[STM]

Chapter II - The Ascendant

Margaret XII Apartment Block was a building of vertigo inducing proportions. Perhaps sixty stories high, the tower contained twelve hundred domiciles and as many as twenty-eight hundred inhabitants. The crumbling concrete façade had once been painted a brilliant white but long ago this purity had faded into a uniform grey-green as mould, soot and age worked as a trinity to bring the structure in line with their own gutter standards. Like the Barbican, ‘Maggie 12’ was lost to the smog of Nolybab; its top floors invisible from the ‘ground’. Supposedly there was a vast iron structure cast in the likeness of Queen Margaret’s face atop the tower. Ammaras had never seen it. For as far as he or anyone else knew, Maggie 12 was the same as Maggie 10, Maggie 5 and Maggie 20; each one was a monotone stark slab, jutting up from the depths, forcing itself into prominence. It was ugly and without a mote of architectural thought. It embodied everything about those interred within. The faceless, the nameless, the many.

Ammaras walked through the tall, narrow front doors and was greeted by the smell of stale cigarettes and piss. The floor was carpeted but hopelessly dirty and the walls were adorned with peeling yellow wallpaper and antediluvian posters advertising food products made from extinct animals and FeeCo. sponsored day-trips to forests that no longer existed. The only thing that remained contemporary was an enormous, framed artwork that emblazoned the far wall behind the reception desk. The Lord-Mayor Glukkon of Nolybab stared down into the vacant entrance with blazing red eyes. His jaw was set and his expression stern. He did not smoke. His visage was surrounded by blocky red lettering that simply shouted: THE CARTEL IS ABSOLUTE. The sunken pits that held his eyes formed underneath a distinct cliff-like brow and his steely gaze was at once cast upon any entrant to the foyer, no matter where they stood. Ammaras stared dully back before turning upon the Lord-Mayor to begin the steady ascent towards his apartment, twenty-five floors up. The stairwell was completely undecorated and piping snaked up the stony walls. The steps were crumbling and exposed rebar spread like veins where the wall had chipped away. On the ninth floor there was a yawning hole where a slab of concrete had come away from the underside and slammed into the stairs below. Ammaras sidled around the edge of the collapse carefully and resumed his trek. After the fifteenth floor the lighting became intermittent as burst bulbs remained un-replaced and wiring had been gnawed away by feral chippunks. Up and up he rose, ascending the twirling column into the gloom, tiring now but desperate to feel the solace of his apartment. The staircase windows positioned sporadically every few floors gave a fleeting vista of rolling smog clouds; vast thick yellow-brown wafts that swallowed the torso of the building. Ammaras pressed on, stumbling stair over stair in a haste now, practically flying towards his destination. There was the terrible mounting feeling that something was inherently wrong, that a danger lay either below or above him and that it was closing in. The darkness was near absolute as he reached the twenty-fifth floor. Only narrow fractures of light shone weakly from under the cracks of front doors. Going by muscle memory he walked along, brushing his arm along the wall until he reached 2509. Home.

Thankful of the sudden calm that washed over him, he placed his paw into the palm-lock and was taken aback to find that as he pressed into it, the front door groaned open. Ammaras walked over the threshold and went to pull the light cord on his left. His paw swiped through the air and upon inspection it was clear that whomever had forced their way in had yanked it clean off the fixture. Tentatively he pushed himself up onto his toes and tugged the feathered tip of string that was left and the apartment blazed into life. The living room was a war-zone. What little furnishings he had acquired were destroyed; the back of his recliner had been rendered from the seat and his coffee table had been upturned, one of the legs had been strewn across the other side of the room and leant awkwardly under a smashed port-hole window. Papers scattered around an upended bureau flickered in the breeze and a thick acrid smell filled the room as the noxious fumes from outside poured into the apartment. The mudokon wandered through the mess, stricken with a glassy eyed stupor. Everything he had built for himself had been taken away, destroyed. He walked through the bedroom to find a similar scene; his nest had been pulled apart and the stuffing tossed aimlessly about. Under the guidance of the breeze ebbing through the domicile, it had collected into clumps and sat like islands atop a jade carpet sea. Ammaras wobbled unsteadily and leant up against the soothingly cold metallic wall. There were a couple of printed notes on it, one briefing the landlord on how to reclaim compensation for property damage, as well as a second one addressed to him. It read:

An eerie calm fell over the room like a blanket. The winds from outside pacified to a breeze and in the heights of the Margaret XII Apartment Block there was silence. Ammaras pulled the note from the wall and crumpled it in his paws. From deep within his chest a tightness began to squeeze at his heart. His stomach knotted and as he stumbled out of the bedroom and towards the toilet bile rose up into his throat. The mudokon was violently sick before he could reach the lavatory chute, his body quivering with the force of his nauseated ejections. To fall foul of the Cartel, or indeed any of the ruling families, was often equivalent to a death sentence. There was an almost poetic injustice in Ammaras’ situation and he realised—as he wiped vomit from his lip with his forearm—that he was being pursued by the Magog Cartel to reclaim debts tied to the value of Magog Cartel stock, purchased only for its supposed insurmountable strength. They would chase him, as well he knew, and the potential of capture was scarcely worth considering. There was but one option, one path for him to choose. Escape.

Acting swiftly, he gathered up what little possessions he had that could be carried on foot—a burlap shawl, a worn leather purse (empty) and small assortment of packeted snacks. Then, cautiously, he eased himself down onto his knees before the rug in his bedroom and carefully rolled it back. The hard steel floor had been bolted down in panels and its perfect grey uniformity was sullied only by four rusted bolts at each corner of a single metal plate. With his clumsy greenish paws, Ammaras twisted the bolts each in turn, setting them down together at his side. As the last one came loose he hefted the panel up to reveal a cranny between the floor and ceiling void of the level below. There was about a foot sized gap and nestled between trails of wiring and an expanse of bolamite webs was a cluster of paper notes, tied together with string. The mudokon gingerly grabbed this bundle before flicking through the 20 moolah bills. There was M600 in total; enough to last a month or maybe two if he was careful. Stuffing the wodge into his loincloth, he swung the shawl over his shoulders, drawing it up to his neck before sliding the panel back in place with his foot. He scooped up the bolts and dropped them out of the smashed porthole and proceeded to slide the rug roughly back in place. Without another second thought he strolled through the living room, exited the flat and pressed his paw onto the palm lock, remembering then that the door had been forced and that really, it mattered not now. Ammaras sighed and tore off down the corridor, evaporating into the gloom.