Monarch Falls

  The Four Quarters of Imagination Book One:

  Monarch Falls

  by Lumen Reese

  Published by Lumen Reese at Amazon

  ©2017 by Lumen Reese

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the author.

  Amazon Edition, Licensed Notes

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  Chapter One

  I heard about one of the first girls to be taken, in the summer of 2142. On the walk to work with a group of other women from the same industrial-sized company housing project we all lived in. I didn't think much of it at the time, just so-and-so's daughter was missing, and she wasn't going to be at work that day. I hardly knew the woman, brown-haired, maybe forty. She showed up to work the next day, and was sort of empty looking all the time she worked at her station on a conveyor belt across the factory floor, inspecting thousands of similar parts for oddities which would make them hazardous. And I felt pity for her then; teenage daughter gone, and she had to report for work... If you missed more than one shift in a month, your contract was automatically terminated and you would be evicted from your room.

  I felt bad for the taken girl's mother, but by probably a week later I thought about it no more. You got a cold? Bring tissues. You got the shits? Wear a diaper. Your daughter gets abducted? Suck it up. It was a sad thing, but girls went missing often, especially troubled ones like my coworker's daughter, and like I used to be.

  Let me tell you, factory work is boring. While some of the others talked and gossiped to make it through their shifts, twelve hour days, five days a week, I kept to myself. I was not good at making friends, I was not good at being present. My eyes could keep working even while my mind wandered. It wasn't until over five years afterward, early in the fall of 2147 that having heard about that girl would become such a strange coincidence. It was the end of that summer that the company had been annexed to a larger corporation, and changes had been made, and the factory that had sustained our entire block in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, was being adapted. Ninety percent of us were no longer qualified. You would be amazed how fast the neighborhood went bad. Teenagers goofing around with friends before dinner became drug dealers and rival drug dealers; little kids playing tag until the sun went down became little kids reading on their fire escapes for what little fresh air their parents would allow them. There wasn't schooling to worry about. Children were taught by parents and parents friends if they were taught at all. I was lucky, when I was their age. My father was no CEO but he was a bright man. But he died when I was ten and I went downhill fast, just like our neighborhood.

  I had until the end of the month to find new work, and knowing that something new was not going to come easily, and would probably mean more factory work, I decided to try my hand at something truly new for the first time in my life. As work-oriented as my block had been before, the entirety of New York City still felt like an expanding chemical reaction that the underpaid, overworked officers of NYPD were struggling to contain inside its glass beaker. They were losing, and we were nobody's priority, and so I began doing some unlicensed private investigation around the neighborhood. I followed around a few cheating husbands and wives at first, I let people pay me what they could, just to get the word around. Then it was a couple of bond-enforcements, chasing a few people who never showed up for court dates. I knew all the right-wrong people for that, from my reckless days. And I found the ones I was looking for.

  It was like I was finally awake. I went around exploring like I hadn't since I was the problem-child, since I was sixteen and living on my own for the first time, getting drunk and stoned on the weekends and still reporting for work on weekdays. Until after a couple months of that, I lost it at a party when I was high, to a thirty-ought year old guy from a different factory. He came around with goodies and hung out with kids half his age, probably because he burned out all the kids in his own neighborhood, and probably because he couldn't do any better than stupid kids. And some of my girlfriends I partied with, who were all older than me, said that that wasn't right. Someone even mumbled the word 'rape' but I scoffed at that. Just because I had to piece together what happened the next day from memory fragments and where and how it hurt, that didn't mean it counted. And some of the others said it was my own fault, and what the hell was I expecting to happen, going around the way I was? And who gave a shit if I got buyer's remorse when there were girls around getting Actual-Raped, pinned down or hit. So I called it a wash, and tried to look on the bright side. The bright side was it took all the recklessness right out of me. I stuck to my routine after that, and stopped being such a brat, and went home on weekends like a good kid.

  Home was Joey Maldonado's place. From the time my dad got shot when I was ten until I was sixteen and could first move into the company housing. And if we're being honest, it's still home even when I'm not living there, even when my old room is full of Joey's two kids now. When I step through the door and hear the kids running around bouncing off the furniture or smell the spices of something cooking it calms me. Joey is one of those cops who doesn't care about us. Except that I know he does.

  Him and my dad were partners, and he was the only thing that kept me from getting shipped down the river. Down the river, not up it, because we were in New York and all the work camps and plantations were south of us. That's where the convicts and orphaned kids go; all the wards of the government.

  I got some of my private-investigator smarts from hearing about Joey's better police work. And I got some of my cred from him, too; everyone knew I was the cop's kid because the only time a cop came around was when Joey came to visit me. That summer I went out and felt energized by the newness, by the amazing irregularity of it, and I poked my nose in everything, because that was what the job required. I was out in the night. To be out in the night in New York City is a beautiful thing, but inadvisable in a dying neighborhood. People started disliking me. I started carrying a knife, not because I knew what to do with it -Joey had taught me a couple things about self-defense but never dared involve anything pointy for my clumsiness- no, I started carrying the knife because it gave me the false bravery to keep going out.

  It was a switchblade, and I practiced some tricks with it. It made me feel like a badass. But I knew I wasn't one, really.

  There was a series of robberies and that was when I hit it big. I heard some street names around and figured out who someone really was and followed him to someone else who I followed to the stores of stolen goods. I turned it over to the cops from there, and my name still ended up in a little blurb in the local paper. Spelled wrong, 'Stella Gracy' instead of Stella Grady, but still. I got a small reward for that one, but if you factored out the week I had put into it, I made per hour about half of what I had made at the factory. And the work completely dried up after that; nobody in the neighborhood would hire me for fear of angering their friends or the baby-criminals trying to make names for themselves.

  Joey started coming around almost every day, checking in, pestering me to come home with him.

  “Let's go, let's start moving stuff right now, how bout it?”

  But I put him off, even though I knew moving back was inevitable. I was determined not to be a burden until it was absolu
tely necessary, I was determined not to look like I was running away from my suddenly-vicious neighborhood, and I was determined not to look like a failure among my small, small circle of acquaintances.

  He showed up on the last day of the month. I already had all that I owned packed into two boxes. Joey had a nasal voice, a mousy nose, a few choice moles. He used to be pretty buff but was getting old, as people did. He had beautiful, shiny black hair that both the kids inherited instead of their mother's blonde.

  I used to secretly wish I looked more like Joey. My hair was black, too, but it was not beautiful and shiny like his. And my skin instead of his healthy Latino tan was sickly pale and had always been sunken. I might be pretty if I were well fed, but I had always wanted to look more like him, ugly though he was. I wanted to look more like one of his real daughters, Anna and Josie, ten and seven. Instead I looked like his twenty-six year old lovechild from a previous relationship, which I suppose I was by way of his partnership with my father. The family afterthought; that was me.

  He smiled in my doorway, showing charmingly crooked teeth. I could tell there was something off about his smile right then, but I didn't ask. I suppose I thought he was lamenting the burden I would be causing him.

  “It's finally time,” he said.

  “It is,” I agreed.

  “All the sleepless nights worrying about you all alone in this place, all the panic attacks when I got calls about any Brooklyn girl so much as getting a paper cut or stubbing her toe. You're finally gonna be back under my roof, and I'm finally gonna get a good night's sleep. It's a beautiful thing.” He tossed an arm over my shoulders.

  “I'll find something else,” I said suddenly, though I had said it a dozen times before. “Soon. I won't be a burden.”

  “I know, kid. Grab a box. Let's go, I've gotta work tonight.”

  He crouched and got a grip on the larger of the two, puffing out a loud groan as he lurched upright and some books tumbled around inside. “God! You got a whole library in here?”

  “No, you're just getting old.”

  “I'm as young and hot as I ever was,” he huffed.

  “You're fifty!” I lugged the other box to the open door.

  He rushed through and I kicked it closed after us. “Pushing fifty,” he said.

  “Pushing fifty? You pushed fifty off a cliff a couple years ago. And there were some jagged rocks at the bottom...”

  We made it out onto the street and began a long walk north. When we went past a couple teenagers lounging on the corner, they started up a slow-clap and followed us for a minute until Joey turned to face them. And then they just shouted after us, “Good riddance!” and, “Bye Stella Gracy!”

  We trudged up several blocks of similar, utilitarian buildings before we left the factory's territory. There the skyscrapers became more diverse, some steel and glass, some grey stone. And a peculiar gap up ahead I saw children playing on playground equipment, just like the playground in my old neighborhood for the factory worker's kids. It was the lot of a big, cubic glass building where inside I could see still more children running around, or gathered in groups, being taught.

  “What's this?” I asked.

  Joey was breathing hard. “Rec center. Put 'em in all over the place a couple weeks ago. You've really had your head up your ass since you got fired, huh?”

  “Who put them in?”

  I was stopped, watching, and Joey heaved his box onto a nearby bench, plopped down next to it, and answered, “Sullivan. What's-his-name. Running for governor. Four Quarters.”

  “Jericho Sullivan.”

  “That's the one. These places are great. There's another one up by the apartment. They're free. Crowded, though. Lucky if we can get the girls in once a week. Be even less now with Stacey's nephew tagging along.”

  I sat beside him, my box on my other side. We watched the rec center from across a crowded street and for a moment we were silent. Stacey's brother had died, and she was very broken up about it, and they had taken in his son. Dean was only six. I had honestly forgotten. There would be six of us living in a two-bedroom apartment.

  Joey spoke after a minute. “We aren't making taxes, this year, there's nothing else to it.” He sounded exhausted. My mouth fell open. “Not for all the kids, anyway. We should've never taken Anna to the hospital, in March. For the pneumonia. There went our safety net and then some. We were playing catch up all year. I was supposed to get a raise, that didn't happen, budget cuts again. Stacey got fired. We dug the hole deeper to send her for that training the factory offered when they upgraded like yours did, and then they didn't even take her back. She missed too many shifts, because of Anna. And now her brother died and we've got Dean. I told her, 'pick a favorite kid' cause maybe we can keep one, but that's a long shot -.” His voice broke there, and a few tears spilled over. He struggled on, his voice going higher, breaking up, “I just thought you should know. I didn't tell you before now, I thought you wouldn't come home if I told you. You know I'd never put you out, I just thought you should know because we're trying to spend as much time with the kids as we can, and love 'em as much as we can before they take 'em away. I tell Stacy, if we cut back enough, two meals a day, she gets a job, maybe I'll get another job, maybe we'll be able to pay off the back debt and next year's taxes, too, and we'll get the kids back in a year, but it's just not gonna happen. Even if we do get 'em back before they're grown, who knows if something awful hasn't happened to 'em by then and we aren't even getting back the same kids.”

  His head was in his hands, his entire body trembling. I had never seen Joey cry before, as long as I had known him. Not even at my father's funeral. People were staring as they walked by. I put a hand on his back. It was hurting me to look at him like that so I turned my gaze back to the rec center.

  “We'll come up with the money,” I said. “Corso can help.”

  He laughed through tears. “Corso hasn't shown up to work all week. He hasn't called. He's probably dead in a ditch somewhere.”

  “You know… maybe he just went off on a bender...” but I didn't believe it. He was still wild, at thirty-five, and he slept around but he wasn't a bad cop, that much I knew. And he wouldn't just abandon Joey.

  It was said that one in three cops would be killed on the job. And strangely I had thought my father had filled some kind of quota and shielded Joey and Corso, too, by his sacrifice.

  The two had been partners since shortly after my father died. He had been under Joey's wing even before that, since he entered the academy on Joey's recommendation at age eighteen. He was never around, at first. Then it was a glimpse here or there, when Joey forgot something at the station, or wanted to lend Corso a book. A few years in, Stacey showed up and never left. She would have a weekly dinner for the four of us. I was a teen, and I was angry. Corso, at least, had been content to leave me alone, where he sat across the table. The other adults always tried to talk. Once I had matured Stacy got it in her head that we ought to be together, I had said something like our union could be arranged only when I went blind; he had added he would marry me when he turned fifty, but only if I put some meat on my bones first. Stacy said we were practically engaged. Whenever we met from then on, we traded barbs. It made me surprisingly sad to imagine him never again lingering in Joey's doorway, shooting me a wink for me to roll my eyes at.

  “Four Quarters,” I murmured, and there was a dark thrill running through me. “I'll sign up.”

  “No-,” he choked, then coughed like he had something stuck in his throat when really he was just overcome. “You're not gonna do that! You don't take care of me, I take care of you! If anyone's trading their life away it's gonna be me.”

  He was looking at me through bleary, squinting, red eyes.

  I said, and the benefit of my mind wandering was that my voice came out seeming calm, “Things would be okay for a few years and then what? They wouldn't survive without you. They need you providing for them, not selling yourself for a quick bonus.”

  He
latched onto my shoulders and I cringed, shrinking down from his tear-streaked face bearing down on me. “You can't. Promise me. We have a little time, we'll think of something. Just promise me, Stella, please.”

  “Okay,” I said, without actually saying the words, and he pulled me into a hug, which I could bear more easily than his frantic grabbing. Touching was uneasy for me. Anything beyond a handshake made me shrivel up, made me regress. But Joey was Joey. And of course I was going to protect him, like he had always done for me. I knew that I was going to Four Quarters as soon as he left for work, that evening.

  Chapter Two

  In a world being given over to the corporations, Four Quarters was the biggest. Whatever your fantasy was, you could live it. You paid a few million dollars and the creators built a scenario for you to live in, from a simple night of passion with a handsome stranger to a year-long adventure with a damsel in distress, a villain, everything you could ever want in role-playing.

  The way that several other companies owned the south and had factories and farms down there populated by people whose contracts had been sold to pay their debts to society, Four Quarters owned the west. These games were staged in one of four states, which had been made from property on the coast, bought by the creators, and were populated by hired citizens; normal people who played along and some who would die if the script called for it. Some saw it as a sweet deal. Good or bad, live or die, you got to live an adventure and you got paid a decent chunk of money. You had time to spend it before getting shipped out, never to see your family or friends again. Or that money could provide for loved ones back home.

  There were several offices for Four Quarters around the city, but I found myself going to the grandest, the original, in downtown Manhattan. I had to take the subway which I couldn't stand to do, what with all the strangers forced into your personal space, and combined with the dire circumstances, I knew I wasn't turning back. Still, I walked the block a bit before I finally came up on the building and forced myself through those front doors and the metal detector there.