The Five Tracks Hotel
A pale foundation of layered schist held up the rest of the grand structure. The hotel itself was made mostly of a dark wood that had been sanded back and blackened, to create a sharp relief against the ever-bright backdrop of the Bazaar. Seven levels, each slightly smaller than the next, sat atop of one another and were flanked at every corner by carvings of strange faces and unusual creatures. Just above the first level, thick beams, jutting from all four sides of the hotel, gave way to latticed pergolas that obscured the hotel’s cascading courtyards and tiered lawns from the Tangled City above.
Mar squatted barefoot on one of these immaculate lawns with their feet impressed on the cold, dewy grass and their back leant against the cold schist walls. The red tussock grasses that lined the base of the wall tickled Mar’s ankles as they struggled to regain their breath. Grown voices rose from the warm light of a tiered lawn above. Mar’s parents were among the noise, laughing and cheering in some unknown and uninteresting celebration. Mar hadn’t the time for it, they hadn’t the time for anything. Mar was being chased and they had to hide long enough for their pursuers to lose interest.
Mar looked down at their wrist screen, and flicked open its plastic cover. Three orange dots blipped on the face of the screen from three different directions and moved closer to the center with each progressive blip. The warmth of Mar’s breath fogged the round face but did not completely hide the blips that now flashed in muted splotches through the haze. The blips told Mar one thing: The pursuers were closing in. Luckily Mar was hiding in the shadows away from prying eyes, and away from the revealing glow of the hotel, on one of the most secretive of lawns on the grounds.
Mar snuck a look over the schist and up the tiered lawns in the hope of spying their pursuers before they got too close. They saw nothing but the well-lit and perfectly manicured grasses leading up the Five Tracks Hotel. It was an impressive building, especially for a child, but from this angle it was imposing and almost frightening in size. It fascinated and scared Mar in equal parts. How big was it really? How far did its corridors go? How many secrets were hidden behind closed doors? Who or what occupied the top two floors?
If there were answers to these questions they were snatched away from Mar before they could conjure them. A loud crack sent a chill down Mar’s spine and with their heart racing, they looked up past the hotel and into the great Tangled City above. Mar found the source of the disturbance immediately. A hover trader, floating high above on their platform, was listing at a sharp angle after having put their balancing pole through what appeared to be the stained glass window of a nearby building. Thankfully the trader’s goods had been tied down and wrapped in netting, though it looked like a large contingent of fruit and vegetables had found its way through the nets and had now joined the procession of shattered glass pieces that drifted aimlessly into the air around the trader’s platform. It was not an entirely uncommon sight in the Tangled City lanes. A Hover trader’s platform could hardly be called a ship, it had no engine nor any other automated form of propulsion, they were, as simple as the name suggested, a platform that floated in the gravity-free air that filled the upper parts of the Bazaar. All that kept it from floating out into the stars was a series of hanging weights that, when balanced with the trader's load, kept the platform at just the right level. To move the platform, the trader usually wielded a balancing stick. A paddle of sorts, with a soft end, that could be pushed against buildings to shift the platform in the right direction. Unfortunately for this trader, they had not chosen a sure footing and had instead plunged their long stick right through a precious glass window. Only 20 seconds had passed since the loud crack that signaled the Trader’s error, before some of the bazaar’s auto-cleaners had appeared out of nowhere to scoop up the mess and disappear with it back into the same mysterious nowhere again. Mar took a long breath and ducked back down behind the wall, but the relief was short lived. Mar only had a split second to see the three dots become one, as they converged on the center of their wrist screen, before getting tapped on the shoulder. Mar’s stomach dropped, it was the pursuers, all three of them, and they had found their quarry...
“Found you!” Said the tallest of the three. “Your turn to be it!”.
“How did you find me?!” Mar replied, with honest disbelief.
An out of breath boy with a portly face and a floppy bowl cut said “well, we saw your shiny hair! It was sticking up above the wall. We almost didn’t see it because of the crash above, but Tykon’s dad let us borrow his flashlight…” the taller of the 3 slapped the portly boy on the arm before he could continue. “You weren’t supposed to tell Mar that, Gostor!”.
Mar was shocked. “Hey! That’s cheating! I thought we agreed. No flash lights”.
The third kid spoke up. She was well-dressed and had her dark hair pulled back by a headband that was encrusted in lots of tiny, glistening stones. She spoke to Mar in a way that was far too prim for her age, but at the same time more sympathetic than her two companions. “We had to Mar, we’d been searching for you for an awfully long time. Gostor’s mother told us to fetch you 10 minutes ago, she said we must be getting to bed soon if we’re to go to the Wind Markets tomorrow”. Gostor’s cheeks reddened at this. He was at the age when even the mention of his parents was a source of embarrassment, likely because it somehow made him look less “cool” in the eyes of older more independent kids like Tykon. Mar patted the schist dust off their pants and got up. “FINE” they said “but tomorrow night, no flashlights. Promise?”. “Promise” all three friends replied as they began to make their way up the tiered lawns back towards the hotel. They talked about inconsequential things, about the crash they saw, and the excitement they all had for tomorrow. Exchanging idealisms and trading dreams about what their first trip to the Wind Markets might offer.
As they came closer to the hotel, a sense of unease came over Mar. there was something wrong. Something felt off. The warm embrace of the Five Tracks turned deathly cold. Suddenly the sounds of the party and the bustle of the Tangled City above fell silent. Mar looked up and then back towards the hotel. The lights had gone out. The party was no longer there. The faint laughing of Mar’s parents was replaced by total darkness. Mar turned to their friends, suddenly panicked and confused. “Wha- what happened to the party? Where are my parents? Where is everyone? I swear I just saw them”. Gostor replied, without a hint of childhood compassion left in his voice. “They’ve disappeared Mar.” He threw the flashlight away into the surrounding gloom. “flashlight or not” he continued. “you’ll never see them again. They vanished when you left them Mar. When you went through the track on Meridian. When you went through without them”. Mar was drowned by a sudden wave of guilt and grief. They cloyed for air but were stunned into motionless as they were overcome with grief. Tears streamed down their face. Mar knew they were there but they couldn’t feel them. In the distance, a single lamp light illuminated an imposing wooden door. It swung open revealing nothing but lightness beyond. Before Mar could do or say anything, they were being pulled away from their friends towards the open door and into the light abyss.
Scent is an invisible memory. It is the sting of hot water against cold skin. Its nostalgia washes over you. Always a surprise, but rarely unwelcome. The scent of the Five Tracks Hotel was many things to many people. It was the waft of a sweet perfume, riding upon an air conditioned chill. It was the warm and irritable trimmings of fresh cut grass. It was a metallic tang that somehow felt natural and it was a wooded breeze through new spring growth, that somehow didn’t.
When Mar awoke from their nightmare, the scent that filled their panting breath was nothing if not a poor attempt to mask the decades old smell of cigar smoke with excessive potpourri. It was a handsome musk born from an unlikely partnership. It had always been this way. Or perhaps it hadn’t. It couldn't have stayed the same, not for all these years. Time wasn't kind to the senses. In truth the strange sense of nostalgia Mar felt made them anosmic to everything else. It wasn't really the scent they were experiencing. It was the embracing, hypnotic pull of their home.
Sitting up in their bed now, with their dark eyes wide open, Mar gazed out towards the lights of the distant activity surrounding the Five Tracks Hotel. It had been two decades since Mar was forced through the track on Meridian, two decades since they had left their parents behind, two decades for their guilt to soften, and yet, the fragments of those events still stabbed at Mar in their dreams.
An age ago the hotel was once the beating heart of the Bazaar, but now it slept in the shadows, amidst a tangle of structures that wrapped and twisted and grew around each other. They called it the Tangled City. Giant buildings danced around one another at impossible angles stretching out in every direction. The higher you went into the mess of this twisted metropolis, the less gravity exerted its strength. Construction was no longer bound by the idea of the “right way up”. Here, at the top of the Tangled City, giant steel branches were smothered in knots of shops and restaurants that threw themselves out in every direction towards the pedestrians that floated along invisible streets. Somewhere, far beyond the tangle was the Wind Market, a place long forgotten and lost to the annals of time. One place, Mar was certain, would never have crossed their mind again had they not dreamt of it’s name just now and yet, now that Mar had dreamt it they found that they were wondering about its fate.
The dream had stirred up repressed memories of the moments after the Collapse, of Mar’s painful separation from their parents and of the circumstances by which Mar had come to live here, under the creaking canopy of the Tangled City, with the three Nanas. The Nanas, a childhood nickname that had arisen from confusion but had stuck out of affection, were three older human women who had recently retired and were now living out their latter years together in the finery of the Five Tracks Hotel. When hearing about the Collapse and shortly there after witnessing a young Mar stumble out of the track gate from Meridian, they quickly rushed to Mar’s side. If there was any doubt in their minds that they would take care of the child, they were soon extinguished by the tears that ran down Mar’s face, greyed by the ash that shrouded their complexion. As the young Mar’s composure slowly returned and they felt sufficiently warmed by the presence of the Nanas, and by the hot Rumpaw milk they had prepared for them, Mar began to explain what had happened, between intermittent quivers. Mar talked about the flashes that had blinded the night sky and the loud rumbling tones that had made Mar’s whole body wobble from the inside. They talked about the unshielded looks of panic that spread across their parents' faces and their parents' desperation to get Mar to the Meridian side of the track gate.
For cycles upon cycles to follow, Mar was riddled with what they’d later understand as survivor guilt. Mar’s timing had been fortunate, and they were privileged even to have had a place to escape in the first place, but their parents had never stepped through behind them. Even as a child, the sacrifice was not lost on Mar. People romanticise the final act of love and while it was certainly love that saved Mar that day, it was small consolation, for Mar knew their parents had given up their own lives to save their child.
Eventually Mar’s initial shock began to fade, and they came to accept their new reality. Living here in the Bazaar with the Nanas, Mar was able to slowly emerge from the protective shell they had thrown around themself even if the trauma remained a defining moment in Mar’s life. The remainder of Mar’s childhood had been defined largely by the autonomy the Nanas had given Mar and the self-sufficiency that arose from it. This self-sufficiency blossomed into rebellious independence in Mar’s adolescence, as they began to explore beyond the grounds of the Five Tracks Hotel. Before too long, Mar was skating the lower streets of the Tangled City, discovering the colourful oddities and relaxed secrets of one of the Bazaar’s four great markets. But even still, the ghosts of their childhood trauma would visit Mar in each lazy daydream and every fiendish nightmare.
Recently though, Mar’s mind had been blissfully preoccupied by the steadily increasing flow of new and returning “guests” that were now tearing through along the threadbare jade carpets of the Five Tracks’ Halls. It felt odd, after decades of quiet and uncertainty, but it appeared the galaxy was finally beginning to move again. They were approaching a new galactic epoch, and though it would look very different to its predecessors, people were organising and scheming and busying themselves once more. Those who had hunkered down to weather the aftermath of the Collapse were now emerging to assess the damages... and the opportunities. On top of this, the rise of the Harmony had expedited this reawakening, confirming once again to Mar, the universal allure of power.
It all made sense of course. People yearned for the old times. Over the next few cycles Mar would here constant references to this, as the words of glory, and halcyon were thrown back and forth as recklessly as those battlecruiser salvos that haunted their memories. Mar did concede that life was probably easier for many back then. But, in truth, they hated this attitude. There were countless parts Mar missed of their old life, not least their childhood, but having learnt so much over the years, they had reconciled with its unsustainable trajectory. Mar wanted to see the galaxy flourish anew, but to their mind, this return to normality, this wistful gaze into the past, would lead them all blindly toward repeating their mistakes.
Mar’s wakefulness was too burdensome now to return to sleep and so they resolved to get up and out from their single bed beneath the lights, and head out on their daily routine. When Mar had first arrived at the Five Tracks Hotel, they would wait every day and night, outside the atrium that contained the track to Meridian, wishing with all their might that their parents might walk through. Hope for this reunion eventually dimmed over the years, but the visits never ended for Mar, who had made it a matter of routine now to spend time every day watching the new guests come and go from the tracks in the Atrium.
On morning’s such as this, as the traumas of Mar’s past were close to the surface of their thoughts, they found visiting the ever more lively atrium an ideal distraction. On the way down the darkwood and jade lined corridors toward the track entrances, Mar mused on the etymology of their home. The hotel was named for the five tracks that led directly into the Bazaar, through the hotel’s atrium, but why was such a place even called a hotel when it lacked so much of what made a place such? It had no purpose built lobby and no check-in hubs. No bellbots to take your luggage and no flickering old concierge to help navigate the great Bazaar beyond its walls. It was more of an oversized lodge than anything else. No Mar thought to themself, adjusting their line of reasoning. It’d earned this ill-suited moniker for one very specific reason. Though it was in every sense a housing complex, it was also a transient place, for transient people. People came and went from the Five Tracks frequently and with little fuss. So it was for the hotel, and so it was for most of the Heavens Bazaar. No matter how at home you felt here, or how many times you visited the Bazaar, some small part of you always felt like a guest. The host though benevolent and unseen, was forever watching. You could feel its presence, always. The Bazaar belonged to no one but the Bazaar itself. It was as if it were a great mammalian creature, swimming through the multiverse, allowing small barnacles of life to cling to its sides. Many guests would join for the journey, but only the host, and its silent motivations, knew its destination...
Mar was so lost in their daily ritual that they almost didn’t see her.
A woman about Mar’s age, with dark hair, stood at the bustling exit from the track on the third ring. She looked somewhat overwhelmed amidst the steady flow of foot traffic, but held her cool well, Mar thought. She was older now, and she wasn’t wearing the gem studded headband she had been wearing in Mar’s dream, but it had to be her. Mar’s stomach dropped and a warmth surged toward their chest. They were stunned by this unexpected appearance but also by the coincidence that had brought the old friend from Mar’s dream to their doorstep the very next morning. For the first time in two decades, Mar was within shouting distance of someone from her past, someone from their life before the Collapse, and someone who they hoped, more than anything, might just remember their parents. The thought welled inside Mar with feverish anticipation. If anyone of their childhood friends recalled the past as well as Mar did, it would be her. Mar lept from the ledge they were sat on, and started through the crowded atrium towards their old friend, hoping along the way that Kelii would remember them.
