#johnmurry

my face. I cracked my neck side-to-side and set my face in its usual cocky expression and headed back to the lab to find Emori. Shoving everything into the deepest parts of my mind and hoping it would stay locked there.

I knew, in reality, it had only been a few hours, but fuck... It felt like days. The machines she was hooked up to were beeping softly and in that steady rhythm, that soothed my frayed nerves just enough to stop my hands from shaking. Abby had that crazy sci-fi looking helmet on her and there was a monitor with a diagram of her brain and blue lights flickering through it. Watching her lying there was so much harder than it should be. It pulled at something inside me. Abby said that she was definitely going to wake up... unless there were more complications. This wasn't the big one, the one that was going to kill her. But that one was coming, it was only a matter of when. I got up from the chair next to the bed and moved over to her, her temperature was fluctuating constantly. Not to the point of a fever or anything, but it was up and down a lot. I pulled the blanket down to her waist. I picked up the cotton swabs on the trolley next to the bed and dipped one into the jug of water, running it lightly over her dry lips. Luna was stood next to me now, after pulling herself out of her Zen Master meditation in the corner. "John." She tilted her head and moved around the bed. "The numbers on this one are different now. And there are more lights." She was looking at the monitor with Raven's brainwaves. She was right, but I'd noticed it already and managed to figure it out with a quick search on the tablet Abby left with Raven's stats. The numbers were only slightly different, but it was enough to get me curious. Not enough to get Abby back in here. "I know." I looked up at her. "It's nothing to worry about." "Shouldn't we get Abby?" Luna asked. "No, there's no need... she's just dreaming." I stand next to her, moving my hand over the screen. "See all these here. This is her conscious mind." My fingers moving over the top bar displayed on the top of the screen, a white line was lightly dancing up and down but barely making it to the first line in the graph. "And this is her... subconscious." It wasn’t the right description but I didn't know how else to explain it to the girl that only just started to comprehend light bulbs. "The part that’s most active when we sleep." The bar marked Theta Waves had lines dancing halfway up the graph. "She's dreaming." Luna looked at me and tilted her head. "You can tell that from these pictures?" I moved back to the bed. "After a little bit of reading and..." I nodded for her to join me next to Raven. "This. The way her eyes are moving even though they’re closed." I’d noticed it as soon as the numbers started to rise. It was the only reason I'd known what to look up. “You don’t miss much do you, John?” Luna said, brushing her fingers over Raven’s forehead, she didn’t look at me when she spoke. “You see more than you let on.” “I’m a survivor; you can’t survive in this world if you don’t know what’s going on around you.” I answer with a shrug. Luna gave me one of those all-knowing looks of hers. The type of look that makes you pay attention, like your about to hear a deep insightful speech. But then she just smiled and went back to her corner to take her Zen Master pose again.

Surviving. That’s what it’s all about, right? Making it from one end of the day to the next. Waking up in the morning, hopefully not in a cage and with all your body parts still attached and intact? That last part might be wishful thinking… I can’t remember the last time I was injury-free. Since we were dumped down here like lab rats I have been hung, banished, tortured, infected with a contagious fever, tortured again, locked up, dragged across a God damned wasteland, then locked up yet again for eighty-six days. Completely alone. I’d always been a loner... But that... That was the worst fucking three months of my life. Alone with my demons and the ghosts of the idiots that created the digital devil that destroyed the world. Now, here is where things get interesting. Our fearless leader, Chancellor Thelonious Jaha - the leader of the suicide mission that led to my isolation, was now that devil’s bitch - he took the easy way out. Choosing to live half a life, half in a land of make believe, and the other he dedicated to destroying everything else. Stealing lives, memories and minds... All too weak to cope with their reality. We lived in a world full of hate, pain and envy. They shut theirs out, they lost themselves, the threw away everything that gave them a reason to live in the first place. The threw away their reasons to survive. I had no intention of returning to Arkadia after I finally made it off the island. But Emori, fellow chronic survivor - the one that got us off the small patch of haunted paradise... She wanted to go after her brother, who had become one of the first of Jaha's sheep. More like a lamb to the slaughter, he was shot upon arriving at the gate of Arkadia. Emori and I had a good run up until then, she was the ultimate con artist there was, and could talk her way out of anything, but she didn’t want to stick around after that. I saw opportunity, though. Jaha's chip-head army had grown, the guards were busy looking out, the doc was too busy watching Jaha. Bellamy was so far up Pike's ass he was wearing it like a hat, Arkadia was ripe for the picking, if you knew how and when to make your move. One thing about cockroaches... You never see them until it’s too late. When Raven joined the City of Light, that was when I really stood up and paid attention. Weak wasn’t the right word to describe her decision to brainwash herself. If anyone on the shithole planet had real pain it was her, and some of it was my fault. The bullet I’d lodged in her spine, when she was trying to twarth my revenge on the man that pulled the cord that hung me, cost her the use of her leg. But it wasn’t long before she was fighting back against the bitch in the red dress. But A.L.I.E. fought dirty. It was time to get the hell out of dodge. On a trip to medical to grab some incidentals before I bolted, I spotted Reyes. Her wrists wrapped in bandages so obvious that they may as well have put a sign reading “Suicide Attempt” over her bed. Raven Reyes would not go out like that... Not willingly. It wasn't her. It was that same digital devil wearing her like a macabre suit of flesh and bone. She didn’t even sound like herself, but it was the look in her eyes that rattled me, she tried to convince me to join the them. Her eyes were kind, she smiled at me but, her words were devious. Raven would never look at me like that, it was all the proof I needed to plunge the Reaper stick into her jugular and get us both the hell out of there. Carrying the body of a completely unconscious woman didn’t feel as heroic as you might think. She was a dead weight, by the time I made it to the rover my legs were screaming. The tips of my fingers were pressing deep into her ribs and the thigh of her good leg every time I had to adjust my grip so I didn’t drop her. The bullets started to fly the second I was through the hanger doors.

The sound of her hand cracking across my fifteen-year-old cheek reverberated out the open door and down the hallway, followed by my mother’s screeches of ”Get out! I can’t stand to look at you!” Saliva was flying from her mouth, her unfocused eyes we’re brimming with tears. She reeked of sweat and booze. Her words were so familiar they barely elicited an emotional response from me. I had come home after trying to claim my afternoon rations and was told that l had been cut-off. Missing a meal wasn’t a new thing for me, but normally because my ration point had been traded away by my mother, but cut-off? That was new. Mom had been missing work detail, also not a new development; she hadn’t shown up in nine days. I hadn’t been back to our quarters in three. So this was it, she’d finally achieved her goal of a slow painful death. All that was left to do now was find her body. Or so I’d thought as I made my way through the winding corridors. She was curled up in my bed in a ball… she looked dead until I drew closer and saw her tremble. I told her about our rations being stopped until she went back to work, which ended as I expected; ten minutes of screaming before she smacked me. I retreated to the hallway before she tried to swing at me again, my temper was making my knuckles itch, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d hit her back. So I took the high road. There was an audience gathered outside now. “Have you people got nothing better to do?” I screamed, getting into an old guy’s face. “Murphy!” Guardsmen shouted from the end of the row of tiny living quarters. “Is there a problem here?” “Oh you mean the gathering of unwelcome guests outside my door.” As if on cue the door to the quarters I was supposed to share with mother was slammed, and the locking mechanism chirped. “Yes, there is a problem here.” “Back to work!” he addressed the spectators, and then he looked to me as they moved off. “What happened to your face?” He was slightly amused. My cheek still stung and must have been burning red. For a moment a thought flashed through my mind, if I turned her in for assault and she was found in her current state she’d be floated for sure. Trading minor’s rations for urban moonshine on top of assault... I’d be assigned a new guardian and in two and half years I’d be responsible for myself. But only for a second. “Took a nap in front of a window bay.” I said, flashing my signature, cocksure smile. “Got myself a nasty sunburn.” This, of course, was completely impossible, all the outer glass on the Ark filtered out UV rays. The guard glanced at our door and the red blinking light. “Have it your way, Murphy.” He shook his head, and as he brushed passed he said quietly. “You can’t live like this forever.” ”Oh yeah?” I snarled. ”What would an Alpha station golden boy know about surviving in this place?” With a shake of his head and condescending grunt, he disappeared from view.

I came around to the front of the Ark again; people were walking around like nothing was wrong. Like they weren’t responsible for their own safety, as if the guard and the Council would keep them safe. As I said, sheep… ripe for the slaughter. I made my way to the gates; they didn’t even have a guard posted right now. I contemplated whether or not to take the few steps that would put me outside of this cluster fuck of insanity, why should I wait here to be cut down with the rest of them. If I can survive that prison camp, I can survive anywhere.

1 Silver Or Lead 2 Under A Darker Moon 3 Wrong Man 4 Defacing Sunday Bulletins 5 When God Walks In 6 Come Five & Twenty 7 One Day (You’ll Die) 8 Countess Lola’s Blues (All In This Together) 9 Miss Magdalene 10 What Jail Is Like

I loved it. The starting sequence reminded me of King Creosote & Jon Hopkins' collaborative album Diamond Mine, with the piano unassumingly blending with John Murry's guitar. His style has echoes of Springsteen and Seasick Steve; I loved the simplicity of his playing paired with his rich, grainy vocals. His lyrics really spoke to me, too. They're strikingly honest and without flair, and I respect that. In the interview afterwards (also worth watching) I related particularly to his words about music. He said that he doesn't care about technical ability, and that what's important is that there's emotional depth: "I want to feel it you know?". While I love to listen to all kinds of music, that statement really stuck with me, because engaging with music that's so raw always leaves me feeling deeply contemplative and pretty affected. So John comes with big recommendations from me - and I can't wait to check out more of his material.