In the Skin, names are earned, not given.

When I first arrived here at the ripe age of twelve, I quickly became the runt of the pack. This city has a certain unfriendly bustle to it, one I was not fit for. I drifted to the outskirts of our village and only emerged when hunger began to take its toll. It always did.

Once, after several months of nameless solitude, I stealthily rounded the westernmost corner of a deserted home-- all buildings and establishments were deserted, I suppose, because they offered no relief from the brutality of the elements-- and sucked in a breath when a viper slid into view. A menacing hiss reached my ears, pulling adrenaline into my veins and sending my ever-beating heart into a chaotic arrhythmia. Animals were so scarce here, so scarce, but I knew better than to engage with a creature as dangerous as this one. When a burly member of the Skin found me there, frozen in fear, he began shouting at me in a language I did not know. A middle-aged woman soon joined him in his urging me to take action against the snake, yet when I still did not, she approached me. An unreadable emotion flashed behind her gray eyes, and she offered me my name: Salem. Peace. Defiantly, I snatched the snake with little regard for my safety. My dusty left hand slid the length of its grotesque figure, tightening around the body until it reached the reptile's head. With a quick maneuver, the reassuring crack beneath my palm told me the snake was dead.

My name remained, however. I cried throughout the night in remembrance of my own cruelty, and awoke the next morning hardened.

Five years later, I am still here. The Skin is all I have ever known, and as far as we are concerned, it is all we will ever know. Commonly known as the Outer City, this circular region I have come to appreciate is located on the outskirts of a bullseye-shaped society which houses what remains of the human race. The Pangaean Republic, they call it. I call it futile, unfair, pointless.

And yet, our thoughts here are constantly consumed by the prospect of escape, of migrating into the Inner City and claiming some semblance of leisure, of a quality of life. To reside within the towering walls of New Pangaea would be to understand safety and prosperity and protection, but us outsiders know better than to hope. Hope is, after all, an addiction. You get high on it, drinking in the sweetness of a surety that there's always a chance. That nothing is final. But when such a luxury is stripped from you, there's nothing left. To hope is to play a dangerous game, from which there is no escape.

So we don't.