Sully held the notice in his hands, rubbing his thumb along the paper as if he could smudge the words away. He was to get a roommate. He had lived alone for so long but he was a fool to think it would last forever. Most of his neighbors were strangers shoved together to make room for more. Some became families and others enemies. You had little choice. The other side, the dayside, the world beyond the gates cared little for anyone here. The Nocturnals were animals and could be shove into their tenements like cattle in a barn.

He crumpled the paper in his hands. Sully was uninterested in making friends. They would sleep on the floor and leave him alone. He didn't need some newbie underfoot plaguing him with questions about his affliction. Why do our veins glow? Why am I so tired during the day? Does this mean I'm a vampire? He rolled his eyes. There had been a number of new people who came through and all behaved like small children with their incessant questions. Many of them calmed down and adapted. A few could not. Their graves were in stacked urns in a converted alleyway. There was no use getting close.

Downtown there was a processing center tucked into the same building as the courthouse where Kathleen had said goodbye to her father. He'd held her hand through the proceedings, through the brief medical exam to confirm affliction, through her work assignment. Then, finally, they'd come to the end of the department and she had to leave him behind. He looked like a drowned rat in the hallway there, stooped and defeated. A woman in a flesh colored suit led her to a waiting room filled sparsely with others just like her.

Her father had fought for years against the formation of the city, behind closed doors and within reams of legal paperwork. In the public eye he was a senator and had to project a measured approach, one which implied he supported the segregation without actually stating it. But he hadn't been able to stop the zeitgeist and once Kathleen contracted the illness he was unable to do anything to keep her with him.

The others in the waiting room clutched suitcases and duffel bags, as many of their belongings as they could carry, and watched the large clock by the exit doors. At the end of the hour they would be shuffled onto a Greyhound bus headed for Nox, the city full of the nocturnal.