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The skin still dipped. An indent quickly fading. Or was it just a memory of a once permanent fixture upon her neck?

What use was sentiment? She was quickly realising that emotion and attachments were tethers to a past she needed to forget. With that locket, so too did her heart disappear. She looked only forward - to survival. And to survive was to keep moving, changing, adapting. Forgetting the mistakes of the past.

To look around was to witness a familiar world, but impressions are merely an artist's rendering of "truth"; a manufactured reality, an interpretation of the ideal. Indeed, the aesthetic facades of the surrounding suburbs were unassuming upon a quick glance. But much like a painting, to look closely is to see the crude strokes. The grooves and dips of the human hand. The mistakes and the deformities. The minutia is difficult to interpret and understand, and in focus, the effect on the mind is dizzying. So most prefer a quick glance, not so fast as to not realise a location, but not so slow either as to truly see the world as it exists.

She paused.

But she did not yet know what she saw. Let us call her Snow. That is not her name, but what use were names in a system of impressions? In fact, a number would serve a similar purpose. But there is such poetry, such symbolism rife in an arrangement of letters and sounds. To call a girl 'Snow' is to imply purity, renewing, a blanketed landscape. Yet also isolation. A biting beauty. Nothing through which one would choose to linger. A transient state, snow. It will disappear as quickly as it came, melting into time. Snow, as a character, is but a player who will fret until she can fret no more. Her hours on the stage would soon be up; she too would melt into time.

She did not always run. In fact, before she ran she barely even walked. She would always sit - on a train, in a laboratory. Her back would hunch over a microscopic sample. Her pen would dance across the page, with numbers and notes which could beckon success or devastating failure. The routine had never wavered, and as the pressure for answers mounted and expectations grew, her heart grew heavy with burden. This was to be her life's work. This was her purpose. Recalling her life before the constant running began, she remembered her stained mirror, the locket glinting on her neck. An even earlier recollection strained the surface.

A shimmering window and an attractive display. High on her first days of employment - the end goal of a degree and purpose - she looked to purge this new income. The glistening window caught her eye and she wandered closer to the trinkets on display. Images of beautiful women adorned in chains compelled her to linger, to desire such beauty. A single chain with a heart-shaped locket hung lonely upon a mannequin’s neck. Unassuming and simple, Snow was intrigued and ventured into the store for a closer look. Soon after she left, with this twinkling symbol of her success.

That storefront has since closed, and now the mounting deaths became a shackle to a desk and samples which promised answers. Of course the answers did come. The dangerous thing about answers and the knowledge they bestow is that they are given with very little regard to the original questions being asked. No longer should we caution those for the questions they ask, but instead brace ourselves for an answer we likely never wanted. An impression of a goal oft planned but never fully realised.

Frost clung to the windows of her tiny home on the day she locked her front door for the last time before the change; before she finally saw. The air misted around her face as she took each unknowing step closer to an unforgivable answer. A necessary evil of which she was the creator. Snow clung to the innocent memories of that day - the sun as it shone through the mist, songs of distant birds in empty, barren trees. The details helped her cling to what feeling she had left; what feelings she could still bear. Years of toiling, experimentation with no clear course, finally yielded a result. Symptoms subsided and normality was once more in reach. She felt like a God. Altering threads in the fabric of humanity to finally give these people - her people - a fighting chance for a future. Disease which had defined her existence was now her minion, to behave as she bid. She had questioned science for a cure, and had been provided her answer. Group immunity at its cellular core. Immunity which depended on consistency, duplication, identical structures against a common evil. People were thriving with the artificial life which The Cure had bestowed. Until greed usurped altruism. There was a chink in the armour of the mighty viral army, the vaccinated defence. As one vaccine necessitated more, the need grew stronger, and many capitalised. A cure through which Snow intended to save humanity, now became a vehicle for genocide of the poor. A natural selection of classes, with survival being awarded to the fattest wallet. An impression of the past was enough solace for the people who surrounded her to thrive, to look forward and forget those left behind. Almost at once, brushstrokes coated the walls of her life. Each a conscious movement which, at a glance, was idyllic, beautiful.

She saw.

Society had divided quickly into the healthy and the diseased, and Snow had been at the heart of this rupture. This was something she could no longer bear, being a mere puppet in the games of her financiers. Gently, her finger tips grazed the necklace she wore; the genesis of her legacy. A better world was her vision, and Snow still recognised the altruism in her thoughts. She looked around at the facade, the impression of an "ideal world". Her heart dimmed and her altruism dwindled, like a speck of ash upon the ground.

She ran.

Guilt consumed her and as she reached the outskirts of the thriving medical metropolis she had helped create, Snow dropped to her knees. Every breath brought pain, the air sliced her throat as she inhaled the icy shards of the evening mist.

That evening was the last time she reached for the locket, no longer with a fingertip, but a fist. This locket was the last tether to a life she no longer wanted to live. Chains tore, and Snow could still hear the necklace clatter onto the pavement. She ventured into the remains of the dying world, leaving behind a life of greed that was no longer worth living.

Touching the nape of her neck, the skin still dipped. But that was now a memory. Snow did not fret as she fled onto the next stage, death a scripted certainty. A fitting punishment for the woman who condemned to death her family, her peers, her humanity.