Phoenix (dystopian romance) (Theta Waves: Episode 1) by Thea Atkinson

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    ACT ONE
     
     
    Theda noticed him again, watching her from across the rubble of street, leaning against the graffiti of a building untouched by the warfare that had left most everything around her in ruins. No young teen, this one. Older than her, probably late-twenties. Longish hair the color of charcoal. He was tall, although he seemed to be doing his best to disguise the fact, all slouched into himself, one boot sole--cowboy boots no less--braced against the wall as though he belonged there when Theda knew damn well he didn't. He was too groomed, too...well, too damned clean to belong hereabouts.
    He leveraged the other foot against the heat of the sidewalk bricks where at least some of them still looked like they had when they'd first been laid: nice and flat and patterned. Not so many of them anymore--too much damage from the holocaust for the cobblestones to look neat. Most now heaved up in places, tripping filthy vagrants and respectable survivors alike, not that the two of those things could be separated anymore either. The mere notion of survivors and vagrants paired up in ways that the sidewalk stones should have but didn't, at least not in Theda's part of the supercity.
    Even in the shaded late afternoon light, even beneath the shadows of leafy treetops stretching leggy, malnourished branches to heaven, she could tell the guy was studying her. Looking through her, she thought, as she squatted next to her card table on her side of street, trying and failing to help a middle-aged client back to a doddering stand.
    "You good, old man?" she asked the client and he gave a wavering sway before nodding.
    "Smokin'," she said to him in response. "Now get the hell up."
    As he struggled to stand, she peered beneath her lashes at the man across the street. His presence unnerved her in ways that made her make stupid mistakes, the latest one even now lying prone at her feet and struggling to open his eyes. She couldn't say she blamed the old guy for passing out--his specific trick had been filled with crusade massacres and his own horrible, impaled fate upon returning home to Turkey. Still, she couldn't afford his lolly-gagging.
    "Come on," she said to the john, slapping his cheek. "Get your wiggle on and get the hell out of here. You got your ride."
    He'd rightfully earned a grisly death back then, if she had any say, except she didn't, and besides, she couldn't say as much to an barely conscious john even if she did give a damn. She cared about two things: godspit and money in exactly that order unless she needed money for the godspit, and then the two were reversed. All she concerned herself with was getting paid--just like any professional woman of trade--and in this case, she might have worried about that, so grisly was her client's vision, except she'd long ago learned to get the money up front. This old fart was no different, except he couldn't find his feet to save his soul, no matter how much she yanked at his elbows. He kept stumbling back onto one knee.
    "Fuck, man," she said. "You're going to be alright. Just get the hell up." She darted a look across the street at where here stalker had staked a claim to his spot the same as he'd done for the last four days, about ten minutes earlier, before she had a chance to coax said client from a faint on the sidewalk. He must have seen the exchange of money, watched as the codger had fallen, was watching still as she rapped the gent's cheeks. None of that could be called a mistake, not in separate actions; no. The mistake she'd made, that she'd been making for the last four days, was to ply her trade at all in the face of that unnerving stare from across the street.
    Like the hookers that came and went around her, sometimes flashing splinters of smiles at her, sometimes trying to run her off, Theda settled into her chisel-coloured survival instinct the way any good magician did, or would, if said con found herself trying to live out of a