by H. A. Swain
“King of work,” he says with a self-satisfied grin. “What else?”
ORPHEUS
I follow Zimri into the warehouse feeling like a Plebe in the Distract for the first time, spinning around and marveling at a place I never imagined could exist. The building is enormous, no walls or halls, just one gigantic space with forty-foot-tall metal shelving units moving up and down on tracks from floor to ceiling. Each shelf has dozens of metal bins and inside each bin is all the crap a Plute like me could order straight off my ExoScreen. Toothbrushes, laundry baskets, guns, and books; clothing, frying pans, shoes, and soap; doorknobs, toys, and prepackaged food. Water bottles, dog beds, cut-glass vases, wine racks, dish racks, tie racks, and ties. Picture frames, baking trays, wastebaskets, and paint. Anything that could be packed into a box is under this roof, waiting to be plucked by the thousands of workers scurrying around like bugs.
“So,” I say, trying to make conversation with Zimri as we walk, dodging the other workers. “You’re the best, huh?”
She quickly turns a corner and I hurry to keep up with her.
“That guy, what’s his name, Rude…”
“Jude,” she says.
“‘Rude’ fits him better.” I wait for her to smile, but she keeps marching forward as if I’m not here. I zigzag around the people hurrying by and catch up with her again. “Okay, so Jude. Was he lying?”
She glances at me then looks away quickly. “About what?”
“About you being the best?” Again she doesn’t answer. “So, you’re not the best? Are you the worst?” She ignores me, which only makes me want her attention more. “You’re mediocre then?” That also lands flat. “Jeez, what’s a guy gotta do to get you to talk?” I stop in the center of an aisle, causing a forklift to swerve.
“Watch it, buddy!” the driver yells.
Zimri reaches over and grabs me by the shirt to yank me out of the way. “Sorry, Merle!” she yells, then turns to me. “Maybe you should figure out why you need so much attention in the first place.”
I laugh, dumbstruck, because no one has ever talked to me like that before.
“And besides, this isn’t the time to chat,” Zimri says motioning me forward. We turn another corner. People crisscross in front of us, each equipped with a mesh basket full of stuff.
“Why?” I ask. “No socializing allowed?”
“You can do that on your tenner.”
“My tenor?” I ask, then sing, “What if I’m a bass?” in a deep resounding voice, which makes Zimri chuckle, so I continue, in falsetto. “Or maybe I’m soprano.”
She smiles and shakes her head like she thinks I might be crazy, then she explains, “Your tenner is your ten-minute break. Not the way you sing.”
As we walk, side by side, I can’t look away. She looks different than anyone I’ve ever seen before. Her hair grows up and out in soft spirals and her eyes are fierce green, but not a fake color like they’ve been altered, more like the green of a dragonfly. Her skin is darker than mine, and she has a long straight nose and boxy jaw, but when she smiles, I see a gap between her two front teeth.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” she asks.
“I … uh … um…” I stutter. “It’s just your teeth.…”
She quickly presses her lips together and frowns.
“You rarely see an imperfection like that,” I point to her face, “on a girl as beautiful as you.”
She stops and puts a fist on her hip. “Are you really this full of crap? I know I have a gap between my teeth and I don’t care, but saying that I’m beautiful? What are you trying to prove?”
“Has no one ever told you that before?” I ask, bewildered. “Where I’m from, we tell each other all the time. In fact, if I didn’t tell my female friends they were beautiful five times a day, they’d be offended.”
“They sound charming,” Zimri says and takes off again.
I walk beside her, chattering away. “Everyone is so uniform these days. It’s like beauty gets boring. All the spit-shine and polish from the minute everyone is born. Any imperfection has been routed out.”
“Maybe where you’re from it’s like that.”
“I meant it as a compliment!” I tell her but she’s back to ignoring me. “You know, if you were a celebrity, some PromoTeam would try to give you a look. Your hair, eyes, skin tone, and clothes. They’d try to tame you. Straighten your hair. Fix that little gap in your teeth. But that would be a huge mistake. In the end we, I mean, those celebs all end up looking alike.”
“Lucky for me I’m just a Plebe then.”
“Ha!” I laugh, which only makes her scowl more and march ahead of me.
Her walk reminds me a little bit of Arabella’s. Fluid and easy, leading with her wrists and knees like we learn at SCEWL, but for Zimri, it must come naturally.
She glances at me, staring again, and says, “What?”
“Nothing.” I glance away, but there’s something in the way she moves that makes me want to keep looking.
Zimri pulls me to the side at the end of an aisle, out of the way of the forklifts and people scurrying by. “Here,” she says and holds out a clunky prehistoric screen thingie I’ve seen other workers carrying.
I stare at it. “What’s this?”
“Your HandHeld.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Put it on,” she says slowly like I might be a little bit dense. And apparently she’s right because I can’t figure out how to attach it to my arm.
“Like this.” She slips the harness over my hand. When her fingers brush against me, I feel electricity dance across my skin. Immediately, I glance at the back of her hand for a carapace, but of course she doesn’t have one.
I straighten the contraption so the screen lies against my palm and inner wrist. “It’s so heavy!” Then I notice that she’s staring at my hand, which is pale from being constantly covered by my ExoScreen glove. Quickly, I move it behind my back.
“Put in your earbud,” she instructs me.
I struggle with the cord attached to the HandHeld but only manage to get it tangled around my arm.
“Clearly, you didn’t go to SCEWL,” she says, and motions for me to snake my arm in the opposite direction.
“Yes, I did!” I try to follow her instructions but I end up in a knot. “But the Kardashians didn’t teach me how to do this.”
“Kardashians?” She looks at me funny as she untangles the wires. “Is that what you called the RoboNannies?”
“Uh, yeah, joke, right?” I half laugh but she only frowns. “What’s this for, anyway?” I hold up an old-fashioned earbud.
“How else would you hear the instructions?” She runs the cord up my forearm, clips it to my shirt collar, then loops the cord behind my ear and slips the bud in place.
“Ow!” I reach up and accidentally touch her hand when I adjust the bud. She quickly pulls away. “How can you stand to wear one of these?”
She sticks out her bottom lip and waggles her head. “Guess my widdle ears aren’t as delicate as yours,” she says in a baby voice.
“That’s mature,” I say, but she only laughs.
“Okay, push start on your screen,” she instructs.
When I do, numbers fill my ear. “What’s with the countdown?” I ask her.
“Keeps you on track.”
“On track for what?”
“Good times,” she says.
“As in fun?” I smile and wiggle my eyebrows because, to me, this whole thing is hilarious. A Plute inside a warehouse! I half wish I could send pix into the Buzz—if I weren’t hiding from my father, that is. I figure as long as he’s not sending someone after me, I’ll stick around here for a few days, maybe a week, make him sweat, then show up again.
Zimri, though, doesn’t find any of this amusing. She frowns, but in a way that makes me think she’s holding back a smile. “Does it look like we’re having fun?”
I glance at all the people scurrying from place to
place, faces deep in concentration. Then I look back at her. “Zimri,” I say. “I can confirm that it appears absolutely no one in this god-forsaken warehouse appears to be having a good time.” Then I lean closer and whisper, “But we could change all that, you and I.”
“Oh my god,” she says, but this time she can’t help it. She tosses her head back and laughs out loud. “Are you always like this?”
“No,” I tell her honestly. “I have no idea what’s gotten into me.”
* * *
I run after Zimri for hours like a little lapdog at its owner’s heels. From one end of the warehouse to the other, traversing what feels like every aisle, every shelf, gathering the stupidest bunch of crap I’ve ever seen. Baby pants, sun hats, spray paint, bug spray, plastic colanders, chewing gum, laxatives. None of it makes sense. Nothing is in order. We’re just mindless drones, following the beeping in our ears and the numbers on our screens. I can’t believe this whole place hasn’t been automated yet. Zimri’s amazing, though. She zips around the maze of aisles, always knowing exactly where she needs to be, but I can’t keep it straight. Every time we turn a corner I get turned around.
“Don’t stop walking,” she barks when I pause to get my bearings. “Can’t you look at your screen and move your feet at the same time?”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I admit, staring at the jumble of numbers flashing from my palm.
“Right here!” She jabs a finger at the HandHeld.
The top third is like a stopwatch; the numbers match the ones being pumped through the earbud telling me how many seconds I have left to find the product before the whole system implodes and a giant death ray zaps me into oblivion. Or something like that. The middle of the screen has a series of random numbers and letters that mean nothing to me.
“Can’t you read?”
“Are you always this grouchy?” I ask, annoyed and tired.
“Are you always this much of a whiner?” she asks me back.
“I’m not whining,” I insist, realizing I sound like a three-year-old.
“Then stop lollygagging!” she yells over her shoulder.
“You’re just insanely fast!” I say, still dragging behind. “I’m the one moving like a normal human being.”
“You’ve got to be better than normal if you want to do well here.”
“Oh really?” I ask, running to catch up. “Is there competition for who’s the fastest? Do you have to have an ASA here, too?”
She scowls at me. “An ASA? What’s that?”
“You know. The surgery. On your brain. To make you a genius.”
“Oh right. What Plute brats get so they don’t have to work?”
“Plutes work!” I say. “They work very hard.”
“Sure they do,” she says.
“It’s just a different kind of work than this.” I motion to the commotion all around us and think for a moment maybe it’s not that different after all. Plebes might be running after products to stick in baskets, but we’re always chasing the Buzz.
“Anyway,” I say, panting from jogging beside her. “Why’s it matter how fast I go?”
For the first time she stops moving right in the center of an aisle. “Because,” she says, hands on hips and chin held high. “If we’re too slow then we’ll all be replaced by A.N.T.s, won’t we?”
“Ants?” I ask. “How could ants—” A loud buzzer blares in my ear, making me jump. “Now what did I do wrong?” I yell.
Zimri chuckles then she sings, “Time for the tenner,” in a perfect tenor voice.
While all the other workers flood out of the aisles and head to the left, Zimri slips around a corner to the right. “Where are you going?” I ask, jogging after her.
“Most people go to the break rooms,” she says without stopping.
“Is that what you’ll do?”
She looks at me over her shoulder and says, “Do I look like most people?”
“No,” I tell her and for some reason my heart speeds up. “You certainly do not.”
Before we get too far, Rude Jude, the jerk who hired me this morning, zips up on his stupid little electric cart and screeches to a halt as if he’s driving a top-model Cicada. “Zimri!” he shouts.
She jumps and spins around. “What? What’s wrong now?”
“Someone’s here to see you.”
A security officer climbs out of the passenger side and Zimri visibly slumps. She grabs for a shelf to steady herself but she misses and stumbles. Quickly, I grab her arm and prop her up, just like I did for Arabella at the gallery the other night.
“You okay? What’s wrong?” I whisper in her ear.
“Billingsley?” she says as all the color drains from her face. The officer reaches out to Zimri. I hold my breath, thinking I’m about to witness an arrest, and I have the urge to pull her away from the security officer and run.
But the woman smiles and pulls Zimri into an embrace as she says, “It’s alright. We found her. Your grandmother is okay.”
VERSE FOUR
ZIMRI
For the first two nights after Nonda was found, I headed straight for the MediPlex as soon as my shift ended. Tonight, I bolt for the massive warehouse doors that roll up when the seven o’clock buzzer sounds and the shift switch begins. It’s fifteen minutes of controlled chaos as thousands of bodies spill from one end of the warehouse to make room for the thousands more coming in the other side so the drones never have to stop. I want to be among the first out the door to have as much time as possible with my grandmother before visiting hours are over. But as I hurry toward the exit, Jude pulls me away from the stream of workers.
“I need you to work a split,” he says, waving his tablet in my face. “We need a better average productivity rate for today.”
“You know I would if I could.” I try to wriggle back into the crowd, but Jude sticks close to my side and everyone gives him a wide berth. “I need to visit my grandmother.”
“Listen, Little Red Riding Hood.” He wraps his hand around my upper arm. “I said I need a split from you, so you’re going back on the floor.”
“And I said no!” I try to pry his sausage fingers off of me but he’s square and stout, a good fifty pounds heavier than I am as if he is built of blocks, head, neck, and shoulders all stacked up on torso and pillar legs. He drags me back against the flow of workers who part around us, like we’re trash floating in the river of no concern.
“Don’t be a jerk,” I tell him. “Let go!”
But he doesn’t listen until someone behind us yells, “Hey, she said let go!”
Jude and I both spin around to see Aimery pushing toward us. Although I’m no longer training him we’ve been working near one another the past two days and he usually tags along with me during breaks. With Brie still gone, having Aimery around has made the days go quicker.
“This is none of your business,” Jude tells him. “Your shift is over. Now get the hell out.”
“Not unless she goes with me,” Aimery says calmly.
The flow of bodies around us slows as people linger to listen.
“Aimery,” I say quietly. “You don’t have to…” He cuts his eyes toward me and I think I see the corner of his mouth twitch like he’s trying not to grin, then he turns back to stare at Jude.
Jude lets go of my arm and gets in Aimery’s face. “I said this is none of your business.”
Instead of backing down like anybody else would, Aimery steps up. He’s at least three inches taller than Jude. A crowd has formed around us as people stop to watch, creating a bottleneck in the flow of bodies trying to get out the door. “According to the Corp X contract,” Aimery says, “employees are not required to work split shifts without twenty-four hours’ notice, so get off her back.”
The crowd begins to murmur.
“Contract?” Jude puts his hands on his hips. “What contract?”
“The employment contract you made me sign when I was hired three days ago,” Aimery says. “Would
you like me to pull up a copy on my HandHeld?” He lifts his arm and shows Jude his screen. Someone in the crowd snickers.
“I can ask any employee I want to work a split,” says Jude.
“Yes and any employee is entitled to say no,” explains Aimery calmly. “The problem is, you didn’t ask her. I overheard the whole thing. You insisted she do it even after she turned you down.”
Jude shakes his head then takes a deep breath, no doubt calculating his response in case Aimery is from corporate as he suspects. Although I agree with Jude that Aimery isn’t from around here, I’m sure he’s no mole. He’s too clueless to be a spy.
“So ask her,” Aimery says politely but firmly.
Jude swallows like he has a bad taste in his mouth, then he turns to me, eyes narrow with rage. “Zimri,” he says, his voice tight and every word enunciated, “would you work a split shift tonight?”
“Say please,” Aimery instructs him. I hear stifled laughter in the crowd.
Jude grits his teeth. “Please?”
I glance at Aimery who nods and I stand up straight, bolstered by his confidence but still worried what the consequences will be if I say no. Then again, I always stay when Jude asks, and right now Nonda needs me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. The whole crowd seems to hold their breath. “I can’t work tonight, Jude. I have to go see my grandmother. But another time, I’d be happy to.”
“Fine,” says Jude. He meets my gaze for a moment, a mix of rage and disappointment in his eyes, then pushes through the wall of bodies and disappears into the crowd.
“Have a nice night!” Aimery calls after him, flashing his pretty-boy smile.
“You didn’t have to…” I start to say to Aimery, but a swarm of people has subsumed him, slapping him on the back, punching his shoulder, and shaking his hand.
“I know!” he calls back to me as he’s whisked toward the exit in the current of bodies. “But I wanted to.”
By the time I get outside, Aimery is completely surrounded and he seems to be enjoying the attention. Something about him draws people—they want to be near him. Touch him. Talk to him. I try to push my way in, but someone catches hold of my arm. I gasp and spin around, expecting to see Jude ready to drag me back inside, but it’s Dorian.