City of Cruelty and Copper (Temperance Era) by Rhiannon Paille

DEATH SENTENCE
    3325CE | 1305TE
    They were going to try to kill me.
    Again.
    I waited, listening to the silence, the beat of my heart ringing in my ears. I wrung my hands out along my sides and tilted my neck back and forth, working out imaginary kinks.
    My entire body was the pinnacle of perfection from my thirty-two-inch hips to my twenty inch waist and plastic chest. Aches and pains had melted away centuries ago with the faint trickle of water that had slipped down my throat. I no longer felt much of anything, nothing except the excruciating pain in my traitorous heart.
    I took a deep breath and blew it out. Opaque shapes hung in the pale light. I looked at the slits at the top of my lead container. The slits were so miniscule I couldn’t fit my fingers through them. They led to a narrow tube that filtered in light from the surface. I turned my hands over and back again, over and over, contemplating scars from wounds that never hurt to begin with. I had seen my own blood smeared over top of my skin like it was a personalized blanket. Endorsed by Fable.
    This was the waiting room. I was used to standing here in my nine-inch combat boots and tight leather pants and black and red corset. It pushed my plastic chest so sky high it was almost tumbling out of the top. I squared my shoulders as footsteps marched down the hallway. My orange red hair was a mess of knots and curls that trickled towards my lower back, my face covered in prepubescent freckles that hadn’t faded in centuries.
    Nothing about me ever faded.
    I was everlasting.
    I was never-ending.
    I was immortal.
    The creaks and groans sounded as gears shifted and the ten-foot-thick lead door slid out of the way. A flash of blue hit my shoulder care of the stun gun Hattie Alexander held. I let the electricity run through my body and instinctively dropped on one knee in a crouch. Colin Cray came around me with the thickest adamantium chains I had ever seen. Colin made quick work of the bolts and forced me to stand. I felt his labored breath on the back of my neck and I thought about a backwards head butt, but didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.
    Hattie smiled at me, her stun gun pointed in my face. She was a pretty woman, in her mid forties, showing laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. She had that blood-red auburn wavy hair thing going for her, and was wearing the standard issue one-piece. She dressed up the black jumper with a butterfly-designed belt that only made her mid section look fatter than it was. I always said, ‘Don’t flaunt it if you don’t got it.’ Maybe they stopped airing those commercials.
    “Ready for your big performance, Fable?” Hattie asked, her high-pitched voice practically sawed my brain in half.
    I kept my black eyes cold on hers and nodded. Colin nudged me forward, and that was when I realized he had hooked up my feet. Same unbreakable material, nothing but the best for Fable Ketterling. Colin had grown colder since I last saw him, blonde stubble on his firm jaw, grayish-white hair spiking from his scalp. I was a five-foot nothing and he was a six-foot something. My head barely reached his chest and behind his uniform I heard his pulse. Underneath that death trap of a fashion statement he had faded tanned skin from the heat of the deadly sun and scorch marks burned into the edges of his fingers. I tried not to blush when his right hand covered my pale spaghetti arm to guide me.
    We walked down the long, dimly-lit tunnel in silence, chains rattling with every step I took. I was numb to the process, numb to the cool air filtering through the manicured underground caverns. People in Temperance didn’t let anything happen by accident. The things they did were deliberate. They had to be, after all that had happened and the consequences that followed.
    They turned the corner, the same corner I had turned thirteen hundred and five times since I had been born. If we were still counting using the old calendars, it would be 3325CE and I