by Rose Francis
She nearly fainted as she fought to keep her left eye—now fully, completely blue—open. The right eye went faster as her body intuitively matched itself to her wishes. No sooner had it finished then she fell to her knees before the bucket, vomiting. She used a little precious water to wipe her face, hoping the redness of her eyes would go down fast. She didn’t want someone to think she was on a Hal.
She stepped out, making her way to the Docks, where she hoped to find a scavenger-ship needing help polishing tools. It paid little more than a hot rat-kebab at lunch, and one meal-token at closing, but every little bit helped.
She kept her eyes down, navigating past several Engineers. One glanced at her, but his gaze flicked beyond her as a heavily tattooed man brushed past him too roughly. He checked for his pouch and followed the man until he was sure he still had it.
She started as she was grabbed, and thought about struggling, but if it was an Engineer, what was the point? Besides—she hadn't done anything. She swung around to face the person holding her, a young woman. She barely registered the fear in the girl's face before her lips were on Christine's. Her arms went around Christine's neck, and she fought to push her away.
The girl murmured, “Please help me—I'm pregnant,” into her ear.
For a moment, Christine lost herself in the softness of her mouth, soft and unchapped, unlike Christine's, cracked and raw from the harsh, dry air pouring through the Lower Block's ventilation. Then it sank in.
“What? Plenty of people are pregnant. Get off me.” An Engineer looked at them, and the blood went out of the girl's face. He took a step towards the woman. Reluctantly, Christine kissed her back, stopping only when she felt sure he had turned his attention elsewhere. The girl looked around, a little too jumpy for Christine's tastes. Didn't she know that looking nervous was the loudest way to tell an Engineer you were a target?
“You need to calm down,” Christine said, with her lips brushing gently against the girl's earlobe.
“But he's—they're—looking for me. He's going to hurt my baby again.”
Christine raised her eyebrows and prepared to walk away. Babies got hurt every day. Four babies were born for every child who reached ten, and ten babies were miscarried for every one born. What the fuck kind of palace had this girl been living in? She felt the girl shaking and put her arm out to steady her. If she passed out, it would bring far too much unwanted attention. The girl leaned into her arm, and her lips moved as she counted her breaths.
“Who's looking for you?” Christine asked. “What Level are you from?”
The girl hesitated, but her eyes flipped towards an Engineer.
“Holy shit. You're running? Look, I can't help you. I've got my own problems.” Christine felt bad; the girl was about the age her own sister would have been, had Sharon not died at fourteen, her face torn open with the kind of smile one only got on a Hal. But Christine really couldn't afford this. She couldn't afford to draw the Engineers' attention, couldn't afford to be late to the Docks, lest she miss out on the day's labor, and she certainly couldn't afford a grown kid swinging from her apron strings.
An Engineer held her gaze a moment too long and started shouldering towards her. She saw his hand flick in a signal to another a short distance away. The second Engineer started forward immediately.
Christine heard herself say “Come on,” and tugged her into a stream of schoolchildren training at the factory school. The Engineers attempted to pick up speed, but there were too many people, a river of kids in the way. The two women swirled through a set of gates, into the rundown school.
A guard stepped in front of them. “Hold on. You’re no teacher.”
The pregnant girl froze. “No,” Christine said, smiling. “Of course not. We’re here to pick up our daughter, Roselyn.”
“Classes are only just starting,” he said, eying her.
“I know. She was in the previous shift of classes. We were supposed to be here an hour ago, but got held over at work. Somebody got caught stealing, and…you know how that goes. We just want to get our daughter, to take her home.”
He sighed. “Okay. But anyone asks, you came in the south entrance.”
“Thank you,” Christine said, and as soon as the door had shut behind her, amended, “putz.” Then her world began to melt, and the pregnant girl was the only thing that kept her from hitting the floor.
“Whoa. You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Christine said, shoving her hand away. “Just heat exhaustion,” she lied. “You ever been inside a school?”
“Not like this,” she replied.
“You mean a rusted-out factory?” The girl didn’t answer, and Christine felt bad for picking on her. “Engineers are like a male dog when they smell a female in heat. They’ll chase a vapor for miles. We need a good place to hide.”
“Like a supply closet?” the girl asked, pointing to a door with that name scratched into it with a knife.
“That might work,” Christine said. She opened the door, and the hints of a smile on her lips died as she saw that there was barely enough room inside for both of them to stand. “Or it might be the kind of closet brooms would get claustrophobic in.” Over the girl’s shoulder, she saw the Engineers talking to the guard at the door. “Shit,” she said, shoving her inside.
“I’m Ilsa,” the girl said. “In case they take me, I want you to know my name, and that I’m— thank you.”
Christine held her index finger to her lips and nodded towards the door. Two shadows showed that there were a pair of legs standing on the other side of it.
“You coming, or you want to have a quick jerk in the supply closet?” she heard one man say from further down the hall.
“We’re surrounded by schoolkids, you prick; show some decorum,” the other said, his voice trailing as he walked away.
Christine didn’t breathe for half a minute, and Ilsa followed her lead. Then they both sighed together. “I’m Christine,” she said.
“How’s your night vision?” Ilsa asked.
“My everything vision is blinkered. You’re kind of a blobby puddle—no offense.”
“Heatstroke?” Ilsa asked, but Christine noticed an edge beneath it.
“Something like that. Why?”
Ilsa grabbed a box and held it up. “Because these are school uniforms.” She rifled through the open box, then frowned. “Though they aren’t exactly in our size.” She held one up in each hand. “They seem to come only in slutty and extra slutty.”
Christine grabbed one and pulled to test the fabric, which gave generously. “But at least they’re stretchy, so we can get them on. It might be enough to get us past the Engineers.”
Two
“Could you turn around?” Ilsa asked.
“The girl who kissed me before even asking for my help is suddenly demure?” Christine asked. But she turned around as she slipped on her own skirt. She noticed Ilsa's shoes: scuffed, likely second-hand slippers. If they weren't so conspicious, she'd demand them as payment for her assistance. She looked to her own bare feet, spattered with mud and tar. Most of the feet on the Lower Levels looked like hers, and it made her wonder who Ilsa was. But she didn't have time to probe the question. “Your sudden prudishness does bring up a kind of interesting point. Let me know when you’re decent, because you’re either not going to like it, or you’re really going to like it.”
“Done,” Ilsa said.
Christine lunged at her, pinning her to the opposite wall and kissing her passionately, but with too much tongue, too much teeth, and too much suction. Ilsa stared at her, eyes lingering on the crow's feet at the edges of Christine's lips and eyes.
“Um. What was that for?” Ilsa asked.
“Puffy lips,” Christine said.
“Well, they should be; you tried to inhale them.”
“No. We’re schoolgirls, emerging during a class period from a supply closet. With puffy lips.”
“Oh,” Ilsa said. She smiled. “You could have warned me
.”
“This was more fun.”
“For you.”
“So it wasn’t good for you?” Christine asked, gently touching her cheek as she grinned ear to ear. “But we should get out of here. Otherwise the swelling will go down, and we’ll have to kiss all over again.”
Christine emerged first, and as nonchalantly as possible, looked in either direction down the hall. She didn’t see anyone. In the light, she could see how well the uniform hugged her frame. “They fit better than I thought they would,” she said.
“Speak for yourself,” Ilsa said. “Mine’s halfway to a belly shirt.”
“They probably weren’t designed with a pregnant belly in mind,” she replied. “Crap.”
“What?” Ilsa asked, but then she saw it. One of the guards exited a classroom to their left. She instinctively turned in the other direction, and noticed the other leaving a room on their right. “Damnit. And now I’ve got to pee,” she whispered to Christine.
“Seriously?”
“I’ve got a squatter using my bladder as a beanbag chair, so yeah.”
“Fine. It might at least buy us a second.”
Christine laced her fingers through Ilsa’s and pulled her towards the restrooms. But she was preoccupied with watching the guard at the end of the hall, and nearly took them into the men’s room. “This one,” Ilsa said, tugging her in the direction of the women’s instead.
“Yep,” Christine said, “on account of my lady parts,” and followed.
Ilsa retreated into a stall. Christine stood on the lip of a sink and tested the windows. They had been welded shut to prevent a leak of pollution into the schools, and maybe to keep girls from smoking in the bathroom, too. “Shit,” she muttered, hopping down.
“No,” Ilsa said, flushing, “only numero one.” She turned on the faucet and let the water trickle over her hands. The sound echoed like a fountain against the cold tiles. “What should we do?” she asked quietly. Christine took a moment to answer—only the factories and schools in the Lower Levels had running water regularly, and it had been a long time since she’d heard how loud it could be.
“Best thing is probably just to blend. I don’t think they got a great look at us out in the crowd; I’m honestly not so sure why they’ve spent this long looking for us. Threes are interchangeable.” Ilsa looked down and away. “What? What aren’t you telling me?”
Ilsa glanced towards the door. “There isn’t time, okay? We need to get out of here.”
“I can agree with that.”
They left the bathroom together. The guard further down the hall noticed them, and he lingered. Christine couldn’t be sure if he was just admiring the tightness of their uniforms or recognizing them from before. “Kiss me,” she said.
“I don’t think two women making out is a get-out-of-Service-free card.”
“You think they’re going to take you for Service?” Christine asked, suddenly very concerned about the fugitive she was harboring.
“It’s a figure of speech,” Ilsa stuttered, edging towards the HVAC alarm.
“No, no, no, no, that’s the wrong kind of distraction—” but Ilsa ignored her and jerked the alarm handle.
Christine grabbed her and rolled her along the wall away from the switch, kissing her madly as classroom doors burst open. Ilsa stiffened beneath her as though trying to avoid getting dirt from the wall on her clothes.
The two teachers emerging from classes nearest the alarm glanced in its direction, then to each other, and shrugged. Students began pouring from classrooms, joining one central throng flowing in the general direction of away from the doors they came in.
The guard continued looking for them, but quickly realized that in a sea of faces pushing past him, all contorted with concern for their lives, he was fighting the current. And he hadn’t spent so much time earning his residency on the Middle Levels to expose himself to the cloud in the slums. He shrugged and let the human current carry him along with the students.
He was only a few feet away. Christine stroked the knife she kept in her waistband. She wondered if Ilsa had seen it when they changed, and wondered what she thought if she had.
Her heart caught in her throat as he drifted closer on the tide, but then a little girl, no more than ten, started to fuss at him. She grabbed his pantleg, her whimpering for her mother carrying over the noise, and he stopped.
Christine started to breathe again. They went down the hall and took a hard left, and after another turn, they were well out of sight.
“So, uh, what do you do for a living when you’re not fleeing the Engineers?” she asked, looking Ilsa over.
“I’m a maid. I...I was a maid.” She stroked her belly. “It’s a long story.”
“We kinda have time.”
“Well...there was a man named Benito. A Poca. And…”
Christine opened her mouth to ask a question, and of course, the alarms started to howl. Before she had the chance to ask, the hall filled with children again, pouring through from the rest of the corridors.
Three
“Do you think it’s another drill?” a boy to Ilsa’s right asked.
“They promised not to do any more this quarter,” a girl near him said. “I bet it’s real.”
A boy sandwiched between them started to wheeze.
“Carlos, it’s fine,” his teacher said, touching his shoulder. “I’ve been down into the cloud; I know what it smells like, and this isn’t it. Somebody probably pulled the alarm.”
Ilsa slowed down, to put distance between the guard and the both of them, and pulled on Christine’s shirt so she didn’t lose her in the crowd.
They filtered through a long hall, connecting into another building, clearly a late and rickety addition. Then they were in another room. A woman was standing on a low stage. For a moment, the teachers at the front paused. She made eye contact and waved them in.
“See,” the teacher told Carlos. “The back-up HVAC is working fine.”
The shelter filled fast as the outlying areas of the district poured in. The Level was meant to have three or four shelters to ensure people could get to proper ventilation quickly. Parts were tough to come by, and most of the time, even the second shelter was out of service. People packed around Christine and Ilsa, and they linked elbows so that they wouldn’t be separated.
The drills weren’t uncommon with equipment as poorly maintained as in the Lower Blocks, and people were calm, if nervous. Christine knew that nothing made it any easier to face the possibility of their impending suffocation, even if they knew they faced that chance regularly. And she’d heard speculation that the Pocas and Engineers deliberately conducted these drills in the hopes that the Lower Level denizens would work even harder, knowing that at least some of their work went into maintaining the delicate system that allowed them to breathe freely.
Ilsa obviously felt somewhat guilty about scaring so many people, and couldn’t meet anyone’s gaze. Christine wanted to console her, but in these close quarters, she couldn’t afford for them to be overheard. There was no sign of the Engineers from the school, but she knew they were somewhere around here, huddled with the rest of the livestock.
Even now, Engineers in ventilated suits would be combing the Block’s HVAC, examining piping for holes, testing gauges to ensure they still worked, tightening connections. The whole process could take a few hours, even with a full complement of upper-level Engineers.
Exposed machinery wove through the walls of the shelter, delivering them clean air from a backup system and maintaining the seal on the shelter doors. Near the middle was a large silo housing varying cleaning filters. Tubes connected to it, leading to larger connections in the walls, piping the air to the full expanse of the shelter. The pipes continued along the ceiling as well. Christine doubted she could put her arms around tubes or pipe. Ilsa’s eyes kept flicking to the patches and rust spots on everything, and Christine knew the woman would never really trust a system that had been so obviously repaired.
She hoped Ilsa was regretting pulling the alarm, now that she was worrying the back-up shelter couldn’t be trusted. It had been a stupid idea in a moment of panic, and one couldn’t afford that kind of panic when evading Engineers.
Despite her claustrophobic surroundings, Christine rarely felt as at peace as she did in the shelter. Pipes in the main expanse were generally hidden beneath a false ceiling made of fibrous tiles to make any tampering more obvious and difficult to plan. Out in the markets and residences, she didn’t get the same feeling of security as she did when packed with a thousand other people with the exact same problems she had, in their own complex, sentient organism. It was hard to feel alone. The thought of the kind of imagination it would have taken to design the system, and the kind of focus to maintain it, was somewhat inspiring. Her entire world, contained in the synthetic arms of a protective giant.
The doors popped as they unsealed, and they heard a hollered “all clear,” to the Engineers nearest the door.
Two suited Engineers entered and called out, “All’s safe. Proceed back to your work in an orderly fashion.” They were nearly swept back in the tide of bodies hurrying to earn their precious meal chits.
Christine tried to push them into the most fast-moving group draining from the shelter, but they were far enough back in the procession that the crowd was already thinning out as they approached the arching doorway. Christine traded a look with Ilsa and they started forward with the same relieved expression that the other residents wore.
An Engineer glanced at them. Christine felt cold as his eyes moved past her, onto Ilsa, then lingered. He attempted to signal something to the other guard, and the second guard removed his baton from the thong holster that held it at his waist. The people were yanking them towards the guards, and Ilsa hadn’t noticed the signal. Christine pulled her back. She hauled her deeper into the shelter, looking for a platform or panel—somewhere they could hide or get some distance. And, more room to fight, if need be.