Her name had been Miriam. But names didn't matter, only the law, only the absolute. The Ziggurat loomed before her vantage on the rooftop, pressing into a tender orange sky, it had always been a sickly shade, right? She watched the impossibly tall building erupt over her and all heads through the smoky black fog, a dance of pollution as a deceptive lead in a waltz that led to death! She adjusted her mask to avoid the tendrils of the mist invading her throat and nostrils and settled back to wait.
Her name had been Miriam, but now she looked across the shanties of Baku, all gathered around the Ziggurat like God-fearing peasants seeking a blessing from a bloated cardinal, but there was no longer religion, only the law and the Tors, she whose name was once Miriam was the best Tor in the Caucasus.
Movement! Her sight caught a gust of frantic dashing, to the left, down a rusted staircase, yet she remained motionless, Tors didn't move, wind and time dictated height and erosion, natural instinct ruled when to begin the chase. She let her hunch cast itself across the vast Megalopolis once the capital of a nation called Azerbaijan, before the Law, before the Tors, when water existed and was not made, now Baku was the one of last major City States.
They had called her from Anchorage for this assignment, where she had quelled riots at the food shortages - people in Alaska once ate whale blubber, now they dined on captured bankers. She would be paid in old money for this, which was scarce and valuable, so the target's importance must be the real treasure and that nagging told her to move. Grabbing a drainpipe, she leaped over the side of the building, it rattled as she shot down more than 100 feet to the ground, an action a mere matter of seconds for the preternaturally strong Tors.
The concrete was cracked and laid with a film of dirt beneath her fingers - much like a Tor coats what was once Miriam, she thought - rising, eyes fixed on an archway barely tall enough for people to walk through, glowing like the dying embers of a furnace. Its presence seemed warm among the ramshackle stalls and ragged peasants doing their best with the rags draped around them to avoid the smog, like the throat of a slumbering dragon, instinct tugging her towards the entrance, with warmth, camaraderie and a haunting song.
Away from the rats outside, she entered the bar. Stragglers danced in the smoky red light, swaying as though hypnotised before slumping over the bar, or over round antique wood tables. A burly, bald bartender in a leather tabard scratched at the ancient bar's wood with a knife, watching the singer, her target, looking right at her as she sang.
Everything about the singer was banned. From the blonde waves cascading over her shoulder and her strapless velvet red dress parting for one leg, to her perfect contralto deep voice, ringing out a sonorous tribute to a past where there was more than Law, but rights. Her voice surpassed sound, becoming an infrasound that held up the walls of this dingy bolt-hole, conveyed sonar into her as she watched the singer, communicating days when the world laughed, cried and everything in between, of the blue sky, of a young girl fishing with her dad and brothers, named Miriam.
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