The Facility

by Eliza Green

  Excitement replaced the muted energy. Sheila punched the guy’s arm.

  So they know each other.

  Anya was still staring when another boy of around seventeen bounded over. She shrank back from his nervous energy.

  ‘Hi, I’m Jake. What’s your name?’

  She didn’t want to say. She had no plans to get to know anyone here. But the giddy blond-haired participant waited for her answer.

  ‘Anya Macklin.’

  ‘So, Anya Macklin, do you want me to show you around?’

  She shrugged as her fingers played with a couple of loose threads in her pockets.

  Anya followed Jake to a wall with several cleaning vestibules. He opened one. ‘This is where we keep the mops and buckets.’ He checked a roster on the wall beside the vestibule. ‘Looks like you’ve been assigned Section Eight.’

  He trotted over to the opposite wall. She followed him, her shoulders rounded, her eyes watching her feet.

  ‘This is where the garbage chutes are.’ He pointed to the higher walkways. ‘Anything that falls from up there should be thrown down here. Your dirty water gets chucked down the chute, too. The wolves like a clean space.’

  A holographic grid marked out the different sections on the floor. Her section of the grid had an orange border.

  ‘Red means dirty. Green, clean. Orange, try harder. Got it?’ said Jake.

  Anya sighed and looked around. One wall made of glass looked to the North; she saw a criss-cross pattern of pipes in the distance. The fourth wall held the shutter into which the wolf had disappeared. There was a door to the left of the shutter.

  ‘What’s the deal with the wolves?’

  Jake looked at her as if she’d just asked him to show her his underwear. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just asking. What’s their purpose?’

  He laughed. It was a strange, detached sound. ‘They supervise us. That’s all.’

  ‘So they just hang around while we mop floors?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much it.’

  ‘Do they say anything?’

  He seemed distracted, bored almost. ‘Look there’s nothing to the wolves. They were sent from Praesidium to supervise the ground-floor activities.’ He looked over at another group being shown the ropes. ‘I’ve got others to help out.’ He turned back to Anya. ‘You clear on what you need to do?’

  Anya nodded. ‘Mop, rinse, repeat.’

  Jake paused. ‘Well, it’s more complicated than that.’

  She didn’t agree. But she’d take the distraction over the hell she and Jason had been through.

  Jake walked at a fast clip over to another group halfway through their induction. She turned and caught the boy with the dreadlocks watching her.

  Ω

  The morning turned into afternoon. Anya mopped her section until the border changed from orange to green and her section smelled of disinfectant.

  The boy with the dreadlocks stood in the section next to hers. She counted twenty-two dark-brown spirals of snarled, thin-and-thick hair that hung just below his broad shoulders, all bunched together with a white elastic band. The other boys’ hair was short and neat. This boy looked more like one of the rebels, scattered far and wide beyond Essention’s walls. Her stomach heaved as she remembered her last moments with her parents. She shook her head, to put memories of that fateful night out of her mind.

  Instead, she concentrated on the boy beside her. She thought about asking his name, but she didn’t want to invite anyone in. Not today, when she felt okay, like what happened to her parents wasn’t her fault. She would ride that feeling until the guilt devoured her again.

  The boy ignored her. Jake, she noticed, tried to catch the attention of Sheila who flirted with a group of boys. He looked pissed off when she ignored him. Anya smiled.

  An hour later, four wolf-like beasts emerged from behind the shutter in the wall. The metallic clacking against the white-tiled atrium floor filled the room. Seeing one was bad enough, but four put Anya on alert. They stalked closer, watching the participants. Their movements were lithe and graceful for beasts covered in a metallic skin. Legs, long and spindly, sat on sharp, narrow nails. Each paw lifted and pressed on the tiled floor.

  Anya’s alertness gave way to curiosity as she studied their movements. The four wolves approached with their heads low; not submissive, but more like predators assessing a threat.

  One of the younger wolves bounded over to the arboretum. An older wolf growled at the youngster who whined and backtracked dirt across several sections. The four didn’t stay long before retreating to their cubbyhole behind the shutter. Anya had heard rumours that the living machines from Praesidium were germophobes.

  While the others seemed relieved, Anya watched the dark space until the last one had disappeared from sight.

  Her hands began to shake; a sign of hunger and a symptom that had only started after her treatment for radiation poisoning at the hospital in Essention. But she would suffer the minor ailment if it meant she had her appetite back.

  She moved to the outer glass wall and looked up at the rainbow-coloured walkways. Her hunger tugged her back to reality as thoughts crept in about her last night in Brookfield. Eating helped her to forget for a while. She looked past the first-floor walkway to the camera perched on one of the steel girders. She adjusted her position until she was sure she was in the camera’s blind spot, then pulled an apple out of the pocket of her overalls and ate. The shaking in her hands subsided. A steady calm trickled through her that usually lasted until her next meal.

  Anya startled when the boy with the dreadlocks appeared beside her. She shuffled to the side to put distance between them. The last thing she wanted was company, but this boy seemed quieter, less talkative than Jake. He could stay if he kept his mouth shut.

  The boy shifted beside her while she ate. She changed her mind about company, but before she could tell him to go away, he spoke.

  ‘Hi, I’m Dom.’

  Anya looked up at him. His smile didn’t reach his deep-brown eyes. He shifted under her intense scrutiny. She looked down at the ground.

  He elbowed her. ‘This is the point where you tell me yours.’

  ‘Anya.’

  ‘So how’s your first day going?’

  She almost laughed. The question was too casual for this quiet, brooding guy. She shrugged and looked up at the camera, hoping they couldn’t see their interaction.

  ‘Did you know this is the only spot in the atrium where the cameras can’t see you?’

  He laughed as he answered. ‘Yeah, actually. I was about to tell you to go somewhere else.’

  She looked up at him. ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because I think you needed a moment.’

  More than a moment, but that was enough for now. She put the rest of her apple away and walked back to her section. ‘Thanks for letting me have it.’

  3

  The repetitive ground-floor tasks kept Anya’s nightmares at bay. It comforted her to know the rebels couldn’t breach the force field surrounding Arcis without a special chip, like the one in her wrist. After the rebels killed most of the adults in their town and followed up with a radiation attack, Jason had wanted to stay on in Brookfield. But they would have died had Praesidium not found them.

  Her brother was different from her. Stronger. They had both witnessed their parents’ murder. But the experience had forced Jason to grow up and face reality, while Anya had only regressed further into herself.

  The rumours of rebel sympathisers in Essention made Anya nervous. Maybe she’d stay permanently in Arcis. The rebels had been looking for her the night her parents were killed. She expected them to come for her again. It had been several weeks since their death, but she remembered it as if it were yesterday.

  A dull thud caught Anya by surprise. She glanced at the front door just as her mother, Grace, got to her feet. Her father mirrored her movement.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said Grace. There was no answe
r.

  Her father took two steps. The floorboard near the door creaked.

  A second thud sounded like a jackhammer in Anya’s ear. She absorbed her parents’ fear as if it were her own.

  ‘No, Evan,’ Grace whispered. ‘It’s them. They’ve finally come for her.’

  Anya watched her father’s fingers graze the door’s handle.

  ‘Don’t answer it, please.’

  ‘I have to, Grace, love. They’ll only keep coming back until I do.’

  Anya’s gaze flitted over to Jason. Grace liked dramatics. It was her thing. But it worried Anya to see her father worked up. And Jason’s quick shrug did nothing to soothe her.

  ‘They’re here for her. She needs to leave, now.’ Grace pointed at Anya but her attention was on her husband.

  Her mother’s coldness knocked the wind out of Anya. Her relationship with her mother had always been strained at best. Grace made no secret of the fact she preferred Jason. She treated Anya as if she were an inconvenience; as if the problems with the rebels were her fault.

  She bit her lip and stood up.

  If the rebels wanted her, they could take her.

  Two short blasts snapped Anya out of her waking nightmare. She looked around to see the others putting their mops away and walking fast from the atrium. They were chatting, smiling. Some of them gave her an odd glance where she stood in Section Eight, clutching her mop handle so tight her knuckles had turned milky white.

  She heaved the nightmare out in one long breath, enough to force her legs to move. Then she put her mop away and followed the others out to the lobby to collect her things and go home.

  She and Jason had never spoken about that last night, and they kept talk of the outside to a minimum while in their East Essention home. Jason was paranoid about who might be listening. Some days it felt like he sympathised with the rebel cause. He had told her about the rumours the towns were no longer contaminated. Anya had no interest in venturing beyond Essention’s high walls, with their guns and sensors. There were bigger dangers than ionised radiation. The rebellion, for one.

  Anya half-walked, half-ran to the female changing rooms, located off the lobby in Tower A. She peeled off the all-in-one jumpsuit and pulled on her Essention uniform: a coffee-coloured tunic and loose black trousers. If she had her choice, she would wear something blood red to match her mood.

  The cramped room filled with too many chatty girls made her skin feel tight. She grabbed her bag and strode out into the lobby. More memories of that last night surfaced. She steadied herself against the white podium near the door where she had to log on and off using her chip. The wolf had shown them all how that morning. She pressed her wrist to it but not fast enough, it seemed. Several girls flooded into the lobby from the atrium, laughing and joking.

  ‘Hey,’ said a girl with long brown hair. ‘You’re Anya, right?’

  Anya nodded.

  ‘We were just talking about what happened in the towns.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I mean, the attacks. It was awful, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  The girl approached her and leaned in close. ‘What happened to you? Marie said her mother and father were gunned down in the street but she was at her friends’ house at the time. Someone was looking for her, she said.’

  The girl pulled back and Anya saw her pupils were heavily dilated—almost black.

  ‘Everyone’s stories in here seem to be the same,’ the girl continued. ‘But none of us actually saw it happen. Did you? Did you see who did this? Was it the rebels?’

  Anya’s carefully crafted mask slipped; her inner darkness shuddered and split apart. She dragged herself back from the edge.

  ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  The girl leaned in closer. ‘Come on, I’m not going to tell. I heard from someone in your town that you were there when it happened.’

  Anya stepped back, her pulse racing. ‘No. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Sure you did.’ The girl persisted. She was strangely calm. Anya felt the opposite.

  ‘Please, I need to go...’

  The girls surrounded her, bombarded her with questions. She felt a hand on her arm pull her out of the group.

  ‘Sorry, ladies,’ said Dom. ‘But Anya and I have made plans to walk home.’

  The girls looked disappointed, but only for a moment. They smiled and lowered their eyes. It wasn’t the first time Anya had seen girls blush when Dom was around.

  He logged out and pulled her through the door towards the force field that surrounded Arcis. It was 5pm, and an orange slant of light bisected the walkway to the front of the building. She shielded her eyes from the weakening light.

  ‘Stop pulling me.’

  They passed through the force field, which left her wrist tingling. Near the base of the Monorail station, he let go. She stomped towards the stairs that led to the raised platform. Dom followed her. She stopped abruptly at the start of the steps and turned.

  ‘I don’t need a bodyguard, Dom, so stop following me.’

  He towered over her by several inches. A thundercloud transformed his face.

  ‘It just so happens that I’m going this way, so stop being a brat and thank me.’

  Anya laughed. ‘For what?’

  ‘For rescuing you back there. I know what they were asking you about.’

  ‘Yeah? Well I had it under control.’ She noticed his eyes weren’t as dilated as the girl’s. They were brown and rich, and packed with secrets, none of which Anya wanted to know.

  She turned back towards the stairs and climbed them. Judging from his heavy steps, he trailed close behind.

  They stood on the platform in silence and waited for the train. Anya’s stop was in East Essention, where the orphans from the towns now lived. The rest of Essention was occupied by adults—too old for Arcis—who had managed to evade the rebel attack or had already been in the urbano.

  In the distance, the Monorail hovered on clear alloy girders that ran the circumference of the urbano, crossing at several points. A couple of girls giggled at Dom, making fun of his dreadlocks. He stared ahead and paid them no attention.

  Arcis was right in the centre of Essention, its vast double towers and glass atrium surrounded by grass, flowers and foliage. The urbano was divided into four equal sections: East, South, West, and North. The water purification system was maintained in North; she had seen it from the atrium.

  The train slid to a gentle halt, balanced on a similar anti-gravity stream to the suspended walkways in the atrium. One of the nurses in the hospital had told her how the urbano worked.

  Anya and Dom entered the same busy carriage and were forced to stand close. Dom pulled out a book from his bag and began to read. Anya ground her teeth and stared out at the place she’d just left.

  With its giant mushroom cap and two towers, Arcis loomed over the rest of the urbano. Tower A, with the lobby and elevators, was a solid structure the same height as the atrium but twice as wide. To the left, Tower B was also windowless, and even wider.

  Anya’s eyes lingered on the mushroom cap which housed the ninth floor. To graduate from the emerging adult education programme, the orphans had to reach this floor, carrying the lessons of the previous eight. Sure, she was curious about what the ninth floor held, but she was in no hurry.

  Anya’s stop approached, but Dom didn’t move. His eyes remained on the book in his hand. She noticed his jaw twitch. His mouth was set in a tight line. The door slid open and Anya leaned into him quickly. He looked up at her, surprised.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  She caught the slight softening of his mouth as she alighted from the train.

  4

  Something lacked about the streets in East Essention: too functional, too similar and no personality. The grey block that Anya and Jason lived in contained several units on different levels, each identifiable by a silver door, and ran for a kilometre in each direction. Stairs for the upper levels sat next to the ground-floor units, whic
h opened out directly into the street. The rear of the block was pressed up against the tall inner perimeter wall. A foot or two of space existed between inner and outer, close to the guns and sensors.

  Anya stopped at her door and tapped her chipped wrist against the panel next to it. The ground-floor door opened, she stepped inside and it suction-closed behind her. This place looked nothing like their cottage in Brookfield with its heavy oak door and squeaky hinges, which Jason had promised to oil for months. But if it wasn’t electronic, like one of Praesidium’s tech hand-me-downs, it didn’t hold her brother’s attention for long.

  She dropped her backpack on the cold grey hall floor and passed by the living room, with its monochrome decor and white sofa that looked like something straight from a catalogue. Anya missed the worn red sofa and warm wooden floors of their place in Brookfield.

  An earthy smell caught her unawares and she followed her nose to the black-and-white kitchen. She found Jason hovering over a bubbling pot that sat on an induction ring. He turned when she came in.

  ‘So, how goes the programme to teach you... What is it for again?’

  ‘I told you. It’s to teach life skills to those of us who have none.’

  Jason stirred something in the pot. Anya moved in closer, drawn to the smell. Her stomach tightened. She’d eaten very little at lunch.

  ‘I’m making soup. We’re not supposed to take the leftover vegetables, but Max said they were only going to be thrown out. Since they weren’t injected with medication, they won’t affect our dosage.’

  Jason had been put to work in one of the food-processing factories in Southwest Essention. The food for Essention was grown in vertical farms in South, near the entrance and the hospital.

  He looked at her. His eyes were partially dilated; less than those in Arcis.