, apartments had been tacked on, built so high that the air in the lane had become stagnant, festering with the smell of piss and faeces from the stray dogs that now roamed the outer suburbs in search of food scraps. He bent down to unlock the roller shutter door of his home—a converted carport that sweltered in the summer and turned his sister's lips blue in the winter. He stepped inside.

6.58 am.

He blinked into darkness, eyes adjusting to the single candle flickering in the corner, behind the dressing screen of his sister's room and the muted news projections on the unpainted plasterboard of the living area. There was the off-kilter thug, thug, thug of the ceiling fan overhead and a shamble of dirty laundry spilling out of a plastic basket on the dining table in the middle of the room. The dishes, piled high in the sink, wafted the rancid smell of off milk.

"What took you so fucking long?" Mel poked her head around her bedroom screen, her glare an anomaly against her waif figure, so like their mum's, and her fine filagree of skin so white, he could see her veins.

Dec went to the fridge and cracked open a can of beer, making a show of gulping it down so he wouldn't have to answer.

7 am.

The changeover alarms blared from the megaphones on the street corner, sending the neighbourhood strays into a howling cacophony. He pulled the wooden soundboards over the cracks around the edges of the roller door to block out the majority of the racket and flopped onto his futon, not even bothering to change his clothes. His claustrophobia bore down in the darkness, closing the walls like the casing of a coffin in a sunken grave. Refusing to turn on the SolStore lights for fear of using up their sun reserves three days short of the week's end, he fought the grave with sheer willpower, imagining great pillars of steel holding the roof up. He sighed as the pillars held true, the walls ceased caving in and he could once again focus on what needed to be done.

At the fall of the next sun set, he and Tommy would be out there with the strays, prowling the streets, doing what they shouldn't. Now, he would try to get some sleep.