Lenith pulled Pelinda from the dazed comfort of the high-backed window bench and dragged her through the bright aisle, jammed with disheveled morning travelers. She did not see much of the inrail’s interior on her first trip. It was meant to seat sixty but about ninety had packed into its aisles. Some denizens were sitting on other’s laps on the benches and open booths.
They were almost to the exit when Pelinda made a heaving sound. The rest of the passengers cleared fast.
Lenith forced her roommate through the open doorway toward the hot, shifting concrete street. She let go to wrangle herself from the mass of bodies returning to their positions.
Pelinda stumbled, tripped, and collapsed to the ground. Her untied hair frizzed out across the dirty pavement. Lenith wanted to let her deal with it on her own. She was already worn out, tired, and feeling sick under the midday suns. Not the same, intoxicated sick Pelinda felt; she was fed-up sick. Yet she helped the drunken Esterite find her feet anyway.
The opaque, veined walls of the Charity building took her aback. Her breath caught. A veranda flanked the first floor on either side. She realized only then, upon further inspection, this place of charity had once been a home with a sloped roof and windows that were covered with white paint. It was a two-and-a-half story, elongated house with pleasing proportions in the middle of nowhere.
The inrail continued toward the commerce ward. The faces that gawked at them were fading away.
Lenith climbed the stoop.
The house, glimmering white in the sunlight, took on a stained yellow tint under the overhang’s shadow. The veined slats were cracked; not decorative. At the threshold, Lenith looked to her polka-dotted shoes and spotted a scuff on the toe. She came to a standstill.
Pelinda entwined their arms. It was the only way she could keep upright. Her pores breathed the oily remains of Salim Solem. Her brown locks were all in chaos.
Wonder if Marlic knows Lenith thought. His good friend is a raging medicator.
Lenith peered in through the automatic, clear doors keeping her from Charity. Far more people just like her roamed inside. It was hard to move forward. Her roommate could not make her budge.
A frantic, sober desperation displaced Pelinda’s stupor.
“Why do you stop?”
“What if I don’t want their Charity? What if I say No and get right back on that inrail?”
“You must go. In time you get work and you will not go, but for now you must. It is how they know you are theirs. They will come for you if you say No.”
Pelinda won. The glass doors parted along their automated tracks and granted entrance.
Everything was painted a shade of brown inside, smelling of dust and unwashed bodies. Non-loadbearing walls had been removed from the first floor. Support pylons remained. The third door was attached to a railing that kept customers single-file as they exited through a mechanical scanner.
Pelinda cut in front of Lenith to fetch a beige bag hanging from a rack where coat hooks might have once been. Lenith had scavenged a house of similar design once. She remembered it distinctly in the moment. History labeled the design as an Elongation Home. Long, narrow, meant to stack neatly side-by-side.
A line of customers wrapped into one of the short aisles, waiting to reach a man behind a wooden counter to return or replace jars and bottles. In one hand they all held an overstuffed bag, and in the other hand they clutched their identification cards.
Pelinda tossed the beige bag over to Lenith. “We focus on clothes and things. I buy food at better store so do not worry. We each get one bag. No more.”
The most popular items were found on rows of flat, long tables in the front—jars of juice and Glargle, brushes and combs, soaps and perfumes. Beyond the tables were aisles. Their shelving units were as tall as Lenith’s shoulders. She wandered down one with Pelinda stumbling close behind. The fall had shaken most the numb out of her.
A Chimayri enrollment sign pointed any potential recruits to a flight of stairs near the far back corner. Tattered, discounted furniture created a barrier between the aisles and the stairway.
Refilling stations for select jarred drinks lined the leftmost wall—most of which were Glargle nozzles. A bald man with a bag wrapped around his fist ambled into Lenith’s aisle, collecting shampoo. Pelinda plucked the last of the green bottles up before he could take it. He grumbled and moved on. It was the size of her palm, no more than enough to last a few days.
Pelinda dumped whatever she wanted into the beige bag. Soaps, a packet of three wash tokens, even hypocritically dipped into the food section to toss a bag of Tamlin crackers in “because they taste good and are not in normal store.”
Lenith became fixated on a mother and father trading spite by the furniture while their young, blond boy bounced on a light blue couch.
They seemed to speak in waves of frustration, which lulled into quiet barbs when strangers came near. But Lenith was not close enough to pique their insecurities.
Standing beside the nostril hygiene products at the end of the aisle, Lenith could hear them clearly. She grabbed a pack of tweezers and pretended to read over the label.
“—our son,” the mother said, “That program will make him their slave. I don’t want my little boy being a soldier.”
“I’ll take him down to the Hub tomorrow. Sort it out. You don’t have to do a thing. He’ll have a better life.”
“He will? I won’t have to do a thing? Since when are phinnies more important than our family? Go down to the employment center for once. I did. Why can’t you? Get a job or get out of our lives. My son is my son and he’s not ever going to be the Chimayri’s.”
“We’ve been trying to save. We’ve been trying but it’s not enough. Even if I got a job, I’d lose Charity. We wouldn’t save a single, damn phinnie.”
Lenith glimpsed the bouncing boy. No older than three years, oblivious of the argument, pleased with how he could defy gravity and how it brought him back down. His titters filled the silence that divided the two adults. Lenith looked back to them. Their glares said more than their mouths ever could. The man was bound to burst. The woman’s face contorted. They were moving to embrace when—
“You do not need nose plucks,” Pelinda said and dropped teeth cleansers into the bag. “Now let us find clothes. You have room for some.”
When clothes puffed out from the top of the beige bag, Lenith took the crumpled sheet of paper Marlic gave her to a special checkout nook. A disinterested woman on the other side of the counter tapped the scrawled digits into a mounted display and ran a black bar over the bag. A miniature screen filled with its every content.
“Have you already been charged your entrance fee? No? Let me tack that on for you.”
Ξ
Back at Apt 35, Lenith rifled through her overstuffed bag in search of a thin red shirt she had shoved to the bottom. The worn out, defective clothes she draped over the foot table smelled of faded detergent.
Two pairs of pants had scuffs and rips. The brand new red shirt had a darker red dye stain splotched right on the chest. A run split the seam of the sheer, turquois shirt Pelinda had convinced her to buy. It would have to be tossed down the floor’s trash chute without access to someone like the Halibreds to stitch it. They had passed a fabric shop on the inrail back home. Everything inside looked too expensive.
Pelinda had swatted at Lenith when she pointed at the panties bin in the middle of the Charity clothing section. “I buy you better underwear,” she had said. Lenith would have preferred to have at least a couple extra. Without them, the wash tokens would be used in a matter of days.
Teeth cleansers, soap, a silver bracelet, wash tokens, a digital city map, and the pile of clothes: These things belonged to Lenith, and they all fit on a foot table alongside a pile of books that were not hers.
She had started out the ennead with a ‘charitable’ 200 phinnies. The trip to Charity left her with fifteen to her name.
Through the cracked bedroom door came Pelinda’s muffled anger. She spoke to Rubin. The two of them had been dating for over a year, Lenith found out, and their conversations tended to consume far too much time—especially when it turned into an argument. It always turned into an argument. First came silken whispers of love, then a slight change of tone, followed by screams all the way to climax and disconnect.
Lenith spread the thin, transparent map out and laid it over her knees. The handle it was wrapped around had a blue button on the end.
When pressed, the sheet turned to an interactive map of the city. The borders of Sudbina made the shape of a bloated, uneven arch that was narrower on the southwestern tip than the southeastern one. The Hub was separated from the rest of the city by the river at the southwestern edge. The illustration hid it under a massive, blank spot.
Another blank glob spread across the dilapidated industrial ward Lenith had gleaned on the inrail. The far north end of the city no longer existed to new cartographers.
Shops and restaurants, as well as services, were all clumped together with the residential areas south of the industrial ward. Each building in this part of the map—represented by an outline of their general shape—was marked by initials that were then listed and explained in a scrolling list below.
Lenith found Kisset 3, labeled Ki3, and traced her finger down along the path she took from the Hub her first day. The sprawling park’s consumed a large, spacious area demarcated as Wandering Uldor. It, like the Hub had no shapes or details within, but for what Lenith assumed were different reasons—to wander and explore.
She dragged her finger back to her apartment and hunted for Fortunate Cores Hospital. It was a somewhat rectangular structure with a curved façade. A green circle around the facility made it stand out among the rest of the nearby buildings. It was north of her apartments. The Red Route inrail went past the front entrance.
A sharp, defiant scream echoed from Pelinda’s room, followed by another. Lenith lifted her attention to the slightly ajar door. Somewhere inside, Pelinda’s feet shuffled closer. Lenith rolled the map around its handle, tapped the blue button, and tucked it under her clothes. It was the only thing she had picked out on her own while Pelinda went off to buy more empty jars to fill with Salim Solem.
A chirp came from Pelinda’s communicator and the Esterite retreated before she could reach the door.
Screaming recommenced.
Lenith’s eyes landed on the white book on top of the literature stack. Its lonesome title read Us’mevani Ebil. She took it, turned the front cover with a satisfying crack, and sank back into the cushions. A groove marked a point near the middle of the book. Not a single word was written in Korvish. It all looked like mangled, jumbled letters with too many apostrophes and elongated words.
As she flipped from page to page, it became apparent that Marlic Askel had written the whole book in Strian. Yet, she was wrong. Turning to a notch in the pages, she found what appeared to be the first chapter, written a second time in Korvish runes.
The first paragraph read ‘Two dots crossed the horizon upon the setting suns. And though they often drifted apart, there were times when they appeared tangled in each other’s arms, uncertain of the connection that always drove them together. It was here that he and she felt liberated for the first time since childhood, and it was here that they laid down. Of all the things they had been, free was never one of them.’
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