Free Daylight Runner by Oisin McGann Page A

It’s drivin’ me nuts, not knowing.”
    The big man nodded, staring into Sol’s face. “You need any help, just ask.”
    Sol left the cafeteria and went up to the changing room. Punching up his father’s marker program on the webscreen, he entered Gregor’s password, Southpaw , and brought up the last record. It showed a stylized display of the dome and his father’s path across it on the Wednesday afternoon. It stopped at section D63 in the Third Quadrant. It meant nothing to him. He used the cursor to turn the display so that the image of the dome spunaround, showing all 360 degrees of the structure. It didn’t tell him anything.
    He logged out and sat down on the nearest bench. This was starting to get him down. A thought occurred to him, and he stood up and walked over to his father’s locker. Tapping in the combination, he opened it and looked inside. It was in a state. Things had been thrown in; clothes, boots, and hats were stuffed in as if in a rush.
    The old books that Gregor read while he was on standby had been crushed in at the back, their pages crumpled. Sol took one out, straightening it up and smoothing the pages. It was a real paper book. A copy of A Clockwork Orange . There were a couple of Gregor’s other favorites in here too: The Name of the Rose and Nineteen Eighty-Four . Sol was shocked at the way they had been creased. Gregor would never have done this, not in a million years. And he never left his locker in this kind of disarray. Somebody else had been through his things. Sol examined the lock, but it showed no signs of having been forced. Maybe Harley had put some of Gregor’s gear back in, making the mess in the process, but Sol suspected what had happened.
    The men who had turned their apartment over had gone through the locker as well, he was sure of it. Sol smoothed out the books and put them carefully back on the shelf, placing a heavy box of nuts and bolts on top of them to help flatten the pages. Closing the locker, hetested the door, but it was shut tight. Whoever these men were, they had no problem with combination locks. Sol strode out of the depot, following a walkway that skirted the rim of the crater, just below the dome’s base. From here, he could see clear across the city. The four huge tower cranes from each of the four quadrants were moving, their various arms swinging loads with delicate precision. On the massive gantries that stretched across the top of the city, smaller cranes swept along rails and, above them, he could see people gathering on the sun platforms. Pigeons wheeled in among them.
    These platforms offered the best exposure to the cherished daylight, and a lottery decided who would get the opportunity to spend a few sweet hours on the public spaces. Sometimes they were even used by thrill-seekers for BASE jumping with homemade parachutes. Not all the chutes worked.
    The government was being forced to sell off these platforms as it struggled with the higher costs of running the public services. Most of the platforms were privately owned now. The one closest to Sol was one of these; it belonged to the Dark-Day Fatalists. He gazed up at the dark-clad figures in disdain. Every Sunday, they gathered to offer up prayers to the elements. He didn’t know an awful lot about them, but the gist of their philosophy seemed to be that the Machine was an abomination, that nature would win out, and that Ash Harbor was justpostponing the inevitable. The platforms had railings, but some of the more despairing DDF members would use the height to make a final, dramatic statement—by throwing themselves off the edges of the platforms. Prices for property directly below DDF platforms tended to be lower than average.
    In fact, high falls had become such a popular choice for anybody committing suicide that police had taken to routinely questioning anybody on the upper levels. The DDF maintained that they did not encourage people to