Chapter 2: Evaleigh

(Trigger Warning: Mature themes and sexual peril)

My shift ended with concerned looks from co-workers. I waved them off. I'm fine.

Always fine.

I was not fine.

I was operating on the same maladaptive instruments I always ran on — the structure that keeps the outside presentable and pretendable while the inside quietly comes apart. Pretending. Functioning. Surviving. The three things I had perfected in place of living.

I held myself together until the shift ended, hyperfocusing on tasks and external stimuli rather than internal ones. Restocking supplies, double-checking on my other patients, anticipating Shanna’s caseload needs, with her permission, and vigilantly attending to those clients before she could get to them.

Trenette had stabilized — retrieved from the edge, whatever that life was worth to her. In the staff locker room, I peeled off the hospital's baby-pink scrubs like skin that I was shedding, and put on what I actually was: an oversized dark-grey sweatshirt, a baggy brown men's jacket, dark sweatpants tied tight at the waist, and shabby sneakers. Dark knit hat pulled low, my long blonde hair buried underneath. Knapsack pressed flat against my back beneath the coat. Face mask drawn up to cover as much of my face as possible. I made myself grey. I made myself shapeless. I made myself into a clone like the other zoo-ites.

Walking the ten blocks home in the dusky evening always made me anxious — a held breath stretched across ten city blocks. I'd been attacked before. The anxiety was not irrational. It was just accurate.

My PED chirped. I pulled it from my pocket without slowing my pace.

"TOP-TIER GENETICS AVAILABLE for men to choose. Improve your offspring's potential. Government-approved matches. Respond within 24 hours for priority selection."

I deleted it without reading further. The government tracked who deleted these messages and who complied. They always tracked. The device in my pocket was not a convenience — it was a leash with a screen.

Another chirp.

"President Aamon addresses the nation tonight at 8 pm. Attendance monitored."

I shoved the device back into my pocket. Attendance monitoring meant location checks at eight o'clock sharp. If you weren't watching, you might be asked why. And being asked why, in this society, was never just a question.

A drone usually tailed me on this walk — a small mechanical eye floating at streetlamp height, patient and indifferent. I checked that my PED was still in my pocket: the mandatory tracking device, the umbilical cord to a government like an authoritarian parent. If they decided to mandate me, I would know the moment the message arrived. Verity's threat today had been personal, intimate, delivered with saliva on my eyelid — but the mechanism behind it was vast and indifferent. A threat from her was a threat from the entire apparatus. That was what made it so difficult to breathe around.

I piled more emotional residue into the mental lockbox and slammed it shut. The lockbox was getting heavy. I tried not to think about what happened to containers that held too much.

I pulled my jacket tighter, zipped it to my chin, and shoved my hands into the pockets. Head down. I started walking, glancing up only when I had to, keeping my eyes on the ground the way I always did — not out of shame, but out of the long-practiced knowledge that eye contact invites things I am not equipped to survive tonight.

Low-class nurses can't hold permanent positions. I worked casual shifts when I could — last-minute calls, odd and irregular hours, showing up when the hospital needed a nurse and disappearing when they didn't. Elite nurses made three times my wage for the same work and same level of education. My schedule wasn't regular, so no one should have anticipated my route home. That was the closest thing I had to safety planning.

The exercise felt good in the late afternoon — the one honest, uncomplicated thing about the walk.

The first few blocks were bad. As I moved deeper into the Zoo, they got worse.

Bodies on the streets. Some sleeping. Some not. The distinction was not always immediately clear, which was its own kind of horror — that you could walk past a person and have to calculate whether they were alive, and that the calculation had become routine.

A City truck rumbled past, the covered bed swallowing whatever it had collected. Corpse collection. They came through twice daily, loading the dead with the efficiency of a service that had long since stopped thinking of its cargo as people – more like roadkill. They didn't check for pulses. With addiction this rampant, someone could be overdosing, still breathing, still inside their body, and be collected like refuse all the same. The truck didn't make that distinction. The truck didn't need to.

I passed a heavily pregnant woman in labour on a doorstep — crouched and gripping the concrete as if the earth itself were the only thing willing to hold her. Alone. No one near her. Just the sounds she made. I wondered whether she would try to reach Mercy Hospital at some point during this process, if she survived long enough to make the attempt, and whether there would be room when she arrived. Most women in the Zoo gave birth wherever they happened to be — alleys, shanties, under bridges, on the steps of their own buildings — their bodies doing what pregnant bodies do, regardless of whether the world had made any provision for it. I would probably pass five more before I reached home. I kept walking, because stopping changes nothing and makes you a target, and I have learned to carry that guilt the way you carry something too heavy, find a spot, however ill-equipped to hold it, and put it down.  It is like shrapnel of guilt. Someday I might find the pieces and create them into something worthwhile.

The government mandated pregnancy and provided nothing to ensure survival. No prenatal care for low-class women. No support after birth. No infrastructure, no safety net, no acknowledgement that a life had been introduced into the world by force and then abandoned to it. Once a woman delivered, she was on her own — responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing a child while working three jobs just to cover rent, often while recovering from a birth with no medical attendance. Many gave their babies to the orphanage. Why raise your rapist's child? The orphans' future was a closed door — what waited behind it was the kind of thing people stopped talking about because talking about it didn't help, and the images stayed too long. Many ended up in the processing centres at young ages, funnelled toward Elite pleasure like a resource being efficiently allocated.

They called it population growth. We called it what it was: forced reproduction stripped of everything that makes reproduction survivable. They wanted bodies to support their economy — not people with futures, not children who might one day ask questions, just replacement stock to keep the machine running. Elite babies were investments. The rest of us were just the raw material.

Billboards and propaganda crowded every block — a concrete maze built to warehouse human livestock, not to house people. The city had been designed not for living in but for moving through efficiently on your way to serving someone else's interests. We were docile, voiceless animals providing for the Elites, and the architecture made sure we never forgot it.

Aamon's blue eyes seemed to follow me from every surface — billboards, screens, the pamphlets that appeared in our letterboxes, whether we wanted them or not. Fifteen years. Four generations of his family before him. The math of it was the kind that stopped feeling like math and started feeling like weather — just the permanent condition of the sky.

Those blue eyes followed me down the street. This was what the cult of personality looked like in real time: a cult leader worshipped as a saviour while he systematically dismantled everything that made us human to only serve his selfish interests, one law at a time, one illegal act at a time, one generation at a time, until people stopped being able to imagine that it had ever been otherwise.

My grandfather had told stories about the Before Times — when leaders could be questioned, criticized, and removed. When the media wasn't simply a government pamphlet with better production values. When textbooks contained actual history rather than the sanitized mythology preferred by the regime. Those stories were illegal now. Possessing pre-regime history books meant death. My grandfather had been executed for teaching neighbourhood children to read from old texts. I was seven years old. I remember the particular quality of the silence that came afterward, the way it was different from ordinary silence — heavier, permanent, forced and shaped like a person who was no longer there.

My PED chirped again.

"YOUR GENETICS MATTER. The Elite Match Program is now accepting applications. Release some pent-up energy. Secure your child's future."

"Low-class residents: New housing tax effective immediately. Payment is due in 30 days. Failure to comply results in eviction."

I kept walking. The chirping never stopped — advertisements, propaganda, threats, all day, every day, the device in my pocket a small, relentless voice reminding me of everything I owed and nothing I was owed in return.

One billboard featured Verity — airbrushed into something aspirational, her ice-blue eyes aimed at the middle distance with practised warmth.

She is such a bitch.

No one believed the propaganda. No one endorsed what they were being sold — fake happiness laminated over the systematic removal of autonomy and quality of life, a coat of paint over rot. We all knew that no matter how many times something is repeated, it doesn’t make it true. Some in the Zoo outwardly supported the government anyway, angling for whatever scraps Aamon might toss in their direction. That was like a hen trying to gain the favour from a hungry fox. It never went well for the hen. The fox remained a fox regardless.

No one could stop him. I doubted government leaders had set foot in the low-class areas in living memory. Why would they? They were busy living off the wealth they extracted from us, looting public funds and lands with the confidence of people who had never once been held to account. We had no power. We were the soil their lives grew in, and soil does not get to have opinions.

Two more blocks.

There were rumoured underground resistance movements that came and went, flickering into existence like matches struck in a wind — bright for a moment, then gone, leaving only the smell of something that had almost caught. In my mother's generation, there had been a structure called the Pentressa, whispered about in hushed tones for a few years, passed between people the way contraband is — quickly, without eye contact, with the constant awareness of who might be listening. Then, like so many things that threatened to matter, they simply disappeared. No announcement. No trial, at least not one anyone heard about. Just absence where presence had been, which in this society was its own kind of statement. Probably killed. That was the word people used — probably — because certainty required information, and information required a press that wasn't propaganda-driven, which didn't exist anymore.

This generation's resistance called themselves the Gazelles. A name that said everything about what survival looked like here — not strength exactly, but speed, agility, the ability to move through open ground without being caught. No one spoke about them openly, because speaking about them invited military retaliation against the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood always paid for the courage of its most vocal members. The calculus was brutal, and everyone understood it: silence was not cowardice, it was the tax we paid to keep the people next to us alive. Either way, the Gazelles had not gained meaningful traction — at least not that anyone could see. Whether that was because they had been dismantled or because they had simply learned to be invisible, I didn't know. In this world, the two outcomes looked identical from the outside.

Just as I had decided to be grateful for an uneventful walk — the particular fragile gratitude of someone who knows better than to count on things going well — I heard footsteps behind me. Regular. Deliberate. Matching my pace with the patience of someone who had done this before and was not in a hurry.

Here we go again.

Like an explosion from a cannon, I bolted into a full run. Fingertips brushed the back of my shoulder — the first contact, exploratory, a predator testing what kind of challenge his prey was.

One block to go.

My electronic key was already accessible. This was not the first time. My body knew the drill before my mind had finished processing the situation — muscle memory built from repetition, from all the times before this.

I didn't dare look back. Turning my head costs me speed and costs me composure, and I needed both. His footsteps were gaining — longer stride, longer legs, the calculation of pursuit favouring him. As I ran, I noticed two other women in the street being chased by their own pursuers. One outpaced hers and got away. The other was ensnared — a sound I did not let myself process, filed immediately into the place where things go that I cannot afford to feel right now.

I have shamefully been the one who watched and kept walking, grateful it wasn't me. The shame of that does not go away. It just lives alongside everything else waiting to be felt.

One block to go. He hooked his right arm around my neck and pulled me back hard against him — and the familiar stride of survival engaged, cold and automatic, the part of me that has learned to operate without panic because panic is a luxury I cannot afford in these moments. I got my left hand into the crook of his arm immediately, protecting my airway. That reflex had taken a long time to build. I was grateful for it now.

He's taller than me. That's why he was faster. The smell reached me — alcohol and vomit, close and humid at the back of my neck.

Gross.

He dragged me sideways into the narrow space between my building and the grey building next to it — a gap barely wide enough for two people, which was, of course, the point. He pinned me between his body and the rough wall, immobilizing my hips, leaving me some range of motion above the waist. He yanked my mask to the ground despite my resistance. I kept my wrist in the crook of his arm, and I kept my breathing, and I kept my head, because I have practiced this the way other people practice things that might save their lives.

THINK. Where is the opportunity?

He arched backward, pulling my neck with him, forcing my spine to curve. His free hand rammed up beneath my shirt, dragging jacket and fabric upward, baring my torso to the cold air. He yanked my bra hard enough that the closure snapped — a small, decisive sound — and leaned forward to look over my shoulder at what he had exposed, laughing.

“Beautiful tits, young lady.” He continued to laugh with a lecherous frequency.

His grip tightening. I was glad for the dark. No one on the street was paying attention. Some might have wanted to join, which would have made everything worse and more dangerous, and I filed that possibility away for later and focused on right now.

He held the bunched fabric with the arm still around my neck, keeping it out of his way with horrible efficiency, then dropped his hand to my waistband. With my free hand, I was already reaching into my sweatpants pocket for my switchblade before I lost my pants.

I'm glad I've lost the ability to feel emotions. It keeps my head clear.

The thought arrived with such clean conviction that it almost sounded true.

"Imagine what our baby would look like, darling," he sneered and slurred simultaneously, drool landing warm on the back of my neck. Aamon says the world needs children. We must do our part." He paused, laughing, “Maybe she will have your tits too!!” He laughed.

Even now, I thought. Even here. Even in this alley, in this dark, against this wall — the government's voice in his mouth, its logic wearing his face, its general mandate being enacted by his hands. The machinery reaches everywhere. There is no place outside it.

This is what happens when consequences and accountability are systemically erased, leaving indecency and violence toward other men, women and children in its wake. It is like the dragon was always there. The cage was removed, leaving the dragon to fulfill its every megalomaniacal desire without consequence.

"Since when did you like anything Aamon says?" I said, keeping my voice even, buying seconds with conversation.

He didn't answer. He was not interested in conversation. He was a man with a single purpose, dulled and slowed by whatever he had taken — addiction was rampant in the Zoo, people turning to substances to survive the weight of living here, their minds distorting and dimming under the load. It gave me an advantage, depending on the substance and how much they partook. Tonight, I thought, I had an advantage. I needed to be right.

Knife ready in my right hand, I found enough space between my body and the wall to lean forward, forcing the physics of the situation — pressing my butt against his armed crotch, tipping him forward, making him believe one thing while I prepared another. He moaned, misreading the movement entirely, his grip at my neck loosening as both hands moved to my waistband. I always tie them tight. Always. I had started doing this years ago and had never once regretted it.

Verity is right. I do have an ass for days, and it just came in useful.

He spun me to face him, slammed my back against the concrete wall of my own building, the wall of the place I paid too much to sleep in, and kept pulling at my waistband. He leaned in, misreading everything, hands intermittently reaching beneath my shirt again, like he couldn’t decide what his real objective was.

He didn't notice the knife. If Trenette could use the body as a distraction, I could too. We had more in common than I wanted to admit.

I grabbed his shoulders, pulled him in feigning interest, let him believe what he wanted to believe for precisely the second I needed, and drove my knee into his crotch with everything I had. He folded — a large frame collapsing inward, the architecture of his confidence suddenly structural rubble — and hit the ground with a sound that was almost satisfying. Almost. I doubted he would remember this tomorrow. I was certain his balls would.

I ran. I didn't even need the knife. He was not very good at this — a comfort that didn't comfort me, because the next one might be.

I crossed the remaining distance to the steel-grey front door of my building, electronic key already out, hand already moving, muscle memory completing the sequence before I had consciously finished deciding to do it. I got through the door. I slammed it behind me. He didn't follow.

I climbed the stairs to my floor and stopped in the stairwell — stale air, dark corners, the faint smell of mould that had been there as long as I had — and leaned against the wall and let the wall hold me for a moment, since nothing else was available.

And then everything I had locked away came loose at once.

I wept in the way you weep when there is no one to see you doing it, and you have been holding it for so long that the release is almost indistinguishable from breaking. The stairwell was my only witness. The stairwell did not react. The stairwell did not ask if I was okay.

I cannot be hurt by something I cannot feel.

The thought rose and fell. I was not sure I still believed it. I was not sure I had ever believed it. I had just needed it to be true, and sometimes that is enough.

I am so alone.

The words arrived without drama, without self-pity — just the flat, accurate statement of someone taking inventory of what is actually there. I sat with it for a moment, in the dark, in the stale air, in the only place I had.

Then I got up. Because that is what you do when the stairwell is all you have. You get up and do it again tomorrow.