"Do sey fit?"

Jackson scrunched his eyes up and rolled them around in their sockets. He could feel the pressure of the lenses against his eyeballs. Painful, but manageable. Satisfied, he nodded. "Good for now. How long are they powered for?"

The person in front of him, a middle-aged Dutch woman with greying hair, tapped a message into her organizer before replying. "As long as you liff," she said, "sey will transmit images to us. And for a liddle while after you die. Which"—she smiled—"we hope you do not."

"And my contract?"

She nodded. "De same as we agreed. If you come back from sis assignment, de worlt will see you as a hero."

"Since we agreed it, though, you've changed the terms." Jackson leant against the side of a mahogany table, watching her eyes drift in a half-wince to the expensive vase inches away from his elbow.

"Only a small amount. Some extra time. No more. You are alreaty receiving a generous bonus for sis. What extra coult you want?"

Without pause, he replied, "Final salary pension."

The woman barked out a short laugh before noticing his straight face and adopting a more calm expression. "Oh. You are being serious." She leant back in her chair and regarded him for a few seconds. "Sere is no time to negotiate anymore. De situation has reached crisis point. But we will consiter it."

Jackson nodded. He hadn't expected to get it, but it was worth asking. He wouldn't have said no to the job in any case—he had to admit he was curious.

"One more sing," she said, throwing him a pack of cigarettes: Ecrivain's Specials, or so the label said. "Light one of dese up and we will attempt to sent a team in for extraction."

Jackson got up and made his way to the door, resisting the urge to rub his eyes.

"Goot luck."

* * *

The stench of the city was the only thing he noticed in the hour it took him to walk from the drop site. It felt like no time at all since the "clique" city had seceded from continental governance, even if its foundation felt like ancient history. With the state of the world at the time, the government had been grateful for anyone forming a semblance of order out of chaos. Now, though, it recognized its mistakes. That's why they'd called up Jackson.

He was coming up to the walls now. They looked hastily constructed, with flimsy metal meshes layered on top of each other and joined together with what looked like industrial cable ties. As much as it looked weak, the lurking gun emplacements far above him served as the city's dissuasion.

The "gates," more like standard double doors, grew closer. Jackson slipped his new phone out of his pocket and opened the Wattpad app. It took a while to load up, but who knew what the thing had been through since the observers picked it up?

Glancing from left to right, he wondered if the observers were watching him now, or if they'd packed up since he was streaming a live feed back to base.

"You comin' in or what?" a voice called from behind the doors.

Jackson looked back ahead of him, where a peephole had appeared in the material of the door. He couldn't say what material—it was caked in dirt. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I'm coming in."

"Shows us yer ID, then." Whoever it was tapped at the door in annoyance.

Not needing to be told twice, Jackson held his phone up to the peephole. A slitted, feline eye darted over the screen to his face, but he didn't have time to think about it before a hand reached through. It scanned the phone with a device and pulled back. A second later, the door swung open.

He hesitated for a split second before walking through. A short, slim figure confronted him.

"You been gone fer a while," she growled.

And yes, Jackson realized, it was a definite—if unconvincing—growl. The girl couldn't have been more than fourteen years old, but she had some strange fashion sense. She wore fake whiskers, mangy cat ears and a tail which barely had any fur left on it. He tried not to stare. He tried not to consider how the tail was attached. Instead, he focused on her name badge. Safe Space Security – Officer Starlet Moon.

Safe Space? Was that seriously their name for the city?

"@Doomerdom?" Officer Moon growled at him again.

Jackson's head jerked back to her face as he recognized his stolen name. "Sorry. I had a nasty virus for a while. Nearly died. Didn't want to bring it back."

"Well that's nice considerate of you, but remember ye've used up five years' outer-time on this excursion. Nothin' I can do to change that."

Jackson let his shoulders droop a little, but nodded. "I understand."

"On yer way now."

Nodding again, he set off at a brisk walk, not wanting to attract attention but eager to leave the freaky cat-girl behind.

In any case, he had a contact to meet.

* * *

Jackson navigated the run-down streets, switching from his map of the city to a book on the app whenever someone passed by. Even from the little he allowed his eyes to see, he hesitated to call it a book. Whoever wrote it could barely string a word together, let alone a sentence. Picking at random hadn't been his best bet.

The closer he got to the central areas—and the person he was supposed to meet—the more he was able to pick up individual smells. The ashen scent of smoke danced in his nostrils, weighted down by a heavy, cloying smell. It was a smell he recognized from the Burning Days.

Burning flesh.

He replaced his phone in his pocket, strode towards the source. If he was going to get data back to base, this seemed as good a place to start as any. Screw the contact. Once you smell that smell, there's no ignoring it.

Rushing now, he half-noticed throngs of people in the street. He weaved in between them, not paying attention to guise or physique. There was nothing untoward in his peripheral, but here and there he caught a glimpse of fur, the glint of a sharpened tooth.

With a last squeeze, he pushed his way into what seemed to be the central plaza. The crowds focused here and though it took him a while before he could get a clear view, he knew the fire stood at its centre, not least from the heat of it. He craned his neck to see and, sure enough, a massive pile of books stood burning in the middle of the square, haphazardly bundled around a central pole. Remembering the book he'd read earlier, he couldn't help noting that this was probably something they couldn't afford to burn.

Near the top of the fire, a group of people clustered around a gangplank on a balcony. Tattered banners hung from its railings. Screaming from its multi-coloured face was painted every liberal symbol known to man, all arranged around the symbol for peace. This was odd, he thought, when you considered the charred corpses smouldering below the gangplank. They didn't look too peaceful to him.

As he watched, a bound and blindfolded prisoner was pushed off the edge. The cheer from the crowd just about drowned out her screams.

"He looks so hot when he does that," said a girl beside him.

He realized she was talking about one of the figures on the balcony. "He is standing next to a big-ass fire," he said.

She giggled and Jackson made a mental note that perhaps cat-lady had been more sane.

"You're funny." She swatted a playful hand at his arm. "But you know what I mean. He's so..."—she sighed—"...so dreamy."

"Which one?"

"Why, @Zayxii, of course!" and she said the name with a little squeal that made Jackson feel the urge to vomit.

Before he could wonder who this "@Zayxii" was, or why he in particular was the nominated vomit-comet, he became aware of a man grumbling nearby.

"All these goddamned prettyboys," he said, "writing shit and getting poured upon like a... like a damned Venus." He spat at the floor, eyes dancing, betraying a mind at the end of its tether.

The girl's eyes widened. She rounded on him and grabbed him by the collar, which was no mean feat considering she was half his size. "He does not. Write. Shit," she hissed. Her voice was rather less squeaky now.

"Not in your eyes," the man said. He must have been in his late thirties, but his tangled grey hair and pitted features made him look at least a decade older. "But writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. Not like you, your friends, your boy-thing crushes. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over." He raised protective hands around his face as some of her friends stalked closer. "Getting happy, okay? It's about getting happy."

One of the girls (if the term could be used lightly) stuck her face close to the man's and said, through gritted teeth, "Oh yeah? Then what do you write, huh?"

The man assumed a proud air and stuck his nose up high. "I write The Dark Revival. Wrote ten thousand words of it this morning, in fact."

"Huh. Nice." She looked as if she were considering it for a while before snatching the collar off her friend. "Never heard of it!" she said, and threw him in the fire.

The man tried to escape, but furred officers pushed him back in with sticks.

Jackson jerked forwards to save him, but stopped just in time. If he tried anything, he'd end up in the fire, too. The Dark Revival, though... He'd have to find a new contact. That was his man.

As the fire caught on the man's clothes and his features started to waver in the heat, he called out to no one in particular, maddened by the flames, "Tomorrow may be hell"—he screamed—"but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days... nothing else matters!"

And then, nothing else did matter. Not to him.

Jackson stared at the flames for a while. Some morbid fascination compelled him to watch as the skin sloughed off flesh and fat oozed out like sap from a log. But then he felt eyes on him. He realized the girls were studying him as he studied the burning. He realized he was in trouble then, but decided to play it cool.

That was his mistake.

"You're not from around here, are you?"

He couldn't see who the voice belonged to, so he replied into the fire-lit faces of the immediate crowd: "I've been here since the beginning. Says so on my profile."

"Yeah, well her profile says she's @Zayxii's bitch," said a face.

"Hey!" Another face pouted.

The first grinned a sickening grin. "So excuse us if we don't believe you. Sexy bod like yours, we'd recognize you."

"We'd recognize," the other agreed.

"Come on," Jackson said. "There are thousands of people in this city. I don't get out much."

"Everyone gets out," the first said.

"Everyone," said the second.

"I've been ill!" But he knew his luck had run out. He cast about in a frantic search for an escape route through the crowd, but each way was blocked. Each way, the faces leered. Firelight flattened their features into identical masks, worn to hide identical minds.

Hiveminds, he thought as the crowd closed in around him.

The girl who'd spoken to him first smiled at him as he was grabbed by the arms. "You should be glad," she said. "You get to see @Zayxii!" And she did a little clapping dance.

Jackson wondered if now was the time to throw up.

* * *

The people who took him away from the fire were officers, he found out. He found out because the damned freaks wouldn't stop talking as they dragged him along. Maybe their penchant for conversation was the reason he wasn't roasting on the pile of books right now.

Why freaks? They seemed more sane than most of the people 'round here, but there was a hidden sense of madness to them that wasn't present in the others. They'd sharpened their canine teeth into fangs and lisped whenever they spoke because of it.

"I mutht thay. I wath ecthpecting thomething a little rougher 'round the edgeth coming to uth from outthide," said the one to his left, swishing a patchwork cape over his shoulder.

"It'th not like he'th the firth," said the woman on the right. "But we killed all the otherth they thent."

"They didn't thend otherth, Tharon. We told you thith. You killed a bunch of thivilianth looking for thelter."

"But Dwayne, they were from outthide..."

"...and perfectly willing to acthept the need for our thity and thafe thpathe."

"I'm willing, too," Jackson said. "I do live here."

"Thut up, thpy," said the man.

"Yeah, thilenthe, thneaker," said the woman.

Jackson did as he was told and shut up.

* * *

He would have been glad to say that the rest of the journey passed in silence, but such mercies were not afforded him. After many soul-dulling minutes listening to the bickering of his captors, Jackson found himself being taken through the doors of a large, sandstone building. Its sides reached up, far past the layer of smoke which hung above them.

"This where @Zayxii is?" he asked.

"Yeth, moron," came the woman's reply.

"So, uh..." Jackson glanced up at an imposing staircase before him. The marble interior had to be the best-maintained architecture in the city. "How come you didn't juth—just throw me in the fire like the other guy?"

"We don't get visitorth," said the man. "Tho @Zacthii told uth to bring anyone in to a 'perthonal audienthe.'"

"I have girlth out there would kill for that," the woman said.

"You would kill for that, Tharon. I've theen you fawning over him. We all have."

They started up the stairs then, and Jackson managed to zone out most of their conversation. He wanted to know what @Zayxii's role in all this was, but to ask that would be to well and truly blow his cover. He may not have much left, but he ought to preserve what he had.

As they continued onward, he wondered if walking up this many stairs was meant to intimidate prisoners or just elevate @Zayxii above everyone else. From the rooms he passed, it looked like there was no one else in the building. Why else have offices so high, if not to give an illusion of power?

Some generic pop music wafted out of two grand double doors at the top of the last flight of steps. Padded with sumptuous red fabric and gold bolts, they almost made him forget that the rest of the city was a shithole.

"Here it ith," the man said, opening the door for him.

"He wantth to thpeak to you alone." The woman sniggered.

Jackson stepped inside, wincing as the music hit an irritating part of the chorus. The door closed soundlessly behind him.

"Yo, outsider."

Jackson suppressed the urge to roll his eyes at the figure at the other end of the room. A weedy individual, the bright plastic desk he sat behind seemed to dwarf him with its presence. A slapdash haircut flip-flopped its way over his childlike features.

The boy shifted, propping his feet up on the desk. "I know all my fans. You're not one of them. The tyrants sent you to assassinate"—he stumbled over the word—"me, didn't they?"

Taking a seat on some strange designer chair, Jackson regarded @Zayxii with ill-disguised disgust. "I'd say I expected someone more impressive, but I can't say I'm surprised. What have you done to this place?"

"Me? I keep them all together. I'm their god." @Zayxii grinned.

"You actually happy about that?" Jackson asked, although he didn't doubt he did for a second. "Or is the real reason you're here to escape the fire?"

"Nothing wrong with a nice bonfire. And hey, I got voted up here!"

"You? What, do you people actually have elections?"

"Yup. We vote for every office." @Zayxii rubbed his hands in apparent glee. "They just love me. I feel like some Jedi Master with an army of loving minions."

"That's..." Jackson sighed. "That's not how the Jedi work."

"The Jedi work however I want them to. They'll believe anything I say out there."

Jackson folded his arms over his chest. "You know, if I were a Sith, I'd use The Force to make a supernova out of that sun shining out your arse."

Unimpressed, @Zayxii shot a wry smile in his direction. "People tend to change their minds about me when they're dragged towards the Blaze of the Banned."

So the bonfire had a name. Charming. "Are you actually in charge here?"

@Zayxii nodded. "The old government did something we didn't like, so we got rid of them."

That explained a lot, Jackson thought. "Permanently?" he asked.

Tilting his head, @Zayxii said, "They used to be holed up in the same rooms I'm going to be keeping you in."

"Great, dead-people rooms. Do I get an ensuite?" he joked.

@Zayxii didn't look amused.

* * *

The room they threw him into wasn't as fancy as he'd pictured, although he really shouldn't be surprised. It was a squalid room filled with ironwork cages arranged in a grid. Most contained a solitary occupant, much as the cage he was in now.

Around him, the other prisoners stared with awe visible in their eyes. The girl in the cage next to him gripped the bars as she did so, tousled red hair matted against her cheek.

"You come from outside?" she finally whispered after the two officers had disappeared.

Jackson glanced over at her out of the corner of his eye as he picked at his chin. "Yup."

"What's it like?" she asked, and everyone seemed to press closer to hear his answer.

"Same as it always used to be, just more dead people. The government runs things and people aren't dicks about it as much as they used to be because they know that they're the ones keeping everyone alive. Things are just about returning to normal in terms of who does what. You guys seem to be going the other way—away from normal."

He looked over at them to gauge their reaction, but for all he knew it had flown over their heads.

"Who's there?" the girl asked. "I mean... our parents. Are they...?" She hesitated. "I ran away from home to come here. They told me it was utopia, that you could do whatever you want without criticism, that you could have fun..."

"Yeah, pro-tip: Never believe anyone when they tell you that," he said, but his face softened when he saw the expression on her face. "I'm sorry. I don't know about anyone's parents, but they're probably one of thousands of people worried about what's going on here. If no one cared, they wouldn't have sent me."

A boy who couldn't have been older than fifteen piped up from a couple of rows away. "Are you a secret agent?"

Jackson smiled. No, I'm just a civil servant in search of the holy grail of pension schemes, he thought. But he said, "Yes."

Then the boy nodded and took off his shoe. With exacted care, he peeled the sole off, revealing a smartphone concealed in the lining.

Angry mutters echoed around the room.

"They made me promise to only use it if an outsider came," the boy explained, not meeting anyone's eyes as he turned the device on.

The mutters subsided, for the most part.

"Thanks," Jackson said, feeling that it was somehow expected of him.

The boy tapped the screen and waited.

And waited.

A gradual awareness of failure spread across his features and he slumped against the back of the cage, shoulders drooping. His eyes flickered over to Jackson, burned a wordless apology into his mind, then closed.

After that, there was only silence.

* * *

At some point, an officer came in to turn the lights off. Then it was a slow fade into darkness for them, with the last dregs of sunlight filtering out through the high, narrow-slit windows hidden at the back of the room. With the darkness came fatigue, the first gnawings of hunger and the inevitability of sleep.

But not for long.

Jackson found himself awake again, groggy, his arm and neck sore from where they'd been pressed against the cage as he slept. He cast his eyes about through the black, but he couldn't see anything that might have woken him.

Something creaked, but it was a muffled sound like the movement of stiff fabric. The passage of air in the room changed, flowing around an unseen object. The door to Jackson's cage clicked open and then he was being half-dragged, half-led through the shadowed maze to place and persons unknown. The last thing he saw before leaving the room was the vaguest glint of moonlight reflecting off the staring eyes of the boy.

Wherever they were going, the path was uncomfortable. Narrow walls and a low ceiling accompanied him on his way out of prison. For an indeterminate amount of time they pressed down on him, unseen but tangible. Eventually, though, the tunnel became lighter and the cloying smell of cigarette smoke wound its way towards him.

Certain they were far enough away now, Jackson turned to his abductor-cum-saviour. Scratched and twisted glasses rested haphazardly on the bridge of a hollow, Asian face. Beneath loose and dirty clothes, there seemed to be no flesh to fill them out.

"Who are you?" Jackson asked in a whisper. He scratched his arm, which ached with blunt pain.

"Allen. Original Wattpad management," the man replied. "I'm taking you to the rest."

Jackson patted his pocket to make sure the Specials were still in there. "The way @Zayxii spoke about you suggested you all died after he imprisoned you."

"Don't know who that is." He kept his statements short as they hurried along. "Person who took charge over us made a big fuss about the fact we escaped. Dragged our name through the dirt—said we killed to escape."

"Did you?"

He shook his head. "He did, though. Claimed it was us. Any support we had then was gone."

They rounded a last corner and emerged into a dim-lit cave. Boxes of paperwork lined the walls, partially covering battered hard drives and CPUs. In the centre of the room, lit by a smoke-obscured hole in the ceiling, a man sat smoking behind a desk.

Without breaking his stride, Allen stepped up to the desk and knocked against its wooden surface. "Do you have to fill the room with that crap again, Dave?"

"Sorry." Dave stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray to the side of a typewriter and massaged his head, wincing. "It's been a bad writing day."

Shaking his head, Allen picked a sheaf of paper off the desk, sending a slinky clattering to the floor in the process. "How do you spend so long writing this stuff? Propaganda leaflets? What are you, a French student, 1800s?"

The man snatched his papers back and glowered at Allen. "You know they read them."

"Yeah, then they either get burned or the readers wind up in prison."

He shook his head. "Yeah. Whatever. Speaking of prison, though..."

Jackson grimaced and raised a hand. "Hi."

"Yeah, hi. Can you help?"

"I mean, I'm just here for the information and a pension, so..."

"What?"

"People are watching. It's up to them to help or not. All I can do is ask questions."

Dave took a sip of whiskey, all the while not taking his eyes off him. "There are people dying out there and you want to sit here and talk?"

"I don't see you doing anything useful." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Allen give a fair-enough nod. "That suggests there's nothing you can do you haven't tried. If that's the case, I can't add anything," Jackson said. "So, how'd you get yourselves into this mess?"

Dave scratched his eyebrow. "There was a Wattpad convention here, when they dropped the plague canisters. This place is far enough out that it didn't spread from the city. As long as we kept everyone here, we were fine. People were scared, at first, but they found strength in each other."

Jackson shrugged. "So you holed up—how long?"

"The plague motes themselves disintegrated into their base components after a week, but we had to wait months for the last of the infected to die."

"You didn't run out of food?"

"We nearly did. Bolstered our supplies with careful scouting runs, but we had to ration. Some people got angry about that, said it was their right to food. We don't know who did it, but they got thrown out to die. Never heard a peep again."

"If they didn't tolerate nonsense then, how the hell did it get to this state?"

Dave fiddled with a deck of cards in front of him and opened his mouth to reply, but Allen answered for him: "Back then, it was death enforcing order, but then we moved into the city and food was nearly unlimited, power was easy to get ahold of, you could just take anything you wanted. We set ourselves up as in charge—no one else was left. But after a few months they started demanding changes to ordinary laws."

"And you just let them?"

"You don't know what it was like." Dave shook his head. "With fewer people to challenge their ideas, they began to see... No, they already saw their view as the only view. But where before they just took to the web and cried out over it, they started harassing people in the streets. There was no one to stop them. It's not like we had a police force."

"We tried to calm them down," Allen said, "but then they started asking whose side we were on. We had to start imposing laws. To be honest, it was safer for people that way."

Jackson picked a comic book—Fray—off the chair so he could sit down. He examined the tattered cover before asking, "How so?"

"It was anarchy in the streets. Anyone who said something outside the new societal norm was..." Allen sighed. "At first, they weren't very good at hurting people, or very enthusiastic about it, but soon enough people started dying."

"Safer for us to lock them up than leave them on the streets," Dave said.

"We treated them well"—Allen stared through the floor, eyes focused on the past—"until they found out. Then there was a riot and, well, that's how we ended up here."

Dave relit his cigarette. "When the only people left in your society are immature or irresponsible, idealistic or overprotective... You either have to have the force to crack down or you have to do what they say, even if it means no forward progress. And the situation will never improve. Whenever someone grows sensible to the truth, they're eliminated. It's a no-win. That's why there's a city out there full of kids who don't know better. And now they're trapped in a cycle of violence perpetuated by the refusal of any challenge to their ideals."

"They need saving," Allen said, "but we've long since lost the 'how.'"

Dave frowned then, his cigarette held in a loose grip centimetres from his mouth. "What's that on your arm?"

Jackson looked down. Just beneath his skin, where the blunt pain lay, a red light blinked.

And above him, there came an ever-louder whistle.

Dave's face had become palest white. "They tracked you," he said.

Allen raised his eyes to his ceiling and took a step back. There was the briefest roar, then the world fell away.

* * *

Greet Visser stood with her arms folded by the right shoulder of the board director. They both stared at the screen, waiting, hoping for the live feed to return.

When it didn't, she said, "What do we do now?" She paused. "In technicality, de cigarettes are in flame."

The director ran one hand over his chin, leaning back into his chair.

"Your orders, sir?" She risked a look at him, trying to calculate the thought processes behind his eyes.

"Send in the tanks," he said.