There was an old saying that mentioned, it wasn't the fall the kills you, but the sudden stop. But generally this was a statement generally made for people who have not fallen into the outer most edges of darkness.

The fall was not the worst of it, my body a mess punctured limbs.

When you're missing a right arm, it's easy to think that maybe eventually you'll stop using this particular limb. But for Nadine, she had come to realize that ones dominance was not based on your strongest hand, but the side of your brain. When she slide my fingers across a tablet, it felt the same as always, albeit without as much feeling. She liked to shop for parts on the open web, on the off chance that she could find parts to rebuild her robot dog. She found Spark plug in a garbage dump, just down the road from Purgatory, who was merely a skeleton of his former metallic rat dog self. She could barely make it through to find the robot dog due to the light not always reaching this district.

A few months ago, she was in the hospital.

She could remember the sound of being dragged on a metallic table to see the good doctor, inquiring with her best friend why in the world it was she survived. If you wonder why she was able to remember it, consider the fact that sge can remember most things while still drunk. Her left arm was a broken chunk, one that could barely make a slam dunk, or any other aspect of athletic fulfillment in the floating city.

"Do you think she's going to make it?" a voice asked.

"We'll have to see, they're punctured all over." the doc said.

Yet now as she looked to the stars, onward into the aristocratic Utopian mess she once lived, which made her realize, being down here, how good she had it. And yet, while she didn't completely trust her new friends, she wouldn't trade them for the world.

She lived in her own darkness.

When Nadine woke up, she found Blanci leaning her head on her shoulders. Nadine could sense her faint outline, as she grasped for air. "Here, have this head ache body. It can help the pain a little bit." Blanci offered. Nadine grabbed it without hesitation, almost fall asleep. "Please stay awake, it sure gets lonely here."

"And who is this pretty face." Nadine asked. This was how she met Blanci, one of her first crushes, but they never got close enough to reveal ourselves to each other, before she was guillotined gunned by militarized police. A Spanish girl raised by Italian parents, though do to a month having run away from home, her accent of a Corsican was barely noticeable, borrowing more from the Urban culture of the Southern most parts of Chattanooga. Nadine didn't know much about Blanci's past other than this, just that whenever she discussed rats with her, Blanci always would ask her to stop.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

But Nadine always wanted pet rat.

Not a rat dog.

It was just a few months ago, when Nadine had run away from the boarding school. Though she was a runaway much like the others, there were some part of her that always wanted to go back to the place where she once belonged.

The others had gotten used to eating roaches, if they could even find that. The secondary American civil war had largely been kind to her family. An aristocratic family whom worked closely with the multiple CEOs of the potato district. Even now she still dreams of rolling soccer balls, rolling away from her, always being just out of reach, and in front of her always some faint glimmer of reality television of dancing shows.

The motion set that covered the city was called the Meadow Of Gold. She called it simply shit, but it was the kind of shit that, despite the most miserable aspect of their existence, made them hold on just a little bit longer, like some abstract idea that they will someday become rich and famous, score a dark comedy skit on comedy television. She preferred the darkness of her own bedroom. The glow of L.E.D. lights, the flow of French Chanson singers singing her songs of good night butterflies. Dead men's lullabies.

Yet in this world, below that distant prairie, while some fairy and elf always play dangerous games, she found myself resenting the image of such falseness. She was a Satanist at heart, and wanted to expose the lies for what they were. For her, she knew that in reality, even her own life was rather austere. It was never something she mentioned widely to her friends, whom were taught by abstractly non-human pixel machines. The best you were going to get, was some Left Libertarian conversation by Noam Chomsky and Charles Johnson. But never an in person conversation.

But for her reality was no political novel.

It was a game of chase, nightmares, total monstrosities.

She thought she was going to die from lack of sleep.

When she had met Brittney, it was a time when she was much more easy going. They had known each other for months, but stopped seeing each other when she used to play "school". Much of Nadine's identity had not yet been formed. She had not yet switched to public school, where she would hang out with school friends to play pool. Yet now as the years went by, she simply ask herself why. Sometimes people separate on bad terms, yet when you're young there is nobody else's term besides the terms of your parents.

Nadine and Brittney were politically the opposite, as she would later find out second hand. She was the right hand, and Nadine was the left hand; it makes Nadine wonder who she voted for in the last election, not that it mattered now since the war. While Nadine ate spicy food, and wiped the sweat off her brow, she still regretted no marriage vows, her desires fading like the wind from some other lover's memory.

In high school, she generally avoided other women, partially do to her own feelings of inferiority, but also her unwillingness to subject them to the darkness of her own lust. At the time she had multiple issues related to hating other girls who were more delightful than she.

Yet the hacker instinct ran wildly. Life was like an electronic keyboard, with various previously recorded music notes. With songs from various decades. Childhood memories were one of those things one tries to push toward the past, but she kept wondering what Brittney would think of her now. Even within her own family, she was largely the opposite of almost every she knew; consider the fact that she had been watching a weird mixture of Alex Jones and Noam Chomsky, with the old Green partier winning out in the long run. She found various conservative talking heads truly alien, in a way more bizarre than exotic science fiction short stories.

To think, her and Brittney became so different.

Like life fracturing into broken glass.