Member-only story
Our Lady of the Nocturne
Will you kneel before her?
The city hummed with noise. Skyscrapers and their beacons of light stood out in the darkness. It was an ordinary night, people commuting home from work, even as shadows slipped long from every corner and alley.
But along building walls were strings of people who, once they turned away from well-lit streets, simply disappeared. Secret hideaways — children searched for them, but only those who remembered past adolescence still sought them.
Into one there-and-gone doorway went a young girl named Liza. Though her patched clothing and bruised right eye told of stories best left unwritten, she still found an entrance into what outsiders might have assumed was the underbelly of the city. Surely there would be loan sharks, dirty money, and politics too shady to be spoken in more than whispers. But Liza was a girl who had nowhere else to go — at least nowhere she could be sure was safe.
As she descended the red stairs into a larger expanse, she heard the pulse of music — much like a nightclub’s atmosphere — which of course meant circles of dancers under streaming neon lights. The shifting spotlights illuminated different sections of the room, revealing groups of people surely caught up in deals that would come to affect the above-ground policies everyone else knew too well.
