Part two: Home
“Your face is unnerving; did you know that?” Hisa said with her usual frown. A sincere fellow I couldn’t hate for her painful honesty.
“Good thing I didn’t ask your opinion” even so, I had my own problems to deal with. I tried to relax in my seat as I took a breath of the fake green air in the park inside the dome, trying to process everything around me without turning insane. One month and my senses hadn’t stabilized yet… it was better than the first week, but I still felt like walking over marshmallows.
“Ellie told me you have been studying like crazy lately. Still with the idea of going to college?”
“I found other ways to be a doctor. Still, I need to study a lot” I threw a glance at her. Some shapes reached my mind, some of them expected and others, not so much, but nothing abnormal in her line of thought. “Even if I don’t end up as a doctor, I could be the best nurse you can find on this planet”.
“You’ve been saying that since you came to the orphanage”.
“And you’ve kept saying that I couldn’t since the first time. Now, I’ll prove you wrong once and for all”.
“The Home doesn’t educate doctors” Hisa was unmerciful about the institution where we both grew up. “You’ll be lucky if you can put a bandaid on a drunkard in any of the pubs of the colony” true or not, she really believed that.
I was aware of the bleak future of most orphans in The Home of the Stork. Even the smartest couldn’t get a good job in the future; even the strongest couldn’t be better than the common thug in the external ring of the dome; even the prettiest wouldn’t be able to go further than the first bar needing a waitress. And me? I was lucky enough to score a job as a maid in the very home that saw me grow from my first teens to my discharge on my seventeenth birthday.
I encouraged so many of the kids of the institution to make an effort to get a better future, but I sadly already knew that, without a family for support, one doesn’t reach very far in Colony 32.
“I can make it work, I’m sure” I replied with all my confidence, but my eye bags didn’t look very convincing to the down-to-earth woman in front of me. Always painfully honest, you could always trust in her best judgement to find a solution to any problem, even if her answers weren’t pretty nor encouraging.
“If you can heal the lost leg of Genry, I’ll believe you” she drank from her bottle and her tired eyes got lost at the fountain of that little park. “Of course, you’ll have to get a prosthetic leg first; and even before that, pay for it. How many kidneys can you spare?”
“How is he, now that you mention him?”
“Not that bad, since he got the job in that kiosk near the space elevator. He doesn’t need to walk much, he talks with a lot of people… a shame he has I am an orphan written all over his face. The people know what to do when they see that” Hisa stretched a bit and then stood up, maybe irritated? Or maybe just tired. “Wanna hang with me or are you going back to study?”
“Believe me, I want to study right now, but my master told me to chill a bit” before my head explodes in fact, she dissolved my books into pure Snow when I kept studying despite her warnings. Only if I were to take a break, would she rematerialize them… being punished for being a stubborn student. Even someone as thick headed as I found the irony on that.
“Then the Black Circle it is” Hisa grabbed me by the arm and pulled me through the external ring of the dome.
“Black Circle?” whatever that was, I’d never heard of it and the shapes it generated on my mind weren’t any good.
“Some crazy chick found an old abandoned industrial rig deep underground and, since then, she hosts ring fights” the usual dull eyes of that woman hit hard by reality seemed to gleam with a substitute for illusion. “I never thought someone would be so bold to organize something like that under the coppers’ noses but, here you have it: every weekend, during six long hours, you can see the best bruisers in town trying to reign supreme”.
“…seriously?” of course, she was serious. She never lied and her truths were now hitting me in the forehead as she dragged me down the subterranean tunnels of the city.
“Don’t you want some medical practice?” she guided me further down than the usual metro stations, further below the water treatment plants, even further below the ancient geothermal plants deep within the earth, following tunnels and corridors I hadn’t ever imagined existed there. “If you’re learning as much as you say, you’ll find a lot of broken bones to put in place down there”.
“Somehow, I’m not very excited by the idea…”
“At least, the food is free down there” when I was a restless teen, I explored the old tunnels when I was too bored and too worried to stain my new clothes in the forest. But I never thought they reached so deep. How far did we descend? Even feeling the Snow, I wasn’t able to quantify. “I don’t know how they make any money out of this, but the rewards for the fights are worth the risk” the tunnels, before covered with old and humid bricks; now seemed old forgotten primeval caverns.
But they only looked like that. I knew better. Those bricks weren’t natural, and they weren’t there three weeks ago. They were created…
“Hey, Renate! Nice seeing you here!” Anaissa didn’t even hide from me. “Never thought you would find me around”.
She was at the entrance of a really big cavern, one at least three times bigger than the deepest dome of her home. Here and there, there were industrial remnants, rusty old pipes, some dusty broken engines, and blown up boilers, but none of them ever served any purpose. As realistic as they were, they were only ugly decoration. Not a lot of people were there, but many of them congregated around the central cage as two fighters tried to best each other in unarmed combat.
“You know her!?” and, as I imagined, Anaissa organized all of this. She told me again and again that she lived for the thrill of the fight. I never thought she would go this far to scratch this itch of hers.
“Hisa, I present to you my dear master Anaissa” I sighed, not in any condition to argue with her. “Anaissa, this is my old friend and colleague at the orphanage, Hisa”.
“I know Hisa already” my master was dressed for a fight, with very tight clothing and her usual cloth over her mouth covering her tattoos. “In fact, I know some of your old classmates, if Hisa was honest about bringing all of them here to enjoy the snacks”.
“It would be outrageous having to throw away so much food” Hisa pointed to the tables out of the clamorous public. “If you excuse me, I wanna get a bite. I’ll see you later!”
Hisa was as opportunistic as she was realistic. I couldn’t blame her for jumping at the chance of a free meal, no matter how shady its origins.
“So, what’s the deal here?” still, I was a bit hurt learning about this underground circle this way.
“Not what you first thought. Try your second” first thought: simple violent entertainment some of my friends would love and she would morbidly enjoy. Second thought: this was more than it seemed at first sight. “First time I saw Colony 32, I didn’t like it, but not because of how orderly it was. Surely you started to notice strange vibes coming from the city”.
“Not yet” after recovering from my first creation, I started to feel things about everything, but nothing to Anaissa’s level. Anything around me released all kinds of strange vibes. “Maybe when my head gives me a break”.
“Then, watch the free food closely and thread from there. As for me” she tensed the bandages on her hands, “I have some fights today. Enjoy the show!” and then, she ran to the cage as the announcer called out her name”.
So, I was left alone. I could have joined the loud mass around the cage to throw some cheers for my master, but I preferred to look at what she had pointed me to.
Some distance away from the central spectacle, an impromptu staff served diverse foods to the spectators. Probably, Anaissa herself went around the poorest streets in the external ring hiring them. Popcorn, hot dogs, diverse sandwiches and drinks… not the healthiest of menus, but no patron over there was picky.
I knew most of the people in the crowd. They were what we could call the lowlifes of Colony 32. Not bad people, just humble; workers of the lowest earning jobs in the city. Some of them, on the good side of humility; others, thugified because of the harsh treatment they received in the external ring of the dome. And some, sadly, came from the Home of the Stork. I don’t condone some of the things they did for a living, but I knew where those actions came from. I couldn’t shame them, knowing they didn’t have any other way to survive.
But, now that I could see the people with my open sight, I appreciated something different: some of them more, some of them less, but all of them had a strange quality I couldn’t make out. The same could be said about the food, but in the opposite direction: one nullified the other. When someone affected by that strange vibe ate from those tables, whatever they had inside mostly vanished; not completely, but most of it was gone once they finished their inconspicuous snacks.
Intrigued, I asked for a sandwich myself. For a creation of Anaissa, it was delicious but, for me, it was something more. I identified the principle she introduced into that food: sobering.
I was trying to figure out what the real deal was when the crowd cheered with all its might the last great and mighty feat of my master.
But my eyes didn’t find Anaissa landing the final blow of her match. I found something else entirely.
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