“Again? The first time you’ve been called down to the precinct in weeks and now twice in a row?”

“Ma, please, take a breath,” I say, adjusting my Specs to fit more clearly over my eyes. Automatic facial recognition is instantly triggered; the gears start shifting around the reflection of my face. I stab at the glass panel sitting innocently on my dresser to cancel. Somehow, I’m not ready to see my name flash before my eyes. To see ‘Rereader’ printed easily beside it. To see the stares and the disgust that come preinstalled with the eight letter word.

My mother stands in the doorway to my bedroom. She’s already dressed for work in her black business skirt and white blouse. When I was younger, I used to think that was too formal for a secretary and assistant. When I was younger, I wasn’t in the workplace long enough to understand how competitive it was. Or even in it at all. I don’t know whether I missed out on a life experience – a teachable moment – because of this, or if I dodged a bullet.

“It’s too exhausting. What if there’s acid rain today? How will you get home? You know I have to stay late at the office and –”

I adjust the lapels of my grey coat. “Ma,” I say. “It’ll be okay. I’m not going under today. It’s just a meeting.” Or at least, that’s what Szah told me. Whether anything out of Szah’s mouth can be trusted, is another issue altogether. For good measure, I make a show of looking out of the window at the curdling grey sky. “Besides, it already rained yesterday.”

My mother’s frown does not ease. “Still,” she says. She shifts her weight to her left foot and her lips thin. “Promise you’ll try to come back early?”

“I promise,” I say and throw in a smile for her benefit. She hugs me and we both walk to the lift together. We live on the fortieth floor, in Brightside, New City. The building is a thin, concrete column with a shallow fountain by the entrance. You’d think pissing angels would be outdated by now – you’d be wrong. There is a curly-haired, stone child fitted atop a three-tiered fountain outside the glass doors to my building. He stares blankly with empty eyes at the odd bystander, and we all try to pretend he isn’t there. I think my mother has even filed a complaint about the ‘disturbing nature of the ornament’. Perhaps old world art is just that – old world. But perhaps we also need these subtle reminders: this is what the world used to be, and this is what it isn’t anymore.

The streets of N.C. are bleak and repetitive – courtesy of the Homogenous Act, put in play before the founding of N.C. It is not the similar outsides that matter – the grey streets, mindlessly scattered with useless concrete statues and water fountains most likely filled with diluted acid rain. It is the insides that matter. The Homogenous Act was implemented on popularity, strange as it seems, but when you look a little deeper, I don’t suppose it is an accident that it fits nicely with the message the Foremen of the Republic want to send. ‘Don’t judge our cities, judge the people within.’ Judge the low crime rates, the low rate of admittance for medical attention – not because hospitals are scarce but because they’re unnecessary. Judge the happiness levels and the life expectancies of the population, judge it by the way the most important thing on their minds is debating whether the thoughts of the dead should be protected by law and Rereading should be banned.

To judge the people within, you must be within. And perhaps that’s one of the defining principles to keep in mind when meeting Szah Lia.

Szah Lia is one of my friends, though not close by any definition of the word. She is a Rereader for Precinct: Norshire. There are three of us in N.C. – Rereaders, that is. There was a fourth, Lysta, who lived in Brightside too – in the building opposite to mine. She left a year back when Ita Ru came into office in the protests started. Despite the capital’s steady stream of Rereaders, she’d cited that there’d be more work and protection there and you know, maybe she was right. But she didn’t have a mother who relied on her, and a knife dangling precariously over her head. She wasn’t from the orphanage.

Since her departure, we’ve spoken once. Apparently the labs in Groenstad are more advanced…and that’s just it: labs. Plural.

With Lysta gone, there were three metropolitans and three Rereaders. The previous Foreman – Sinead Vui – ascribed each of us to a Precinct. It was a perfect on paper move: easier commutes, easier communications, the labs could be structured to the predilections of the assigned Rereader. The need to switch between handlers and doctors was eliminated. It seemed perfect. And that’s the thing about things that seem: they never quite are.

When my mother and I part ways at the tram stop, and she climbs into the air-tram and I walk to the Precinct, she makes me promise again to come home early, though this time I cannot hear her voice. The rebreather over the lower half of her face captures the audio waves and nanoseconds later, words appear on the pixelised screen of my Specs. Because my mother does not wear Specs, the words are transmitted to her tablet, which she will not look at until she is seated safely. “I promise,” I whisper into my Rebreather, but whatever weight they may have had will be replaced by the thin, lifeless glow of her tablet’s automated font.

Meetings are rare for Rereaders. In my five years of service, I think I have had only three. The message came on my Specs while I was digitally flipping through a fashion catalogue. Somehow, it made more sense to order clothes online than go to the stores and have the staff sneer and refuse to serve. Rereader. Who knew one wiry successor could do this much?

Three blocks from the tram pick up, Szah is waiting for me at the end of the street. She’s sitting on a concrete bench, with a leather bag slung over her waist, in a bright orange sundress. “Don’t look at me like that,” my Specs flash with her words, and she flips her sunglasses up when I come close. “You’re wearing a dress too.”

I want to say that my dress is not like her dress at all. My dress is a forgettable dark grey, with a high collar and form fitting sleeves and ends mid-way over my thigh like most work dresses. Her dress is an eye-catching orange that swishes against her ankles; her hair is free and left to tangle loosely down her back while mine is tied back in a severe bun.

Her sandals click! against the side walk when she stands up, and she runs a hand through her messy auburn hair. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” I say instead. I wanted to say something, but I wouldn’t have.

Szah rolls her eyes. “Don’t lie,” she into her brown Rebreather and we begin to walk, in sync, towards the station. “I bet you wanted to make some snide comment about the sun not shining or it not being summer.”

“It’s spring – which is almost summer,” I point out. “And the sun never shines. Part of the ‘burning out’ thing. You remember that, don’t you?”

She slaps my arm. “Stop reminding me. There’s only one thing I want to take away from Further Education science, and it isn’t ‘the sun is going to leave our planet eclipsed in darkness in two hundred years’ – do you think I’m going to be alive in two hundred years? No, I will not. The only worthwhile thing in that class was Preston.”

Preston’s name gives a sour flavour to the air. I change the subject instead. “You know what we’re being called here for?”

Szah’s hand is resting on the strap of her bag; it tightens. “Are you still refusing to speak about Preston?” she asks. When I don’t reply, she throws her hands up dramatically and maybe rolls her eyes. I don’t know; I don’t see. “I don’t know,” she says, finally. “I received the same automated invite you probably did.”

We walk for a bit in silence. The buildings shrink with each step, becoming stubbier and thicker at the root. I don’t like to talk about Preston, or what happened. I try to focus on not thinking about Preston which doesn’t work very well at all. I think of his thick grey hair and defined jawline, and the way he watched me grow up with his vivid green eyes, just like the child in the pictures hidden in Ma’s tablet also has. When the Precinct comes into sight, I want to yank my Specs off and crush them beneath my feet. The Specs automatically begin to identify and load the entire history of Precinct: Loscester. I take a deep breath. I press the off button. I don’t need technology anyway. I can never figure out how it works. I would love to live in the old world, where you didn’t have to touch a computer if you didn’t want to.

As Szah and I edge closer to the looming grey Precinct, I think of Dr Midhurst and his suspicious absence yesterday. I think of how I didn’t include the indiscretion in my report. It makes me think about how he is old and tall and thin and grey, like Preston, though his eyes are shocking blue. I trust Midhurst, I don’t trust Preston. And perhaps that is the most shocking difference of all.

Inside the Precinct, the air is colder. But it is only when we step out on the HD floor, that I swipe the white sleeve of my jacket to raise the regulated temperature. “We meet Xio here, right?” Szah shifts her weight from one foot to the other, beside me.

I shove my hands into my pockets to warm them. “That’s what the invite said.”

I asked why once. Why is it so cold? And why only Homicide? Why not the floors that make sense to be cold? Like the morgue or Forensics?

Each receptionist had a different answer: for the germs; the air filter is faulty; Inspector Nonsiu likes it that way; it’s a conspiracy to freeze us all to death.

Today, the receptionists on duty are Ola and Xio. Ola thinks everything is trying to kill us, from the temperature, to the Foremen, to Optics Displays. Instead of reacting like most people afraid of waxing and waning shadows, she bleaches her hair regularly, takes courses in professional make-up application – though not for commercial reuse – and flirts with everything that moves and can take her home at night. Xio greets us and walks us back into the lift and down to the labs, which feels redundant but I’ve been around long enough not to question Xio’s micromanaging. She keeps meticulous record of the comings and goings of everyone who steps onto HD. Szah does not know this.

“Why did we come all the way up here to go all the way down there? What is this? An old world theme park? I value my braincells.”

Xio’s brown eyes narrow. You would, I’d want to say if I were her, You would because that’s what you do when you don’t have many of something.

Xio is not me. Xio’s anger is only visible in the tightening of her jaw and the widening of her stance – all entirely unapparent, if you aren’t looking closely enough. I tug on the sleeves of my jacket. The tension is palpable and uncomfortable. I clear my throat. Before the steel doors of the lift slide shut, I catch a flash of pink. “Ola doing okay?”

“Don’t mind Ola,” Xio tells me. “Today she’s discovered that coffee beans have some weird, unpronounceable additive that slowly builds cancer cells.”

And maybe it is true, because Ola’s blouse has an extra button popped and she leans over the desk to speak security guard who isn’t replying to her face. Szah gives a snort from beside me. I think maybe Ola’s way works better than others; she’s afraid of dying to a debilitating degree, but from where I’m standing, she’s looking like she’s feeling rather alive. If anything, that’s a successful coping mechanism.

And maybe that small derisive moment of judgement is why Szah and I aren’t close.

With my rebreather off, my tongue feels sour and dry. Szah looks younger without hers on. It dangles in her hand, the straps straying as we step off from the lift. I hand mine over to Xio, who takes it with a wink. I’ll have to go back up to HD to collect it from her, but it worth the dark look from Szah when she realises that Xio will not be taking hers and she will have to cart it along with her wherever she goes.

The labs are slightly warmer; not connected to the central conditioning system. We stop outside RL21, Xio gives us a mock salute and ducks back into the lift. “Good luck,” she mouths before the doors close.

I smile and wave. When I turn to face Szah, she is frowning. “You know she is only a secretary, right? And not even a personal one.”

I choose to ignore the judgement that coats her tone. “My mother is a secretary.”

“She’s not your mother.”

“You first,” I gesture toward the door, anger burning at the back of my throat. I take a deep breath and let the retort die on my tongue, however slowly. Silence is a weapon wielded only by the wise.

“You’re a Rereader.” Szah is staring me in the face. Her face is heated, cheeks tinted pink. I don’t bite. Orphanages do that to you. Rereading does that to you. You learn to put your emotions on the backburner – you have to, when your main focus in remembering someone else’s. Even when that means you’ll lose sight of the already fuzzy line that separates what you feel now with what they felt. And everything you are, is just a jumble of puzzle pieces, and you’re never sure which belong to the ‘you’ picture and which to the ‘them’ – or even if that distinction still exists.

“Maybe that’s not something to be proud of,” I say to her and push past. The door swings shut behind me. I manage to take a deep breath before Szah steps in.

Midhurst is standing by the door in a white coat. He gives me a long look, something undecipherable flashing behind his shock blue eyes. “Aylah,” he greets, then turns to Szah. “Ms. Lia.”

I raise an eyebrow at the unexpected formality Szah receives. I don’t realise Midhurst is not done: “Congratulations on your pending nuptials.”

I inhale sharply and both pairs of eyes drop to me. She’s marrying him?

Szah pushes past me, her shoulder colliding with mine. She takes a seat on the loveseat against the wall. Her leather bag is too small for her to slip her rebreather into, and so it sits clunky in her hands.

Midhurst places a hand on my back and leads to me to desk I sat on yesterday, whilst transcribing the alt-con. “How was it?” his voice is low. I don’t think Szah can hear. I try to match his volume.