I’m going to buy a new battery, Sunny told herself. She just hadn’t been able to put enough money together at once to afford one and eat, but she was so sick of putting up with Tommy that screw it, she’d rather starve. The Conversion Department had to put extra effort into car batteries—the lead was easy enough, but the acid and plastic required more advanced chemistry—and with everything manufactured in-house, it cost about three hundred dollars. She’d thought about buying a new charger, instead, but with all of its delicate fabricated parts, that was almost a thousand.
The phone didn’t ring again as Sunny drove the bumpy, cracked, rain-torn road south to the upscale bedroom community of Point MacKenzie, through the nice mansions there—wealthy people who didn’t want to live in the megastructures inside the Dome so they bought property as close as possible—and on to the E. Banks Bridge that crossed the Cook Inlet to connect the Anchorage Dome with the rest of northern Alaska. The Glenn Highway, parts of which had sunk eight feet in the Earthquake of ’97, had been abandoned for the massive, eight-lane bridge with the Megarail following the undercarriage.
As soon as Sunny got out on the bridge, she got a view of the Dome, which was actually a series of massive linked domes that stretched from the Knik River to several miles down the Seward Highway. Over a thousand square miles of domes contained within seven major structures and dozens of smaller offshoots, all linked together with a fan circulation system and temperature-control climate regulation, like a massive commercial greenhouse that kept the air at a comfortable seventy-two degrees year-round.
She entered the North Anchorage Dome on the last leg of the E. Banks Bridge, and the windows of her car immediately started to fog up at the change in humidity. Overhead, massive fans thrummed as they pulled in fresh air from outside. Not that it was strictly necessary—the botanists and scientists of the Climate Division made sure they kept North Anchorage, South Anchorage, Ft. Rich, Eagle River, and Chugiak domes at tropical conditions, allowing the most effective water and air-purifying plants and algae to completely renew the Domes every four hours.
Inside, everything was green and lush. Water flowing in from the Knik and the Susitna Rivers was harvested before it could flow into the Pacific, and used to create cascade effects of blooming jungle plants on every terrace, every chiseled rock wall, every rooftop. Waterfalls had been constructed to flow down the tree-studded sides of most skyscrapers in the North Dome, giving a sense of wildness that was only betrayed by the fact that the sky overhead was sealed off by titanium struts and Fabriglas.
People inside the Dome hadn’t started their days yet, leaving the place pristine and all the stone courtyards, edifices, and monuments empty and glimmering in the early morning sun. The Cleanliness Commission’s pickers kept even the cigarette butts off the streets. Picking had been one of the jobs Sunny had wanted to do, since pickers working for the Cleanliness Commission got to see a lot of greenery while scrounging for trash amongst the jungle-draped megastructures, but unfortunately it wasn’t a day-by-day job, but salaried, and she’d been fired on the second day for not showing up on the first.
Sunny pulled into the parking garage immediately off the Bridge—fossil-fuel vehicles were not allowed more than four hundred feet inside any one Dome without incurring emissions fines, making the North Anchorage Dome really the only one she could afford to reach, what with the gas highway down between Wasilla and Chugiak.
Sunny parked at the towering outdomer garage, paid the five dollar parking fee, and was early enough to get on the 6:45 public rail west, headed for the Seawall project. She got off the rail at 6:55 and ran to the lines forming at the docks, signing in just at 6:58. Already, the lines were choked with other outdomers looking to make a few bucks for the day, and there was that air of desperation that always came in the last five minutes before Last Call. Sunny was well past the crack-of-dawn time to catch a job with a foreman, but she lined up anyway, shamelessly hoping for some random death or mass firing. Right next door, the Courthouse of the Republic stood like an ancient Roman senate building made of near-black granite, with a hundred and ten polished steps from the street to the entryway. Sunny knew, because in one of her many days fruitlessly standing in line, she’d counted.
Sunny was actually surprised to see that the work crews weren’t completely filled yet. Foremen with scanners were still going down the ranks scanning retinas, reading the work history on each person, deciding who best to fill their crew that day. Sunny allowed herself to get a little hopeful, realizing the foremen were choosing bigger crews than usual. Not only that, but the line administrators were still accepting people past 7:00.
She started to get excited. Must be starting a new phase of the project, she thought. More work meant less chances she was going to drive to the Domes and go home empty-handed. She wondered what the new arrival deadline was. Maybe she could afford to sleep an extra ten minutes each day…
Then the Dome Police seemed to drift out of the nearby alleyways by the hundreds, a wave of armed men and women in black combat gear.
“Reconciliation!” someone down the line screamed, and everyone started to panic, hundreds immediately jumping the metal line barricades and bolting for the road. Sunny stayed where she was as the Dome Police began firing tasered bolas and beanbags at those trying to escape. Dozens hit the ground screaming, but at least a few hundred made it past the containment ring and out onto 4th Avenue.
Once the initial wave was contained, the DP surrounded the last stragglers—those U/Bs who were too afraid or too weak to run—and forced everyone into a big herd. Anxiety in the gathering increased a hundredfold, because most of the people standing in line had some reason or another that they weren’t hirable for other jobs…
…which meant they often came here to see if a kind foreman would overlook the fact they had U/B status and give them a few bucks for a day of hard work. It was a common practice—the foremen saved project budget by paying less under the table, allowing them to put that money into their own pockets, and the Unnecessaries were able to sporadically supplement their income with something other than panhandling.
Then the open-bedded trucks started moving in, dozens of them, each with a cage on the back for detainees.
Suddenly, all the people that the foremen were picking from the lines made sense.
They’re conscripting, Sunny thought, horrified. Pulling out the bad apples, sending them north to the Slope work camps or the Pit, where they would work until they died.
A man with a megaphone climbed up onto the courthouse steps and shouted, “As you probably guessed, this is a Reconciliation. As it is against the Republic’s laws for Unnecessaries to seek regular employment, Unnecessaries who don’t have authorization to be here will be conscripted for a shorthanded outdomer worksite. Ordinaries will be evaluated for their work habits, and those who don’t meet standards are going to be demoted. Any worksite defectors or anyone without documentation will automatically be considered a foreign agent and be held for questioning, then deported to the Pit. Please remain calm. Running or resisting arrest will result in an automatic class demotion.”
Even then, everyone who had been dropped in the initial rush were being zip-tied and stuffed into the back of the trucks. People were crying. The panic was infectious, and even though Sunny knew she wasn’t on their conscription list, her heart rate increased while her limbs shook with adrenaline. Reconciliations usually occurred only two or three times a year, and she had always been working on the other side of the fence when they happened, one of the lucky ones who got there early.
The Dome Police escorted all the people the foremen had pulled from the lines to the trucks, turning the joyful boon that most of the desperate men and women thought they’d received into the worst day of their lives. Sunny felt for them. Two more demerits, and she was gonna be right in their shoes. Just another useless mouth to feed in a place with too many mouths.
The lines were forced to form again, forty huge snakes of people that went
on for hundreds of yards. Compliance Officers—people she had originally mistaken for foremen, but upon second look didn’t bear the bloody knuckles, dirty, work-crusted hands, or hard bodies of lifetime manual laborers—went down the lines, tugging people out, their choices backed up by the Dome Police. The day wore on, and in the background they saw the massive granite blocks being moved from the rail by those lucky first-liners who had come before the crack of dawn and gotten a job before the Reconciliation started. If they noticed or cared that their contemporaries were being sorted and graded like cattle, they made no indication. In fact, most workers on the other side of the fences made a point of not making eye contact with the men and women surrounded by Dome Police.
Then the officer closest to her tugged an Unnecessary B from the line only a few people down from Sunny.
“I got a family!” the man cried. “My little boy’s only two! I can’t get shipped north!”
“Says here you’ve still got six months of probation left before you’re eligible for another Dome Commission job,” the officer read off his chart.
“I need to eat!” the man cried. “My kids need to eat!”
“And they’ll get a stipend for your work up north,” the officer said, gesturing for the DP to take him away. Watching the two men with their clean black combat gear, their expensive tactical weapons, their total indifference to the guy who had fallen onto his knees to beg, Sunny resented them more deeply than anything ever before.
“Please, my boys need a father.” He was grabbing the Compliance Officer’s pant leg.
“You’ll be allowed visiting days,” the officer said, shoving him back towards the two Dome Police in black SWAT gear. They escorted the man away. Before he was completely out of sight, Sunny heard him crying.
That’s gonna be me in a couple more no-shows, she thought. She felt sorry for him, a well of indignant hopelessness burning within. What could she do? Raise her hand and complain?
Then the Compliance Officer was standing in front of her, his scanner upheld.
“Hello, officer,” Sunny said, trying to remember that she had once worked with guys like this.
“Retina,” the man barked. Like she was a dog. A goddamn beast that wasn’t doing what it was told.
Bristling, feeling violated, Sunny did as instructed. Jackass, she thought as he read the results. She waited for him to pass.
Instead, he frowned at her resume. “It says here you’ve been hired four hundred and thirteen times in the last two years, and yet you don’t have a single recommendation to your name.”
Sunny snorted. “Obviously that’s a glitch.”
The Compliance Officer didn’t seem so sure. “Yeah…”
“I got paid,” Sunny said. “If they didn’t like my work, they wouldn’t pay me, right?”
“Recommendations are customary for good work,” the Compliance Officer said, continuing to frown.
And it was true. She was supposed to have at least two hundred recommendations by now—she’d been keeping count how many times a foreman who had been impressed by her work had told her she was getting recommended for a promotion. If even a quarter of those foremen had remembered her name and written her a recommendation, she could have climbed back into Desirable status years ago.
“Hey, it’s your system,” Sunny said. “You can’t penalize me for a glitch.”
But the Compliance Officer didn’t seem convinced. “Ma’am, we’re gonna need you to step out of line.”
Sunny felt a rush of cold sweat sweep her body, followed by rage. “Fuck that. I’m perfectly legal. Move on.”
The Compliance Officer gestured for a couple DP to grab her by the shoulders and haul her from the line.
Maybe it was because of her previous altercation with Tommy, or maybe it was because she was usually an early bird who didn’t deserve this shit, but when the closest combat-clad man grabbed her, Sunny yanked her arm out of his grip.
It was a mistake. She knew, as soon as she did it, that it was a mistake. But by then, it was too late. Several DP were moving on her, then, rushing to get their hands on her. Her instincts went into overdrive. She knew it was a demotion. She didn’t care. When the first one tried to grab her again, more violently this time, she punched him right in his fugly face. Then, as the others were scrambling for their tasers, she jumped the barricade, launching deeper into the milling lines of people, then leapt another line barricade and crouched out of sight in the midst of the crowd.
The shouting and chaos behind her stilled, then quieted. A couple of the people in line frowned down at her huddling at their shoes, but didn’t complain. Eventually, Sunny stood.
Then, very carefully, she started easing her way through the lines towards the courthouse. People made short protestations, then forgot about her. Eventually, at the opposite edge of the gathering, she found herself facing a lazy semicircle of DP guarding the stone stairs leading up to the courthouse. They looked bored.
She left the line and started walking towards the closest one. He immediately tensed, his fingers tightening on his rifle. The other DP glanced at her warily as she approached their companion, but made no effort to leave his station.
“Hey,” Sunny said as casually as she could, though her throat was tight with terror. She knew that if she couldn’t make it past him, she was looking at a lifetime of hard labor at one of the northern worksites, digging up stones or oil for the rest of society.
“Get back in line.” The guard was watching her with distrust.
“Look, I was just trying to get in the courthouse when they blocked me off and I got mixed up in this mess.”
The guard looked at her rockdust-caked clothes and snorted. “Sure you were.”
She forced a smile. “Think you could let me by?”
The guard laughed. “Get back in line.”
Sunny looked over his shoulder and widened her eyes. She raised her voice to a shout. “That old guy’s getting away!” She pointed to the other side of the gathering.
The guards all looked. Sunny started walking, back tense, all the while expecting a taser between the shoulder blades.
She kept walking.
And walking.
By the time she reached the bottom of the granite staircase, her heart was hammering and she could barely breathe. She glanced over her shoulder to see whether the DP could really have forgotten she existed.
Sure enough, they stood facing the Reconciliation, all their black-clad backs to her.
Huh. Maybe being chronically forgotten was useful for something…
“Neat trick.” A mid-thirties, direct-from-India man in a strange opalescent silk robe was seated on the third stair up. His long black hair had been clasped at the nape of his neck with a brass band, and his clothes were uniquely cut and glimmery in a way she’d never seen before—almost like a long Bangladeshi panjabi laying over those puffy harem pants from the old movies—which screamed ‘money’ to her like a cheap neon bar sign, since anyone foreign who was given access to the Domes nowadays had to be wealthy.
He had been watching her as she approached, grinning.
I’ll show you a trick, you prick, Sunny thought, sickened that yet another rich man had come out of the Courthouse to watch blockkers get beaten down in a Reconciliation for his own perverse entertainment. She let shock form on her face and pointed at an advocate climbing the courthouse stairs. “Holy crap, is that guy Canadian?!”
The guy in the embroidered Indian silks looked over his shoulder and she kept walking.
“Nah. A Canadian wouldn’t be caught dead in that suit. Too stuffy.”
Four steps away, Sunny stopped, frowning, and turned.
The Indian man grinned and waved at her.
Her heart skipped a little beat. She glanced at the advocate still climbing the stairs. “Maybe you should look again.”
Obediently, the man looked. “And what am I looking for?”
Sunny quickly sidestepped, moving around his head, out of the place wher
e she had last been.
Sure enough, when the man turned back, he was looking for her . He was grinning again. “I take it that works on most people?”
Sunny’s mouth fell open. “Holy shit,” she whispered.
“I’ve gotta admit, I was wondering for a moment if you were actually gonna get out of there. Seemed like a good way to get tazed.”
“You…remember me?”
“Sure do.” He reached to one side and picked up a folder that had been lying open on the step beside him, and Sunny saw a picture of her face before he closed it. Beside the man, there was a leather attaché case. The top was open and she saw more folders inside.
Immediately, Sunny got wary. She glanced around her just to ascertain that no DP had been sneaking towards them as they talked.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The man smiled at her. “We’d gotten some reports over the last few months there was something weird going on over here with one of the day workers at the West Dock, and since Darren’s busy, I had to check it out.” He cocked his head. “You hungry? I was thinking about breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry.” She was, in fact, but with rent coming up in six days, she didn’t have the ten bucks to spend on a plate.
“My treat. We could have burgers.”
The photo of her disappearing inside the briefcase was nagging at her. Sunny frowned at him, wary all over again. “What is it you do for a living, again?”
“Oh.” The man chuckled and held out his hand. “Sorry, my bad. I forget these things. I’m Bukkhazariah Basuchandra, but people call me Khaz. Tell me… What’s your name?” He was smiling, but there was tension in his face as he waited.
Strangely, Sunny had the urge to tell him. Probably, of course, because there hadn’t been another soul to remember her presence in three years.
Still, Sunny wasn’t stupid. She didn’t tell him and didn’t take his hand. Something about the Indian guy was giving her a bad feeling—a really bad feeling. The same kind of bad feeling she’d had the morning she got into the ambulance the day of the crash. In fact, the closer she got to the guy, the more her hackles went up, like goosebumps on her soul. She took a step backwards. “How do you remember me?”
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 4