Chapter 7

I wake up to clattering. Sure enough, Tori is up and running around her small, sideways apartment. I watch as she grabs handfuls of tools and what I assume she thinks are useful items. She shoves them in all sorts of pockets on her jumpsuit.

“Oh, good! You’re finally awake.” Tori drops a plate with some stale bread and a hard boiled egg. She shrugs apologetically, “I know it prob’ly isn’t what you’re used to.”

“Thank you,” I say, scarfing it down. I haven’t eaten since the sandwiches Tori made last night. I eat the food while Tori runs around and packs. I tilt my head, “Where are you going?” 

“We are goin’ to get fake passports,” she corrects. 

I chuckle nervously. “Did you say fake passports?” 

She raises her eyebrows at me. “What else would they be?” 

“Real ones,” I say. 

“Ha! Those would take months to process, and y’don’ have that type of time.” 

I nervously crack my knuckles. “There is no way to expedite them?” 

“I dunno what expedite means, but it sounds like fancy people shit to me.” She adds, “pardon my bluntness.”

I hesitate, still reluctant to fall into step with this plan. “We get them from criminals?” 

“Jeff? Nah, he’s no criminal,” She waves me off. I do not interrupt to explain that fake passports are illegal, and that those who make them are, indeed, criminals. “We just walk up, place an order like it’s a pizza, an’ come back in a day or so, whenever he tells us to be expecting them.”

“What? Is it that easy?” I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t know much about breaking the law. I bite into the egg. It has no seasoning, but I swallow it down gratefully.

“With the right kinda money, anythin’s possible.” She grins and rainbows her arms. 

I stammer. “If you had the money this whole time, why did you wait?”

She laughs, the type of laugh that gets louder and more winded as she goes along. “I have money. Must be that dry, Stayer sense-a humor.”

“I do not think I follow…” My words come out as a mumble. 

“You’re buyin’,” she motions in my direction. 

I nod. “That is a fine idea, if I were to have funds on me.”

“Y’don’t have money?” She furrows her brow. “Y’said you have sway.”

“I said sway, not money!”

Tori blinks, “Is sway not Staykar for money?”

Now it’s my turn to laugh. Tori’s drawn brows deepen. I rub the back of my neck. “I only brought enough drown to pay for Roomba. I wasn’t exactly expecting to be kidnapped.”

Her expression changes from confusion to suspicion. “Are you holdin’ out on me?” 

“No, of course not,” I insist. 

“It’s just, how’d you think this was going to work without cash, anyhow?” 

“Oh,” I stammer, “I figured we could earn it, like you normally would.” 

“I’m not pickin’ through that garbage for a couple hundred drowns worth of scraps. It would take months to earn enough for not one, but two shinin’ passes. Money isn’t the main pay here, Aubrey! Ya don't just get a job and get a couple drowns at the enda the day”

I cross my arms back, a little confused by her dialect, but using context clues to manage. “I do not see why you are complaining. That is what you do for a living!” 

“For useful shit, yeah,” she agrees. 

“Well my opinion happens to be that passports to return home are useful… stuff.”

“They’ve seen us at the trash pile anyhow, that’s where they’ll be checkin’.” Tori nods at her own words, like they’re final. 

I shake my head. They only checked the trash pile because they watched me jump down a trash chute. I make to object, but Tori cuts me off, “We’re wastin’ time. Let’s just hit the road an’ see what happens.”

“We are not wasting time; we need to come up with a way to earn some money,” I counter, “It’s called a plan.” 

“Oh Aubrey, you don’t earn nothin’ down here.” She gestures around her apartment, but I’m sure she means to refer to the Mantle. “That’s old school. You take things, make ‘em better, and trade ‘em off for things ya need.” 

I rub my temple. “Okay then, what do you suggest?” 

Tori’s eyes trace me up and down. Her eyes linger on my legs before she looks up at me with falsely innocent eyes. I can feel my human side blushing. 

Voice low, Tori says, “I mean, how much do you really need two legs?” 

“I already told—”

She raises her hands. “I know. I know. I just think I could whip up somethin’ that’ll still work just fine.” 

“Stop trying to sell my body parts. It’s creepy!” I snap. 

“Well then you come up with a better idea.” 

“I have plenty of better ideas,” I sigh. I remove my watch from my hand. All my jewelry are heirlooms, but this is the most expensive. “Let’s sell this.” 

She raises her eyebrows. “It’s broken.” 

“I thought you were a mechanic,” I say, trying out the same mocking tones I’ve heard her use.

“I’m an engineer, actually.” She mimics offense, but she takes the watch from my hands. She grabs a thin, delicate screwdriver from her crossbody fanny pack, unscrews the back of it, pokes around for a second, and screws the metal coating back on. She flips it over with a proud smirk and flicks the face of it. It starts ticking promptly. “There!” 

I take the watch from her hands and inspect it. As claimed, it’s as good as new, ticking away at a steady rhythm. 

⇥

To my understanding, the Northern Market is about an hour away if we walk around the trash pile. When I ask if we will be taking transportation, like Tally and I had, Tori laughs in my face. 

Instead, she explains we are going through the trash pile. 

“I don’t want to walk through trash,” I complain. 

Tori, short to the point, asks, “Why?”

“It will stink, for one.” 

“Nah, they have odor shields in there.” 

“It’s dirty,” I persist. 

“Not any dirtier than the trash I dug you out of yesterday.” When I move to make my third objection, she cuts me off with a hand wave, and shrugs. “Look, I know you’re some princess or somethin’, but we got a lot to do. Just don’t touch it. Or close your eyes for all I care.”

I’ve annoyed her.

“I am not a princess,” is all I can say. 

My human foot burns in my boot, and my previous soreness from falling settles in my bones. Every step on my human side feels like an obstacle, while my cyborg leg moves swiftly. 

Tori’s isn't affected by the distance at all, which I suppose makes sense. It seems as though the Market is a place she frequents. 

The Overflow looks intimidating from the outside. From my angle below, it appears as though the junk pile touches the base of the floating country above. I zoom in on a few notable additions to the pile - cyborg parts and mech replacements. In fact, the Overflow in majority was caused by the sudden discarding of mechanical parts due to the Glitch. 

The entrance isn’t fancy; a hole in the wall reinforced with a blue painted frame. Above it, a skinless, plexiglass hand appears to be giving the bird to all who enter here.

We follow a path marked by little sketches of Gray Bats. They glow green in the dark. The ground also has some sort of bioluminescence to light our way. Despite being an actual tunnel of garbage, it’s… well, it’s rather pretty.

“What is with the bats?” I break the silence.

Tori looks to me in surprise. I point at the glowing bat on the wall as we turn toward its marked tunnel.

“Oh, yeah.” Tori smiles, “A group of us marked these paths after most a’ the Overflow was cleaned up. Figured no one above was gonna fix it, so we made do.”

“You and your friends marked all these tunnels?” 

Tori nods proudly.

“Where are your friends now? Off to complete their next public service?” I ask, intrigued and impressed.

“They’re around.” Tori replies lightly. “Anyway, y’see this floor here too?”

Tori goes on to explain the idea behind the flooring and goes on and on until thankfully we reach sunlight.

As soon as we make it to the Market, I realize the Mantle is a world of differences from the capital. It’s astonishing that this place is even part of the same country. The roads are completely unpaved but wrappers and bags are plastered down to it like a patina. Buildings are old and many have seen better days; I assume damage done by the Overflow. The larger, unpatched cracks are filled with plants or pretty bits of glass. They are certainly resourceful people down on the Mantle. I notice a bat scratched into the paint on a nearby building. 

There are few people out and about. Those we do pass eye me, see Tori, and keep walking. Tori smiles at me nervously. “We really ought to get you somethin’ more suitable to wear.” 

I look back at the Overflow. There is a distinct line holding back the majority of the pile. A row of long buildings fill me with a mild vertigo. I could swear these structures are even taller than the ones above. I scan the buildings, measuring them. My analysis confirms they are shorter than the capital. The structures are so tall, they look like they’re poking the under belly of the Upper Crust, but my measurement confirms they are about 173 feet too short.

“Do you think we would be able to go up one of the buildings?” I ask Tori. “I would be interested in making my own map of the Mantle since it seems there are none available?”

“I don’t think you’d see much more than dust and discards.” She looks up with me. We can’t see the streams from the trash chutes, but I can hear a steady tinkling of glass and metal colliding in the distance. It comes to my attention that she sees this stone sky almost every day. The Upper Crust hangs over the Mantle almost completely. Everything looks so dark. Like dusk. 

“You’d be surprised what my left eye could see.” I say.

“Oh-hoo, okay tough guy.” Tori grins, tapping my shoulder with a fake punch.

I shake my head, “it is not a flaunt, I am just being honest.”

Tori barks out a surprised laugh. She grins, but it fades. 

Tori kicks a rock out of her way. “No one goes up there anymore. We build long, not up.” She makes a sweeping motion over the dusty land. “The Overflow got people scared.” 

She leads me further into the Northern Market. It’s shop after shop, with some pop up tents nestled in between. Vendors shout out to people mingling in the streets—more people than I’ve seen in Delmoun yet. 

Tori walks through them all with confidence. I shrink behind her and follow closely, one hand hovering over the belt at her waist. Just in case, I tell myself. The crowd breaks for Tori, or rather, Tori muscles her way through, and we move quickly.