Unbanished

It's the heat that hits me first. Like a memory, like a wall, it makes each breath pull harder and the heart pound. The air shimmers with it, moisture rising off the stony ground and sweat breaking out on my skin. It feels soupier than it did before and I quickly put on my mask and adjust the oxygen levels. The last time I was here I was saying goodbye. I never meant to come back, never thought I'd come back. But, I guess they don't make exile like they used to.

Yes, it's the heat that hits me first, but then the sight of the city walls takes me back. They still tower above me, but they no longer loom like they once did. They seem smaller, somehow, more like a cage than a boundary. No longer holding my whole world, they rise up and encase just one tiny part of everything I've seen.

We've landed in The Field, an area beyond the City's walls for landing air- and spaceships. It's littered with junked out trash and debris from thousands of bad landings and battles between factions both from within the City and outside of it. From here only the central towers can be seen rising up beyond the height of the walls. Twenty-seven years I've been gone. Twenty-seven years of banishment, a punishment for an action that should never have been a crime.

I hear the hum and whine of the rotors starting up on the VTOL I arrived in. It's classified as space-worthy, but it was also a piece of junk held together with mammoth spit and tar and could barely make it beyond the heliopause. We haven't left the Orion Spur in the past 5 years. Even so, it's been quite an adventure for a girl from one of the last habitable bubbles on Earth.

"Captain," Marcus yells over the rising pitch as the airship's four main thrusters peak, readying to lift, "You gonna be okay? We gotta get outa here." Marcus is leaning out of the hatchway from the belly of the ship. The ramp I just walked down is already rising back up.

I turn back briefly and nod as most of my team sketches variations on the theme of a salute. Atreus yells, "Here," and throws a cannister towards me. I catch it and step away as the hatch closes and the airship achieves lift-off.

I'll miss those guys, but they haven't been unbanished, and aren't likely to be. They were given a five minute window to drop me off, but a second longer and The Field will be bombed. It's been done before. Hell, there was a time or two when I was the one who ordered it. I'd rather miss them than see them dead.

I pick my way through the detritus of The Field. The rocky ground is lined with a couple of Landers - large spaceships that are used for rapid mass-transit between planets in the galaxy, and a selection of Striders used for ground travel. VTOLs - the Vertical Take-Off and Landing ships, like the one I arrived in - are plentiful and in an array of sizes, shapes, capacities, and states of disrepair. They're loosely lined up on my left as I head towards the small shack that serves as a guardhouse.

A couple of City guards are waiting at the shack to walk me to the gates. They scan the ID chip in my wrist. It's perfunctory, I'm not their problem. They just need to deliver me to the gates and head back to their rum and cardgames or whatever it is they occupy themselves with.

As we near the gates, I check my oxygen levels and adjust my goggles. Everything seems redder, hotter, harder to breathe here. O2 levels are fine, HUD is reading normal, but my heart is pounding and my vision is blurring. Then the gates start to slide open and I see it. My streets. My home. My City.

I stumble and realise, this is what a panic attack feels like. Three guards come at me from the guardhouse in the City Wall. They're efficient and thorough and that would normally piss me off, but it gives me five minutes of not having to talk while they check my ID and weapons. I slow my breathing and increase my O2 levels and get a look around. This gateway, the door to the guardhouse with its barred window, the ancient cobbles beneath my feet, the houses and stores lining the road. It all still belongs to me. I belong to it somehow, somewhere deep inside me, a sleeping creature of echo and memory is waking in recognition. I don't even have to take my mask off to know how it smells - the bitter spiced rum, the almost acrid yet sweet smoke of street vendors' foodstalls, the musky sweat of a million people crowded together in incessant heat, and the feral animals roaming the streets.

The guards tag me and one of them says, "You're to meet with the Patrón. You have one hour to get to the civic hall," and then activates the tag. No need to tell me the consequences of not showing up. I head off down the main road through town that still holds it's ancient name: George Street.

There's an expression from Old Earth that we've somehow hung onto: You can't cross the same river twice. Nobody's sure what a 'river' really is anymore; we know the theory - a naturally flowing body of water, but no-one's ever seen one, so we think of it like plumbing without the.. well, the plumbing, I guess. But the idea that the expression carries, the synecdoche of it, still resonates. This idea that there's a constantly shifting, changing thing that you can present yourself to, be present with, and name and know. But if you go away and then return, cross paths with it once again, it may have the same name and even the same structure, but everything within it will have been created anew.

I walk down George Street marking the changes as I mark the time. People's eyes shift sidelong towards me, no-one greets me. Where once I would've known every vendor, every beast, every child racing in and out of doorways, now I'm a stranger. And not a welcome one.