A (hopefully) quick author's note: This is for a novelI have been working on for years now. I haven't been able to make it work. Delain Demintia and Styx were all attempts that have been posted here. I got the diea a few months back to combine this idea with "Humanistic Denial," another story of mine posted here. This is a possible opening for the novel. I'm hoping to do some serious work on it soon, but I would love feedback before I continue.

---

When Reven left, he didn’t say goodbye to Skylar. He never told Skylar. Not why he was leaving, or even that he was. He just did – one day – when the world was as it always was. The world did not change. Only people did. People changed. They came, they went, they died very often. They lived sometimes; but only in the sense that they survived what others did not.

---

People didn’t talk about it now. Just when they thought that man had done the most evil he was capable of, as a race, they managed to amaze themselves yet again. So people did not talk about it this time. But everyone thought about it.

Nikki learned quickly to lie about his age. If he told people how old he really was, they would look at him and wonder why he had survived. With a virus that was designed to kill anyone who hadn’t entered puberty, why had he survived when none of the other children had? Why had he survived and not their child? So Nikki no longer gave his age. Biology had declared him an adult, and so he was one.

There were other ways people managed not to talk about it. Sentences they left unfinished, things they would stare at. For some that was all they could do. Others tried to forget it, all of it, and pretend like children had never existed. Both managed to define the world and both managed to be an annoyance

There were no more schools, since there were no longer any children to go to them. The buildings were turned into apartments. The playgrounds were left untouched. Some were maintained factitiously. People would sometimes come and sit nearby and stare at them, as if they could serve some purpose even without the children that had once played there. These people never went in. they just stared at the jungle-gyms, the swing sets, the smoothed wood and fresh paint. They tried not to think of the smell of sweat, puke and puss. They tried to remember the time before quarantines and statistics and the mass funerals that were the accumulation of it all.

Nikki would stare at these people as he walked by and wonder if they had always been this wasted and if they had watched their children die just as senselessly.

Not that it would have made any difference. His own parents had stared uselessly from beyond thick glass as his body decided whether to be a child or an adult, whether to die or to live.

It was the other playgrounds that Nikki found himself attracted to. The forgotten ones. The ones left to rain and weeds and rust and termites. Nature had worked quickly in the three years since to hide what had once been theirs. In these the wood cracked, the bars blackened and all the green things tried to cover it up. There’d be grass and weeds and sometimes trees, all as tall as his waist and sometimes Nikki could se them swaying the wind the way that would have been magical to a child.

Nikki had taken Skylar to one once, after Reven left, after Skylar was left in Nikki’s care like something negligently left behind. Skylar had thrown rocks at it until he couldn’t find any more. Then he had screamed. Nikki came to realize not long after that that Skylar screamed often. Nikki was never able to understand what Skylar felt the need to scream about. It was never the logical thing. Skylar had lost younger siblings to the virus, but he didn’t mourn them. They were just dead. As if their lives had had no other meaning from the day they were born but to die during those few months when all of mankind seems to die. Skylar had also been older than Nikki and not in any danger himself. His body had never had to risk everything in order to stay alive. It wasn’t damaged by what had happened. There was no risk that he might still die from it. And yet he screamed from something lost in a way Nikki never could.

Maybe that was why Nikki consented to their arrangement

Skylar would provide “protection,” Nikki would endure his presence. Someone would be monitoring the both of them.