SKIN & EARTH: THE NOVEL TRIBUTE

BY

DARKSIDECALLIN9

Skin & Earth album and comic by Lights (2017)

Warner Bros Records

Dynamite Entertainment

Last Gang Management

This novel adaptation is intended only as an unauthorized fan tribute.

Thank you Lights for saving my life.

Chapter 1: Intro

I paid my way into Tempest University to study Geology because I made her a promise on her deathbed. Yeah, I came here to study rocks. Instead, all I'm learning is how to help them continue their destruction. They won't stop until they've drilled into what's left of Madison Oasis and, I guess, I'm supposed to help them once I graduate. Sure, I paid my way into the same school as the pinks, to learn the same things the pinks do, but they never let me forget what I am. All the money in the world isn't gonna change that fact. I'm still a red.

That's what the mask is for.

Class ends and we're supposed to spend the weekend reading up on sentinel drills. The instructor issues a weary word caution that falls on deaf ears, something about the pills that are sweeping through the sector, as we file out. I'm the last to leave, always seated front and center, determined to get what I paid for even though the money was a waste and I might as well have burned it up.

In truth, I wait until everyone else is gone to make it seem more natural that no one sits next to me. The other pinks in the front row cluster together near the walls like I'm contagious and they're gonna catch my disease, while the seats in the row behind me are completely empty. The guys crammed at the ends of the back row have even taken their chairs from both sides of me, revealing the stark white floor around me.

The wall between me and them is invisible but it encloses me from all sides.

I shuffle past empty chairs, black upside down triangles bolted to clear, curved legs, and know that I don't need to heed my instructor's warning about the pills.

I've got a drug of my own already.

Walking through campus, breathing in the fresh air, even through the mask that hooks around my ears and makes them raw in the back by the end of the day, I can feel their stares. I disgust them. I am so used to it that, even as I pass the giant fountain at the front, I swear that I can hear the stares over the splashing water that overflows from the concrete reservoir. I decide that I'm gonna make it a game the rest of the way home, actively listening for their stares, their disgust, and their judgment. It's not just that I'm used to it. I've always heard things that no one else could hear, like I had the ability to snatch a note out of the air, bottle it up, and recreate it. I've always felt like if I was someone else, if I wasn't Enaia Jin of the red sector of Madison Oasis, I could've had a different life.

I could've been a musician.

It's a long way back to the wall and I walk past their perfect little houses, constructed in the same clean, modern, sterile architectural style as Tempest University itself. It's all white and gray, geometric shapes stacked on top of each other without regard to character or artistic vision, like they were built in a day by someone running from a past, a history they wanted so deeply to forget.

A shiny sports car, silver and iridescent with its headlights built into the grill, a constellation of glowing red razor cuts running all the way down the bumper to form a sinister smile, screeches past me.

"Go home!" The driver yells at me.

I ignore it. I'm thinking about how much I want to drive his car.

I go up the steps to leave the neighborhood area and a pink, a blonde, interrupts her phone conversation because I just walked past her and, I guess, I was just that offensive. As I ascend the steps, I pass by other pinks, totally drugged up and passed out, who don't even know I'm alive.

I'm not quite sure they are, either.

I keep playing that little game with myself as I step onto the main drag in the city on the way back to the wall. The geometric buildings tower over me like giants made of glass and diamonds, of mirrors and concrete, as some continue to stare. I like the look on their faces when they see me and even more when they don't see me at all. I reach back behind my ears to momentarily pull back the strings on the mask, giving the chafed skin some relief, and think about the irony of it all.

The mask might hide my face, but all it really does is make me stand out, a target in plain sight.

The shopping street is a procession of stores draped in purple and pink, selling Hypnosis sessions and time in the Dream Chambers. A Pill Bar promises that the pink pill guarantees euphoria in two tablets and it's right next to the Morphine Emporium, which rhymes.

Like the lyrics to a song.

The Emporium also sells a three day getaway in an escape tank. I glance at the poster as I walk past it, a person in a virtual reality chamber surrounded by a verdant tropical paradise that isn't really there.

It reminds me of us when we're at the spot.

I fall in line with the rest of the reds in masks, waiting to get into the entry point of the sector boundary wall. Most of them are service workers.

Wonder if they could tell me all about the sentinel drills.

I'm at the front of the line when I check my texts. Still nothing from Priest. He left me by the fire and I can still feel its warmth. It's still burning my skin.

"Next!"

I step up to the pink with the badge at the checkpoint, he and his men with guns wearing their own masks to protect themselves from our toxic stench, and hand over my ID.

"What's this?"

"Student visa." Been through this too many times, like a chorus that doesn't stop repeating.

"Hold up...for real?"

I start to explain how I became a student, but he cuts me off before I can even really begin. "Your name is En Jin? Like...engine?" He scoffs. "God, your parents do not give a fuck!" After he's done mocking my name, after he's done intimidating me, he adds, under his breath, but loud enough that I can still hear, "Hell, I'd rev that…"

They can mock you and want to fuck you, all at once.

"Well, my parents are dead, so…"

He focuses his eyes down on me, right through me, and I shrink. "You think I care if one of you people kicks the damn bucket?" He holds my ID up, the student visa that means everything and absolutely nothing at the same time, and brandishes it in-between his index and middle fingers. "Watch your step here, kid. You're the first student I've seen from the shite side of the wall in years. Your no-fuck-giving parents must've sucked some mighty Tempest dick to get you in." I extend my palm out and he slaps the ID into it. "You think I can't see that snarl straight through the mask?" He yells after me as I crossover to the other side. "Think again, red. Think again!"

All at once.

I catch the last bus going Down Town before the nightfall curfew, barely able to squeeze myself through the mass of tired bodies before the door closes. The dude I end up next to bares a tattoo with a cobra that says, "Kill. Fuck. Maim."

Home sweet home.

The red sector is the ruins of a bygone opulence, a mass of dilapidated houses and buildings that once used to be great and big and beautiful. To live here is to feel like you live in a palace that was ransacked in the middle of the night, and the queen was assassinated.

The bus is bumpy, the slums lined with laundry drying and sagging, exposed power wires, and as the dusty, cloudy lights of the horizon enrobe the egg yolk sunset in purple and pink, the pollution from the Tempest drills seeping evermore into the red sector, I use my index finger to trace the yellow patch on the shoulder of my school jacket.

The logo is a bird flying next to a drill.

I take the bus all the way to the end of the line, and when I find myself again alone amidst rows of empty seats, I take a picture of the tattoo on my forearm that he inscribed onto me and text it to him.

"Last stop, kid!" The bus driver informs me. "Sorry. Can't go further'n this."

"That's fine. Thanks."

He smiles as I walk past him to get off. "You, uh, live this close to the city center?"

I turn my head back and joke, "Quiet spot with a killer view? Hard to believe the rent is so cheap."

He chuckles softly, the way a red does. The way someone does when they've given up all hope. "Heh. Alright then. Take care."

I walk to my place, which isn't new and modern like the pinks' houses, but would have once been considered cozy with character, if it wasn't the dump it is now. Still, I try to do what I can, and almost make it to the warm, fluorescent glow of the lanterns I've slung across the balcony when my phone starts vibrating. Just when I think the only hope left in Madison Oasis might as well be Mount Hope, the cindered chunk of rock at the center, I look at my screen and see that Priest is calling. Just seeing his name gives me that little glimmer that keeps me holding on.

I answer, because I'm lost in the thick of it.