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They were often gone for weeks or months, and some of them never came back at all. Few believed they had settled down elsewhere; it was more likely that they had met their demise somewhere along the way.

Throughout the years many seemingly useful items had been found rummaging through the abandoned buildings; packaged food, guns, cars, motorcycles, and transistor radios.

But food vanished all too quickly, ammo was used up, fuel was scarce if present at all in a serviceable state, and there was nothing to tune the radio on to, except for celestial noise.

Sono had found the bicycle he currently rode in a pile of debris, the result of several floors collapsing in a building that remained standing despite. Surprisingly, it had required only minor adjustments before he could ride it.

On very rare occasions the traveling Outsiders brought back firewood, which was sold at the market at ridiculously high prices. Edgar always had firewood, though never much, and was forced to ration the little he had. But whether he got it from the market or not, he didn’t disclose.

There were still things to be found everywhere in the city, whether forgotten, overlooked or things someone else had stashed away. Many Outsiders spent their lives looking for those treasures.

The Core advertised both items that they sold in the shops and items that they wanted to acquire on colorful billboards, and also on giant television screens built in to the wall, often in proximity to the shops. The shops also managed the amount of Core bills in circulation, thus fully controlling the economy it had created. There was no point in trying to make counterfeit bills, since they were simply too advanced for the rudimentary tools available.

Right next to one of the shops was where Sono had gotten hold of the insects for which he went to prison for. More captivated than hungry, Sono had seen a young man drop a recently purchased box of insects, breaking open from the impact with the ground, and subsequently spreading insects everywhere. He had seized the opportunity immediately, along with other Outsiders.

Next to the garage door, identical on both shops, there was a large mirror, wider than it was tall, and beside it something that looked like a door, except without a handle or even a keyhole. There was just an outline of a door, carvings in the metal around which the concrete wall loomed. Whenever there was trouble, police poured out of it. The police only reacted if a crime was committed against the Core, namely the shops, but if two Outsiders began fighting in front of the mirror with knives, or a fire roamed in the building across, they didn’t care. The Outsiders could kill each other and the building could burn to the ground and there still would be no reaction.

The police had quickly picked Sono and a couple of others up, and proceeded to squash the itinerant insects with their feet. Still to this day he had no idea why they had reacted, because technically, the insects were no longer theirs, they belonged to the purchaser. It was infuriating beyond measure.

A few years ago, by all accounts due to large numbers of Outsiders breeding their own insects getting discovered, the Core only sold dead insects.

Nowadays he wouldn’t even dream of taking anything from a fellow Outsider, but the Core was fair game.

The Core as well as the Outsides had long ago been part of a much larger city, a flourishing metropolis without visible divisions. But at some point, and swiftly so, walls were erected around parts of the city that was to become the Core. Presently, since no more newcomers came from other cities, and the dead outnumbered the newborns, the population outside the walls was dropping steadily. No one knew the status inside the walls.

Since the Core took advantage of the comforts the flourishing metropolis had bequeathed, never going through the trouble of destroying or even changing the piping underground, meant that Outsiders could benefit from it as well. His grandpa certainly did.

When water did come out of his pump, it was a murkier, smellier liquid, very different from what came out of the faucets in the city, as if it came from an entirely different network of pipes. Shitty water flowing through pipes in the middle of nowhere went by without a single eyebrow raised, but that didn’t mean that it would flow forever. But his grandpa didn’t seem to worry much about it.

After the purification process, having passed through all of the trays, Edgar boiled the water, and then it was fit to drink and to cook with.

The scaffold was covered with a piece of tarp as always. Would the opposite mean his grandpa was around? Maybe, but probably not. He could’ve simply forgotten to cover it up.

Edgar kept it covered up to keep particles from falling into the trays and ruining the whole purpose of his contraption. Neither his grandpa nor Sono had ever seen rain, but he’d heard of the phenomenon. It was the same with regards to snow and hale; they were merely grime on photographs and videos. Occasionally chunks of unidentified origin did trickle down from the sky, but it was a sort of sticky, decayed confetti, like the sky harked up the contents of its stuffed throat and then spat it out in disgust. That was what Edgar protected it from; the only form of precipitation. Though the intensity over his grandpa’s home was nothing like that in the city, the concrete pieces in-between the two bore no signs of it anywhere. His grandpa could not answer as to why that was. Edgar got it every once in a while, but nowhere as severe as in the city, where it fell often, and in intense bursts. Sweeping it away was done unintentionally by shoes of all sizes, leaving it to crust up at the less frequented areas of the Outsides.

Right next to the filtering trays was an old red toolbox, a heap of rusty metal and other collected junk, three large plastic barrels serving as water reservoirs, and finally some plastic boxes with varying contents; some had food, some trash, some pieces of concrete and charcoal, and one of them occasionally contained his flip-flops whenever he decided to walk in circles around his domed home in a pair of worn, brown dress shoes he had hidden somewhere among the concrete pieces. Sono had looked for them on several occasions, but never discovered them.

His flip-flops weren’t in any of the plastic boxes.

His grandpa’s considerable pile of dust, with which he washed his hair, only received a fleeting, albeit slightly contemptuous glance. If he would’ve been in possession of some, he would’ve put glitter in it, and make his grandpa’s drab hair sparkle.

Nobody knew what they drank inside the Core. But few believed they drank the same water which they offered to the Outsiders. No one had ever seen a guard or police drink or eat anything. How would they, since they never removed their armor?

It was a similar case with the air they breathed. A prisoner had once felt a surge of the cleanest, tastiest air when passing a room only the guards had access to. Whatever the cause of it was, it suggested that the guards breathed a different air, and that they were human after all. The guards had tried to contain it quickly, but their actions only brought more prisoners to the area. It ended with several prisoners dead, but the hope of a place where the air was fresh was immortalized, etched into the prison’s concrete floor with their blood.

Otherwise the air inside the prison was the same, or at least it felt like the same as in the Outsides.

From that the notion of oxygenated buildings inside the Core budded and bloomed among them. It was by now an entrenched belief among the Outsiders, some sort of oxygen production taking place inside the walls. Since the air was the same whether one stood right next to the wall or among the concrete at his grandpa’s place, miles away from the Core, they had to contain it somehow, hence inside the buildings. Whether the guards’ masks had their own air supply was anybody’s guess.

Once, long ago, some Outsiders had tried to cultivate algae farms to produce oxygen, but given it up to methods relying more on chemistry than sunshine, since the skies only grew thicker. Instead underground laboratories were set up for the purpose of coming up with a viable solution. In order to prevent the Core from interfering, it had been kept very secret. Sono had no idea whether they were still operational. No one knew anything substantial about it, which could be interpreted either way, at least by an optimist.

The poor air quality, on top of the long-term effects, brought a lot of problems to the Outsiders on a day to day basis; coughing, wheezing, troubled airways in general, chest pains, chest tightness, and burning sensations in the chest, irritated eyes, headaches, dizziness, drowsiness and on occasion fainting. The air hunger was rampant among them.

What probably were heart attacks and strokes, leading to death and disability respectively, weren’t uncommon either.

Since heart and lung problems was something generations of Outsiders had suffered from, and the prevailing conditions a daily reminder of its trajectory, most people didn’t even bother with masks. Some did wear them though, often makeshift cloth masks wrapped ingeniously around their faces in an effort to protect their airways, and a few even wore ancient gas masks, but more for laughs and scares than safety, since the filters were often long shot.

There were probably scores of other problems associated with the pervasive pollution, but for better or worse, present circumstances limited it to heart and lungs, the only pillars left of the dismantled hospitals.

Presently, many Outsiders viewed radiation poisoning as the biggest threat, holding the fact that they sold both water purifiers and iodine tablets in the shops as conclusive evidence of its presence. In reality there was no way to either disprove or validate such ideas, but the dire possibility now had ample prancing space on every Outsider’s shoulder, within spitting distance of taut eardrums.

Who knew how long it would take, how many generations until the air became so polluted that nothing of benefit could be drawn from it. Instead of sustaining them, at the very least, it would solidify their demise.

Parting with the water filters, pump and all else associated with it, Sono continued his search.

He wondered whether his grandpa still had the ability, the endurance required to walk all the way across the concrete landscape, to cross the leprosy fields, in whichever direction. Had he fallen somewhere, slipped out of the blue, and was now trapped between two boulders with a broken leg, staring at the brown? He had not heard anything. But then again there were more paths than the one he’d taken. In some places the drops were substantial as well. But why would he leave his home?

He was never short of food, but not thanks to Sono. An old friend of his, whom Sono had never met, came once a week to resupply him with the necessities. Who this friend was, Edgar had never divulged. His grandpa’s supplies, though meager to begin with it, never gaped completely empty, so there had to be some truth to it.

The lid was on top of the toilet, which was reassuring, but precisely why he thought it reassuring, he couldn’t say. The toilet was too narrow for him to fall down into anyway, even if he snapped both pelvis and torso and folded himself in half like a well-worn playing card. Unwilling to go any nearer, he looked over toward the pool, and then walked blindly toward it; offering his sight to whichever of his senses needed the vacant space. None took up his offer.

As the pool opened its depth to him, the glimmering tiles lining its insides slowly coming into view at a distance, he stopped dead in his tracks. The sheer radiance of his vision grabbed hold of every muscle in his face, freezing solid in wonder. The Olympic-size swimming pool was filled with water. It was filled with water; unsure of which expression to manifest, his entire body became a sizzling stew of fluctuating emotions, unable to avert his riveted eyes. The tiles glistened like they were about to erupt, reflecting the liquid with effervescing delight.

Keeping the tip of his tongue on his bottom lip, he pushed the rest of it out of his mouth, and then inhaled deeply through his mouth. He was too preoccupied to blink.

For his entire life the memory of the pool had consisted of two things; an enormous symmetrical hole in the ground, and pretty tiles. He’d been down only a handful of times, but never for long. Though the tiles were pretty, up close as well as from afar, and even prettier than most things in the city, it was still a hole. There was nothing to do down there.

He walked toward it slowly, a frown finding its way onto his forehead. Sono ran his fingers across the bulging eyebrows his elusive feelings had raised.

There was no doubt about it being a liquid; its innumerable small waves, breaking one after the other, were like fresh creases in a sheet of plastic, leaving the faintest of white trails on the cyan-colored surface. He had only seen such cleanness, such vivid colors on Core advertisements. It looked surreal.

Sono froze in place, and while he stood there, motionless, an almost aggressive joy bubbled up from his trunk, thrashing past his squishy insides on its frantic struggle upward. “Grandpa!” Sono shouted elatedly, quite spontaneously, his smile keeping both his lips and teeth from joining. He spun around swiftly, searching for his grandpa.

The Core couldn’t have anything to do with it. No. Sono shook his head to further entrench it. No.

He wondered how the hell his grandpa had pulled off something like this. Had he filtered it all? An Olympic-size swimming pool’s worth? The color suggested it, but logic deemed him a fool. The color was so unpolluted; no visible impurities whatsoever. Had he boiled it all as well? Was the week he hadn’t seen him enough to fill it up by himself? Had he had help? His elusive friend?