Midtown’s artificial atmosphere was anchored from the coastline, spanning the entire island with a barrier that flexed like thick rubber around the vehicles passing through. Inside, the beige sky stretched high over Mal's head like a cathedral ceiling, almost as high as the skies up north — in Baron and Silver Lake, she could sometimes lose sight of people’s faces in the low-hanging smog, or of her own outstretched hands.
The car spat them out just south of the island’s dead-centre, right in front of a glaringly-bright screen advertising spacious, comfortable cryogenic chambers and priority placement aboard the Niña, endorsed by Naloss Pharmaceuticals — though, this advertisement referred to it as the Page, and in the back of Mal’s mind she remembered that Niña’s construction had been financed by someone of the same name.
Just behind the billboard, a tall, wide building stretched left and right, clear out of her periphery. She could only just parse the pale blue lettering on the glass doors as she was dragged through them: the Midtown Essentials Centre. She was foisted onto a blue-clothed attendant without a word or backward glance, but on the way to the elevator she caught Render looking at her, a pensive expression on his face. She looked away first, fixating on the carpet as the doors closed, struggling not to have a panic attack — it wasn’t her first time in an elevator, but this one was much faster than the one in Kawehno:ke’s community centre.
On the fourth floor, the attendant led her into a decontamination shower that flung soap suds into her eyes, nose, and mouth at every opportunity. The final stage was a high-pressure rinse that started out warm and grew steadily colder; by the end she was shivering, feeling scraped raw and completely exposed, and with defensive, hunching shoulders she snatched the paper-thin towel from the attendant’s offering hands. Her clothes were not returned; instead, she was handed a set of soft beige garments and thin-soled slippers.
The clothes were soft and thick, seeming fairly durable — the knit was so tight that she couldn’t see the weave pattern in the fabric. She rubbed the cloth between her fingers as she pulled it over her head, kneeling down to fold up the hems of her too-long pants: she’d never seen so much fabric still in one piece, nor felt something so light against her skin. While the attendant was turned away, she reached up to pull her hair loose, palming the film and slipping it into the ankle of her too-large slipper — it was almost certainly ruined, but she couldn’t take any chances with throwing it away undeveloped.
The attendant cleared their throat, and Mal viciously cursed in her mind as she stood and followed obediently, head down and fists clenched. The canister rubbed uncomfortably against her ankle as she was led to a dimly lit room with a wall-facing desk, a set of cabinets over a sink-basin, and a short bed lined with paper. The door locked behind her; she fruitlessly tried to turn the knob, staying tethered even when the lock didn’t give, fingers tightening around the lever until her knuckles screamed in protest.
The shape of the lever burned in her palm when she finally stepped away and huddled into the small space between the foot of the bed and the wall, where the camera over the door couldn’t see her. She knotted her fingers into the roots of her hair and collapsed in on herself, trying to think past the worry for her daughter and come up with a means of escape. Her grip tightened and tightened as her thoughts chased themselves in circles — I need to get out, I need to get out NOW, Clover is waiting for me, Clover needs me, what kind of Istá will I be if I’m dead—
She forced her fingers to loosen. Her hands pressed against her mouth to corral her shaking breaths, willing herself to calm down as she pulled together a mantra in her head. She needed the focus she had before Clover, before Gwenh, before she was benched — when it was just her and Tai-Song, their lacking sense balanced with too many wits and a firm belief in their own immortality. She could not have a daughter — if she had a daughter, that child would only become another chain around her neck.
“Wo meiyou saghiir,” she whispered to herself, tapping her forehead rhythmically against her knee. I don’t have a child; no daughter is waiting for me. “Laysa laday dziecko.” I don’t have a child; that kid belongs to someone else. “Nie mam ying’er.” I don’t have a child; I am not and have never been a mother.
She tipped her head back and closed her eyes, breathing deeply through the cycle of her belly, her ribs, her chest. It was too early to say whether her camera had saved her or had simply delayed the inevitable, especially if her work had garnered a reputation. Her thoughts drifted back to Yuen-Fa’s warning, the slow trickle of her photos chipping away the anonymity of her fellows; had she ever taken pictures of Dominik, or Willow, or Mahmoud? Every picture she had ever taken was eidetic in her mind, but now she was drawing a blank — whoever profited from the war’s continuation would pay handsomely for their names and haunts, if her photos had already betrayed their faces. They could probably torture it out of her, if it came to it.
She shook her head. She had to operate as though the worst wasn’t about to happen, and that meant believing that Render wanted her skills, not her inside knowledge. And maybe Tai-Song had been given the same grace: Render would have use for a good engineer, especially one who was working to break into Niña’s computer. Tai-Song could have bargained with his skills, could have promised to build up the ship’s security in exchange for his life.
Her shoulders relaxed some as her body bought into her delusional optimism, her heart ramping down; all she had to do was learn the rules, find Tai-Song, and wait for an opportunity to escape. She moved slowly and stiffly to her feet to rifle through the desk’s cabinets and drawers, looking for something to defend herself with. Her fingers closed around a scalpel capped with plastic, and unsheathed the tiny blade the same moment that the door opened behind her.
She whirled on her heel and brandished the scalpel with as much confidence as she could muster, hoping the blade’s trembling wasn’t as obvious to the nurse as it was to her. “Don’t touch me.”
The nurse raised his hands in surrender and kicked the door shut; no clicking lock this time. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“I don’t care.” Her hand trembled harder as she weighed whether she could get past him, whether she would have to draw blood. “I don’t care. You all kidnapped me—“
“It’s better than the alternative.” He moved slowly but easily around her to sit down at the computer. “You were very lucky that Mister Render was present to vouch for you; because of him, you’ll have more of a life here than you ever could have had out there, and I need you to cooperate with me if the transition is going to go smoothly.” He opened a familiar-looking library on his computer console. “Now, how old are you?”
Her arms felt like they were weighed down with sandbags, and the scalpel began to lower. “Eighteen.” In the back of her mind she carefully pulled together a backstory that would protect her, committing the details to memory and telling herself not to deviate. “My name is Mal.” She didn’t want to give up her name, but her file on the Database had to be easy to find, if anyone was going to realize that she was still alive.
“Your documentation will be under an identification number — no name necessary.”
She clenched her jaw angrily, growing tired of her every plan being unravelled; before she could think of how to convince him otherwise, he was already moving on:
“Do you menstruate?” At her silent nod, he continued, “Any irregularities? Heavy flow, inconsistent cycles, greater-than-average pain? Any chance at all that you’re pregnant?”
She shook her head, staring down at the floor to hide her welling eyes. The nurse stood from his computer and blithely turned his back on her, hunting through the cabinets — the scalpel trembled in her hand, and she couldn’t will herself to use it. She moved slowly and silently for the door; there would be no need for bloodshed if she was quick.
The nurse turned around, preparing vials for a blood draw and a urine test. “Now, we just need to collect some samples from you—“
She retreated hastily and thumped loudly against the door, readjusting her grip on the scalpel as she reached for the doorknob. “No.”
“I’m afraid it’s necessary—“
“I won’t let you.” Her fingers closed around the lever. The attendant was certainly waiting outside — bloodshed might be unavoidable.
“How long do you want to be here, wasting my time? If you don’t want to cooperate, I can call security and have them hold you down.”
She lifted her chin defiantly, slowly and silently turning the lever. “Do it.”
The nurse glared at her as he reached for the phone, but before he could pick up the receiver it began to ring. Seemingly by instinct he picked it up and rattled off a canned greeting; Mal could hear a faint voice on the other side, could tell it was someone important as the nurse straightened up, his eyes darting to the camera over their heads. His expression pinched at the muffled words, the call ending before he could argue his case.
He didn’t quite slam the receiver down, but it was a near thing. “It seems you’re exempt from the standard entry testing.” He dropped the packaged needle back into the drawer and slammed it shut. “You’re free to go.”
***
The numbers above the elevator door ticked upward: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. The doors opened into another identical stretch of hallway, and yet the attendant never hesitated or paused to remember the way; Mal would be at a severe disadvantage if she tried to run. At a door indistinguishable from every other, the process of opening it involved a key-card and a seven-digit code; inside, the room was a 6’x8’ box with a bed and a toilet, and when the door slammed shut behind her there was no knob to try and wrestle open. She was missing almost everything she had come in with, and she had already given up hope of seeing them again: her blanket was probably on its way to the incinerator, her camera probably being stripped for parts, and her bullet was almost certainly being loaded into the gun that would kill her in the near future.
On the thin mattress sat a small laminated card, one side printed with ‘2112’ and the other with a warning to keep it on her person at all times. The lights snapped off as she tried to peer closer, leaving only a faint red dot in the upper left corner of the room. She sighed and crawled onto the bed, her arms finally unwinding from the parcel clutched to her chest: a spare change of clothes that looked identical to what she was already wearing, and a carton of cigarettes. She opened the carton and took a whiff as she curled onto her side — she could pretend that her tears were from the harsh chemical scent.
When her eyes fluttered shut, she dreamed about Niña. Not the hulking beast lurking in the bay as she knew it now, but back when it was still a skeleton being welded together in a Midtown shipyard, when people were just as likely to call it the Page. Being forbidden from signing up for the construction work hadn’t stopped her from sneaking over to watch from the chainlink fence, and Tai-Song was usually right beside her, pretending to be obsessed with the finer points of ship-raising and not Dominik’s habit of working shirtless.
And while Tai-Song seethed with jealousy over Dominik’s deepening friendship with Willow, she was watching a girl with buzzed auburn hair and a deep, rosy birthmark covering half of her face. It was a totally different kind of attraction to seeing her onstage, where she had felt distant and unattainable despite being so close; here, where she was too far away for Mal to see anything besides the way she moved through the world, it felt like the only obstacle was the fence separating them. Instead of slowing down, the hours blinked by as Mal admired the girl’s strength and grace; her stomach fluttered as she bolted metal together with a machine thicker than her torso, tossing around yellow-hot rivets like the long burns on her forearms meant nothing.
Mal came back the next day, holding her breath as the girl approached the fence and threw herself down on the gravel opposite. Up close, she could finally see and be jealous of the girl’s glasses, clear plastic frames that pressed red spots into the bridge of her nose. She pulled out her provided lunch — another strong reason for seeking day-work with Midtown, though the rations were subpar and likely cut with sawdust — and a pack of cigarettes; Mal hesitantly pulled out her own meagre lunch and placed it between them like an offering.
Between bites of shared food and puffs of a cigarette passed through the chain, the girl told her that no one could say her long name the right way, so just call me Gwenh. Mal asked to hear it anyway, offering to teach her all the Kanien’kéha swearwords she knew in exchange; Gwenh had raised an eyebrow at that and told her, with some incredulity, you can only call me Gwenhwyfar Del on my gravestone.
Conversation was easy, until Gwenh asked her what she did with her time when she wasn’t being a groupie; Mal panicked and made up a lie about helping with the Domino Clinic. The falsity burned as it left her lips, and she immediately wanted to take it back and explain that she was actually an undertaker, but not the kind that hovers at the edge of construction sites like an omen, honest — but Gwenh was onto more interesting topics, particularly whether Wren might part with ser recipe for pickled mushrooms. She couldn’t remember whether she had ever told the truth.