Excerpt: Ace, King, Queen

Chapter 1: Butterflies in the Dark
The cold air ravaged all of Gael’s exposed flesh, sending shivers through him, freezing the blood in his veins. Tears had come and made their marks down his cheeks, but they’d long since stopped coming. His eyes were dull and devoid of life; they were looking but didn’t see. His un-sleeved, skinny arms were locked in a weak embrace with his legs, and the only sign he was still alive was his gentle rocking motion.
He swallowed the saliva, and it roughly went down his throat. Every movement, sans the rocking motion, hurt him to perform. As he blinked, the residue of tears gripped his eyelashes together, and he didn’t have the willpower to fight for them to open again.
The crashing of waves and colliding of rocks below was drowned by the sound of Gael's heart pounding against his rib cage, each beat a desperate cry for release. The sound was the only, creepy comfort that Gael received - he knew that he was still, whether it was willing or not, still alive.

Chapter 11: Of Spades and Clubs
Dirtied by electricity, thriving on addiction and existing merely for the melodramatics; the peer is invariably a good metaphor for the world. Those that try to fight the peer are forgotten into the dust, and their efforts are often for nothing, and there is a sense of loneliness that can never be remedied. It’d been three days since Gael and Frankie had visited the peer, and the only slight change they could find was a new piece of graffiti. A new logo branded onto the world that had little chance of making it in reality.
Gael was smiling despite the emptiness he felt, easily navigating the maze of the peer. He didn’t know where he was going, but he didn’t care. This apathy was what guided him, because every dead end led to someone; trying to make their living, hiding in the shadows of their dreams, on the edges of reality. These people were the ideal targets for the competition, because they were insignificant. It felt horrible for Gael to think it, but due to their shady life styles, these people were often alone. They didn’t belong anywhere, to anyone, and nobody cared for them. It was this that made them easy to pick off, one by one.
The darkness of the night was kept at bay, the tide washing away any hint of reality. It was permanently day, and full of movement. The movement that took place in the peer was always monotonous, robotic, and devoid of emotion. It was as if the peer had lost its soul to the hunters long before Gael and Frankie had come there.