[Fiction] Lady Of The Night

[Nightfall]

It was an overcast night in New York City, the last of the day's heat rising from the pavement. A faint breeze stirred the muggy air, cooling the skin of the scantily clad women who stood on the street-corners and draped themselves on prospective customers. Most were thin and dull-eyed from drugs and disease, the hopelessness of their situation shining forth from under the overpainted faces and skimpy attire. These women would live and die in this line of work unless a miracle happened - and even in the age of novas, those were few and far between on the streets.

A slender brunette walked down the street without fear, her sleek black garments a stark contrast to the gaudy bits of lingerie the prostitutes wore. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but her looks were extremely striking regardless. The men on the street eyed her hungrily as she swayed through the crowd, unerringly picking out the girls who were underage. "Come with me," she would tell them, and unable to resist the command of her voice, each one would obey.

Their pimps would naturally object until she lowered her sunglasses, revealing eye-shaped windows into the midnight sky... or the void of space. Lost in that gaze, they would slink away at her order, taking the older members of their strings with them. She had no concern for the women; it was the girls who were her priority.

She led the girls away into a better part of town and a warehouse converted into a single-story block of apartments. There, they found more girls who were clean, well-fed and seemingly happy. The others took them in and showed them around, while the woman made her way to an older-style computer and began to type in names.

The doorbell rang. She stood up and went to answer it, revealing a middle-aged couple of Caucasian extraction. "Have you found her?" one of them asked hopefully as she let them inside.

"Da," she replied. One of the girls held her hand to her mouth and ran to the couple when she saw them. There was much embracing and joyful tears between the trio as the star-eyed nova looked on. Eventually (and after a donation from the couple) they left, and the woman turned to her computer.

Posters adorned the walls of the converted warehouses, photographs of pretty girls and the nova herself. These were the girls who had no families or couldn't go home because of trouble there, the ones who found other ways to make a living than by selling themselves. She did the odd spot of modelling herself, but generally eschewed the highlight except for her campaign against teenage prostitution.

Her life had been destroyed before it had even begun. But these girls would have a ray of hope where she and others she had known didn't.

And each night, she walked the streets like she had for most of her life. But the reason and her business were now different.

No more girl would be forced into prostitution if Irini Mikhailova, the Russian nova many New Yorkers had taken to calling 'Lady of the Night', had any say in it.