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Red Nail · #3 (**permalink**) 09-17-2008

In the shadow of one of the complexes Jordan settled into a kneeling position. He unfolded the note carefully and read the simple note aloud and in his head several times over.

“349 Street Alley B. 349 Street Alley B. 349 Street Alley B.”

He kept repeating it for five more minutes and let his eyes wander over the area. He blocked out his own thoughts and subdued his impulses to notice that synchronicity was occurring around him. If he thought about the field it wouldn’t form. He needed to concentrate on the location alone for the field to work properly.

If he thought about synchronicity then he’d just end up leading himself to a library book about it, a place with a great deal of resonance with the fields, or chasing his old paths through Ruin. The unthinking was what kept most people from being good tacks. There was too much meaning and chaos in most people’s lives that only the ones with care-free minds or ones that rigidly controlled their thoughts could make the fields work quickly and well.

As Jordan was about to repeat the words again, the field snapped into focus. He watched a piece of newspaper flutter by with the words Cashian Road printed in bold. The newspaper caught some foul smelling wind and was carried away into the heights of 43’s vaulted ceiling. Without dwelling on the paper for any longer, Jordan was off and running. He streaked past and around the few pedestrians left on the streets on his way to the dead end of 3rd street. There he took a left and ran for a brick wall. At the wall’s leading edge was blue and white reflective tape. Two feet away was a pole that was eight feet high, covered in the same reflective tape with a sign of a stick figure jumping halfway up its length.

Jordan picked up speed and just before running between the pole and the wall he leapt into the air. The was no pause he could notice as his surroundings were gone, switched with the sky blue wall of a food store and a padded mat several feet below. Jordan pumped and angled his legs to avoid the pad, which would slow him down, and hit the ground running. His foot accidentally kicked a can and he raced along behind it. It came to a rest against another building’s wall and completed an arrow of made of trash that pointed up the side of another building.

Jordan skidded to a halt and shimmied up a pipe attached to the wall. From his vantage point he could see a small human gang loitering in the alley beyond where he was about to pass. From the roof he also saw another newspaper on the wind. He held it in his gaze watching where it went, knowing instinctively that it was linked to the previous paper. Halfway through its flight the paper vanished into thin air and Jordan was running and diving after it.

The ground rushed at him again, but this time there was no mat to cushion his ill-timed fall. Jordan tucked and rolled, banging his leg and arm into the ground. Otherwise he was fine when he rose in front of a few startled pedestrians. The first thing he laid eyes on was the sign for Cashian Road. Another sign was below it with 349th Street dented into it’s metal. Jordan hobbled for a few steps, walking the pain out of his leg before he started running for Alley B. He felt the field slide away from him and dissipate as he entered the alley. It felt like a wash of cold and sent goose bumps up along Jordan’s spine.

Someone must have been trying to hide the package from anyone that could have scavenged it. He assumed that it was Salarishkay’s brother, or sister, or whatever. Weesog always had trouble telling so he just called them all hes and hims and left it at that.

Jordan rummaged through garbage piles and other things that he would have rather forgotten, but he finally produced the package. It was sealed in white wrapping paper and tied with twine. Pretty ritzy for a simple sample package, but Jordan’s job wasn’t to ask questions. He just had to deliver it.

He hid behind a dumpster and started to work his field against the block. It was tough and kept assaulting his mind with other feeling, emotions, and images that were not his own. For a time Jordan wondered just what kind of sample this was. The layers of synchronic protection that was placed upon it was impressive. Jordan finally had to give up and move out from behind the dumpster.

He knew Sector 2 well enough to make the tip to the school. Once there he’d get some answers from Salarishkay about the package. It take him a bit longer to make the journey, but at least he’d get a chance to look around the Sector that he visited often, but never got to look at in detail. He slipped the fine box into his pack and took off down 349th. He’d catch the tram at the far end to the First University of Ruin.

Behind him in the alley, hidden in a nook that Jordan hadn’t searched, was his actual goal in a simple brown box. It was stained with the rapidly decaying sample of fern rat and would soon be a worthless pile of sludge in a brown box. It would never reach Salarishkay.