Nineteen Days to Launch
Mal had been awake for hours by the time a tray of food was pushed through the slot in the door, a bowl of something that superficially resembled oats and fruit. After she licked the bowl clean, the door was thrown open, and Render marched inside.
“Time to earn your keep, Miss Y.” He reached up to pull down the shirt she had draped over the camera that morning while she pumped, throwing it onto the bed.
She rose without argument, following him down an entirely new hallway to an entirely new elevator, which required one key-card to enter and another to access the buttons. After ascending to the top floor, they stepped into a sitting room where a group of twelve waited, all elaborately styled and uniformly beautiful. They greeted Render first and then turned to stare incredulously at Mal’s frayed hair, her plain clothes, her crooked and yellow teeth — perhaps even at the way she breathed, loud and raspy compared to their eerie silence. The only thing equal between any of them were their apprehensions.
“Everyone, this is my new photographer. You may know her work already, if you’ve sat through any meal with me; naturally, we’re all very excited to work with her.” Render turned and bent slightly at the waist to point out the important figures. “Andrew Howell — the boy in the mauve palette — will be twenty next month. You will take his portraits, and make him look like an eligible bachelor. You will call him Mister Howell, if you must speak of him, but do not address him directly.”
“Where’s my camera?” Her gaze stayed pinned to the floor, anxiety racing against anticipation to see what would stop her heart first: wielding a camera was easy, but so was slipping up and getting shot.
“Right over here.” He gestured to a camera that most certainly wasn’t hers, set up on a tripod. He was wearing heavy rings of milled serpentinite on every finger. “I’m afraid I don’t enjoy the Howells' company enough to use your preferred equipment — this model will have to do for today.”
“Shall we get a move on?” an older man called, looking bored as he lounged on a long couch — she would guess that this was the father, and the woman sitting stiffly beside him was the mother. They were each wearing a single serpentinite ring on their right thumbs, nowhere close to the mass on Render’s fingers. “Our colleagues have been waiting on these portraits for weeks now.”
“Of course, Jamison — we wouldn’t want to Andrew to get any older.” He withdrew a cloth bundle from his lapel pocket and unwrapped it gingerly, returning the glasses he had confiscated. “Do as you will, Miss Y.”
***
The few times that Mal had been pressed into taking someone's portrait, the sessions had been short, smooth, and painless by necessity: competition may have been fierce when there was only one shot to spare every few weeks, but the subjects were unfailingly dedicated to keeping in her good graces. Her friends up north had especially loved having their photos taken, and would forgive just about any social blunder if she promised them a place in her next roll of film.
Here, with unlimited shots and all the amenities she could need, the work was a horrific slog — every request was challenged or sighed at as though she was asking people to pose for an oil painting, and with Render perched on an armchair behind her she couldn't help but feel that he was breathing down her neck. At this rate the shoot would drag on for the rest of her life, which could be quite short: it was only a matter of time before someone snapped, be it her or them. Her migraine was quickly out-growing her skull.
“Hold!” one of the stylists called, too late — the bulb flashed just as he entered the frame, spoiling the shot. “I said hold, you—“
“We’re wasting daylight,” Render calmly announced. The entire group froze in fear of their punishment, Mal included — he only spoke again once he had the room’s full attention. “Do what you need to do and get out of the shot. If you speak that way to my photographer again, there will be consequences.”
The stylist nodded jerkily and turned around to shakily touch up the boy's hair and cosmetics. The adjustments made him look even younger, like a soft-faced twelve-year-old rather than a someone preparing to enter into a Midtowner's idea of adulthood. She wondered what he thought of her, likely the first Untouchable he had seen up close — her eye-bags alone made her look older than his frozen-in-time parents, and like all Untouchables she may as well have been born with grey hair. The bulb flashed again and again as she occupied herself with the dichotomy, and soon enough it was time for the family portraits.
Up to this point, the five younger siblings had been easy to ignore, entertaining themselves with handheld devices in the corner. With a camera on them they whined endlessly, crying about their pinching shoes, their too-tight neck-pieces, the unbearable strain of having to hold still and smile. The complaining stretched to new heights when they proved incapable of keeping their eyes open in photos, and after thirty minutes almost no progress, the day boiled over all at once.
“Enough!” she shouted. Behind her, Render abruptly stood out of his chair; she resolved to make everyone in the room feel as chastised as possible before he put her out of her misery, and turned her accusing glare on the teenagers. “You two in the front, stop fighting. Second from my right, do not move or blink until I say so. Farthest on the left, take one step back and smile like you mean it. If I have to repeat myself, I’m coming over there to talk to you — understand?”
Everyone hurried to obey. Her headache and poor attitude remained throughout the last ten pictures, and she distantly remembered telling the youngest girl stop crying or else, but the rest was a blur. When the last person scurried out, protecting their head from her lobbed ire, her headache receded into a concentrated pit over her left eyebrow. For a moment, the only sound was her angry breathing.
“I find Jamison Howell’s children just as irritating, rest assured,” Render finally said. “Everyone else in my circle is much better behaved.”
“I’m done.” She pushed her glasses up and out of the way as she turned to face him. “I’m not taking photos for you. Put me to work somewhere else, in the gardens or in construction.”
“You’re awfully weak for that kind of labour,” he remarked, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms, waiting to see where she was going with her demands before crushing her free will. “Don’t forget your place, Miss Y — I can very easily make life difficult for you, and it's not as though you have anywhere else to go.”
She sighed through her nose, glancing at the tripod. Before she could talk herself out of it she was reaching out and pushing it over, letting the camera burst apart upon the hardwood floor — the lens was shattered beyond even her tolerance, the electronic viewfinder had turned a panic-inducing shade of blue, and the flash-bulb had snapped off at the base.
Render was on his feet again, a look of genuine shock flitting across his pale face before smoothing over into disappointment. “That was—“
“Expensive, right? Hard to replace?” She kicked the camera aside, gleefully watching his jaw tense. “And I’ll do the same to any camera you put in my hands. Let me work somewhere else, or get ready to pay a lot for my time.”
***
The bunks held twelve beds and nine occupants. Some glanced over at her blearily before burrowing beneath their blankets, others only stirred in their sleep, and still others didn’t move an inch as the door closed behind her. The figure in the farthest bed was sitting upright and facing away, back ramrod straight — she would have thought that they were meditating, if not for the unobtrusive orange light flickering against the headboard, cast by a toy she couldn’t see.
The bottom bunk nearest to the door was perfectly made, compared to the other two empty: with the bedding shoved to the baseboard and the pillows strewn haphazardly, it was clear that their owners were coming back. She curled up on top of the untouched bed, her glasses tucked against her chest, her back to the others — in a room full of Untouchables, the only looming threats were her nightmares.