Dinner had the appearance of meat and potatoes and the texture of porridge, made all the worse when there were no berries or nuts to make things interesting. Mal choked it down between gulps of the fizzy vitamin soda, finding herself on the edge of a conversation about imported produce that she was too tired to follow. When the crowd rose from their meals and filed out the door, she was relieved to go to bed and sleep, still holding onto the vain hope that things would seem less hopeless in the morning; instead of going to the bunks, the group led her into a lounge that pulsed with bass-heavy music and flowed with brightly-coloured alcohol. She turned on her heel and walked back into the hallway, pressing her back against the wall to recover from the deafening noise. She couldn’t remember the way back to the bunks.
Zig-zagging down a hallway chosen at random, almost every door she tried was locked. The few that opened only led to more hallways, which she dismissed out of hand for the moment — she didn't need to be more lost than she already was. She got lucky on her twentieth try, the door opening into a boxed threshold; after checking for onlookers and cameras, she stepped inside to explore.
With almost four hundred square-feet of floor space and a dark-room that was larger than the average outhouse, the photography studio was far more luxurious than what she had afforded for herself in Kawehno:ke. She ignored the single camera affixed to the ceiling, more interested in the sheer quantity of raw materials stored on the lower shelves: jugs of developing solution, crates of film, reams of photo paper, vast arrays of special equipment she had only ever thought about in the hypothetical. She scooped handfuls of film canisters into the pouch of her shirt, feeling a kind of mania that obliged her to gather materials and resources while they were plentiful.
The darkroom was equipped with a safe-light, yet another luxury she was unaccustomed to having: without a red bulb or the spare electricity to power one, she could handle the process of developing negatives by touch alone. The glaring red light hurt her eyes, and so she propped the door open as she investigated the cabinets, finding more chemicals, more photo paper, more rolls of film. She scooped up another handful of canisters, and her shirt groaned under the weight.
A little voice in the back of her mind whispered that there would be no cameras in the darkroom — even infrared light could spoil the sensitive film. She kicked the door shut, letting the darkness close around her, reaching slowly for the film stuffed down the ankle of her boot. She couldn’t just throw it away, not without ensuring there was nothing to find — and if a camera happened to catch her exposing a reel of film to light, there would be questions about what she was trying to hide. She had to develop the film now, while she had the privacy and the materials to do so, and once she knew what was on the film she could safely destroy it—
The darkroom's door clicked open before she could do more than graze her fingers along the sewn edge of her boot. Render stood in the doorway with a markedly casual lean, looking down at her with an amused smile. “Enjoying the amenities, Miss Y?”
She bolted to her feet and emptied the pouch of her shirt onto the countertop. “Sorry, I was just looking—“
He raised his hands to assuage her panic. “No need for that, you’re welcome to take whatever you need — I’m just glad someone still has some use for it.”
“I don’t.” She brushed past him with crossed arms and hunched shoulders, claustrophobic even in the giant studio. “Need it, I mean.” She began to pace nervously as he turned to face her, feeling cornered.
“I see.” He slowly moved to sit at the console desk, giving her a wide berth. Behind him, the monitor's black screen pulsed with tiny, colourful starbursts. “So, it’s a coincidence that you sought refuge in my studio?”
She stopped pacing. He had her blanket tucked under his arm — she was sure that it had been burned. It felt like the events of her capture were compressed into a single moment as they replayed in the back of her mind, most prominently Render's strange melancholy as he stared at her camera and addressed her with that strange name. She cleared her throat and affected her voice to a more plaintive register. “I can’t stay here.”
“So I’ve heard,” he replied, reclining in his seat and crossing his ankles. “I think you’re operating under some false presumptions, Miss Y — or don’t you remember stealing from me?”
“I have a seat on the ship.”
“No, you don’t. I own the manifest, and there’s not a single Untouchable on the Page.”
“Not even one of yours?” The question was idle, since she knew the answer, but between them she wanted to be the one asking questions.
He shrugged helplessly, and lied easily. “Not for lack of offering, but alas, they’re all reasonable people. I’ll never be rid of them.” He fixed her with a calculating look. “Perhaps I should be offended that you want to leave us so soon.”
“I want a better life.” She lifted her chin to look at him defiantly. “Since you own the ship, it shouldn’t be too difficult to save a seat for me. You offered the same to everyone else, right?”
“That's different.” His eyebrows raised involuntarily, like he hadn't expected to be caught out in a lie. “Other people have paid handsomely for their seats, either in cash or labour. Why should you get one for free?”
“Your actual supply outweighs actual demand. There are less than a hundred thousand people in Midtown — probably only a million altogether in the whole city, for a ship that seats up to one-point-five. You’re not in a position to charge millions of dollars for a resource that’s worth pennies.”
“Pennies it may be, but it’s pennies you’re willing to spend — and since I’ve cornered the market, you have no choice but to buy from me.”
“And how much did you spend, cornering the market?” She paused, an angle occurring to her, and smirked. “Do you really believe you’ll recoup that investment?”
He hesitated. “That’s irrelevant.”
She shook her head in disappointment. “Sunk costs don’t make a business, Mister Render. Just how many people have actually agreed to pay your prices?”
He stared at her with an unreadable expression, brow slightly creased and mouth pulling to one side. Finally, he stood up and held out her blanket; her necklace and five remaining candies were cradled in the fabric. “The seat’s yours — for now.”
She gratefully took back her things, slipping the candies into her pocket and wrapping the blanket around her shoulders — the smell of bear grease was faint now, but it was still soft and warm. The bullet was a small comfort, but a bigger slight: even if she found a gun, Render clearly understood that she lacked the ability to take a life. “Thanks.”
“Oh, I still intend on collecting payment — you're costing me twenty-six million, after all.”
“Can’t you call it an investment? Proxima needs artists, after all.”
"Artists, yes." He crossed his arms at that, regarding her coolly. “You’ve been dormant for some time, though — what held you from your art, all these years?”
Her grip on her blanket tightened painfully, and her wrist throbbed. Distancing herself from photography of historical record was a matter of safety — wealthy backers preferred the romantic fantasy over dreary reality, after all — but it didn’t change that she was clumsy when it came to the subject of art. “I was— elsewhere,” she hesitantly replied, holding back the name of elsewhere at the last second. “I still work. Make art. It’s just different, now.”
“How so?”
The conversation was confronting pieces of herself she didn’t want him to know about, and she struggled for an answer that would end the talking. “I do it for different reasons, I guess.”
He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to elaborate. She looked away, feeling frustrated and lost: her artistic endeavours began and ended with the beadwork on her moccasins, and she didn’t know how to translate the ever-drumming if I don’t take these pictures, how will anyone know what it was like for us? into something beautiful, something that he would want to hear. Even while searching for something toothless to say, she caught herself thinking of the negotiations she had witnessed in Bay Ridge, that moment where things seemed like they could be better than they were. She would remember it for the rest of her life, the same way she remembered all of her photos when she closed her eyes: it was fuel to the fire, and if she had managed to get a picture it would have been the burden of proof people could shoot for when anger could no longer sustain them.
“Why do you care?” He probably knew all about the negotiations, was probably baiting her into giving up information.
He gestured to the portraits she hadn't noticed coming in, lining every wall — at least thirty pieces, alternating between framed photo-prints and bare charcoal sketches done on butcher paper. “Academic interest. Your predecessor was rather verbose about the topic.”
She feigned interest so she wouldn’t have to think of a safe answer, then found herself genuinely enraptured by the sketches hanging between the headshots. Each portrait was wild and impressionistic, the dynamics of a person’s face as they spoke somehow perfectly captured in the strokes and smudges of charcoal. As she came across a familiar face — Willow’s mother, looking as steadfast and cool-headed as her son, certainly no older in this portrait — the itching familiarity suddenly snapped into place. She had grown up staring at a sketch just like these, and she would bet her life that the wide, slightly-singed portrait currently hanging over her parents’ fireplace was an original of this artist. She could see it perfectly in her mind, a constant in the backdrop of her childhood: River was in the middle, exasperated but fond as he mediating an argument between his brother and sister. Elodie, the oldest, was sticking out her tongue on the left; to the right, the youngest brother Malcolm was gesturing so dramatically that his hands were blurred, finely articulating his side to an argument that Mal had always sensed to be utterly unimportant, both at the time and with thirty years of hindsight. In the two years following this argument, the trio would go on to lose their father and two aunts to Pinta's construction; two months before the Pinta would be completed, Malcolm would be counted in the final rash of workers killed, leaving River and Elodie with no remaining kin in Little Caughnawaga.
“The construction yard was one of her favourite haunts. She would sketch people’s portraits as they told her their life story, before she had a camera." Render's voice was half-fond and half-bitter. “I had a devil of a time tracking all of them down; she’d often just give them away for free.”
“They’re beautiful.” She glanced back at Render, wondering who this predecessor had been to him, where she had gone, and why. “What happened to her?”
His smile tightened a bit. “I heard about your scuffle this morning. Did the HYAS hurt you?”
She hesitated, tucking her sprained wrist more securely under the blanket; his wording was unfamiliar but easy to grasp from context. “No, I— I overreacted. I’ve just had bad experiences with drones.”
“I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t. Even the other residents are afraid of it.” He leaned an elbow on the desk, making himself smaller and more personable. “I’ll be seeing to its reprogramming myself tomorrow. Would you like to sit in?”
Her jaw clenched as she focused on the floor, arms locking over her chest as she hunched in on herself. She desperately wanted to say yes, her old wounds clawing at her insides and begging her to put down the last war drone once and for all, hoping that the closure might finally absolve her of her crushing grief. She unfurled herself joint by joint, her held breath leaving her chest in a heavy sigh as she pulled her blanket closer around her. “No. Will you please show me back to the bunks?”