THE LAST SKYRAIL WALKER

A Sycaphlegm Series Lore Fragment — by Nicol S. Blue

The skyrails were never meant to be walked. They were meant to be ridden, back when the old world still had enough power to spare for comfort — ribbons of alloy strung peak to peak, upper-city platform to upper-city platform, carrying people who never had to think about the ground. Ren walks them anyway, because the cars stopped moving three generations before she was born, and a road that goes somewhere is still a road, even if it was built for someone else.

She learned the safe sections from her mother, who learned them from a man who used to maintain the rail lines before maintenance stopped being a job anyone paid for. The rule is simple and unforgiving: if a section still hums, you don't step on it. The old power draw is still live in places, the zero-point lines the wealthy used to run their lifts and their lights, and a live section will pull the charge out of a body the same way it once pulled it out of whole districts below — the histories call that the web, the trap, the thing that made the sky itself a kind of debt collector. Ren has seen what's left of someone who forgot the rule. She doesn't talk about it. She just checks, every time, hand hovering an inch off the alloy, feeling for the wrongness in the air before she commits her weight.

What she's after today is a relay coupling from a dead section near the third peak — intact ones are rare, valuable to the tinkers in the Basin's upper chambers who trade in anything that still conducts. It's not stealing. Nobody's claimed the skyrails in longer than anyone alive can remember. But she still moves like someone who could get caught, because old habits about who's allowed to take from the sky outlast the people who made the rule.

The view from up here is the part she never tells anyone about, because it isn't useful and usefulness is the only currency that buys forgiveness for time spent not working. From the third peak, on a clear day, she can see almost to the Wasteland proper — the scarred flats where the craters mark old combustion sites, and past them, if the light is right, the barest suggestion of something that isn't rust-colored, something that might be the edge of the Electrostatic Barrier or might just be her eyes finding a shape in the haze because she wants one to be there.

She thinks, sometimes, about the people who built this — who strung metal between mountains so the rich wouldn't have to feel the ground, and never once asked what happened to the ground once nobody wealthy was feeling it. The skyrails outlasted their builders' cities. They outlasted the arrangement that made them make sense. What's left is just the road, going somewhere it was never meant to go for someone it was never built for, which is, Ren has decided, the closest thing to justice this world still bothers handing out for free.

The relay coupling comes loose easier than she expects. She pockets it, checks the hum in the alloy one more time out of habit rather than need, and starts back down toward the burrow entrance, where a story about a walk two peaks over, someone else's rumor about a light in the Wasteland that shouldn't be there, is already three burrows deep into changing shape by the time it reaches her.

She'll hear it eventually. Everything reaches the bottom of the Basin eventually, the same way she always reaches the ground again, one careful hand-span above a hum she's learned to trust more than promises.

THE LAST SKYRAIL WALKER is a world-building fragment from the Sycaphlegm Series, the ongoing afro-futurist epic by Nicol S. Blue. The first full story, PROTOTYPICAL, is available now. [PATREON_LINK]