Clock lives inside his Engine. His Engine lives inside a large warehouse with thick stone walls, but Clock doesn’t live in the warehouse. He sleeps under the timekeeper and he reads the morning paper under the database wheels, and he sometimes lays across a board set over the large system of pedals that control various functions and systems, and sketches a woman with charcoal pencils on scrap paper. The woman is always the same woman, though she looks different every time. He does nothing with these sketches except to fold them carefully, and hide them in his Engine’s heart.

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Payne loves needles more than anything else. The pinch, the pain, the blood. It clears her head, and it makes the world separate for a moment into neat little slivers. And she likes it that way. People, people who would be better off not speculating, like to say she loves drugs and tattoos and pain. But she wouldn’t notice any of that, if they weren’t all delivered on the cold, uncaring, perfect promise of a needle.

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Sam is in a punk band.  It’s called Dead Kitties, and the one before that was called Armistice.  He’s the bassist for Dead Kitties, and he writes all the songs.  Nobody knows that though, because he’s the sort of bassist that stands at the back of the stage and watches their singer Lab Rat get all the free drinks and their guitarist Davey – even though he’s Welsh – get all the girls.  But it’s copacetic, because after the show Nika’ll probably launch herself at him and scream “YOU WERE SO AWESOME!” into his ear.