Chapter 3: Evaleigh

Morning. The drone will come soon. It always did — as reliable as sunrise, and far less welcome.

I stayed still beneath my blanket, face buried in the crook of my elbow. Through the broken window, lilac wafted in on the cool air — that rare, scraggly tree outside was blooming again, indifferent to everything beneath it, offering beauty to a street with no other plants or trees. I had always found that tree quietly offensive and quietly necessary in equal measure.

The fist-sized drone entered through the broken window and buzzed through the room like an uninvited insect — pitching and hovering, conducting its daily census of the living. It moved down the row of fifteen haphazardly lined-up cots in our large grey cinderblock room with the unhurried confidence of something that had never once been told no.

I occupied the cot nearest the window, giving me one side of my sleeping arrangement that I didn’t need to guard – the wall. My cot was also the last stop before the drone exited, which meant I was always the final inspection, the closing argument. The drone made its full sweep from my head to my feet and paused, waiting to see if I'd stir, the way a predator waits to confirm what it suspects.

I did not stir.

The building housed 200 people in a space designed for 60. After the regime consolidated power 75 years ago, it seized property from anyone accused of dissent, which meant anyone it wanted to silence, which meant anyone at all, when the mood took it. Elite families absorbed the best housing units and rented them back to the lower class at rates calibrated to keep us just solvent enough to keep paying. The rest of us were crammed into whatever remained, stacked like inventory.

Six floors, 2 large rooms per floor with cots stuffed in them, with one kitchen and one bathroom in each of the large rooms. No working elevator. The plumbing operated at roughly the same level of reliability as every other promise this government had made. The heat ran for perhaps four months of the year, if we were fortunate. Rent consumed eighty percent of what I earned — not by accident, but by design, the economic stranglehold they had perfected over decades. Keep us poor. Keep us desperate. Keep us too exhausted for anything beyond the next shift, the next rent payment, the next chirp from the device in our pockets. We worked to survive, not to live. Whatever survived the extraction — rent, utilities, the minimal food required to keep a body functional — was claimed by the endless cascade of new taxes that flowed directly into Aamon and Verity's personal accounts, as openly as if they had simply reached into our pockets and helped themselves, which was, of course, exactly what they were doing.

The regime had learned from history. You didn't need concentration camps when you could make entire neighbourhoods into open-air prisons. The Zoo wasn't a place we had been sent — it was a place we couldn't afford to leave. The walls were financial. The guards were invisible. The sentence was indefinite and lacked a formal name, making it harder to identify and resist.

Yesterday's events snapped back into memory with the particular cruelty of mornings, when the mind has no defences yet, and everything arrives unfiltered. Verity's finger. The saliva on my eyelid. The stairwell. I imagined her at a screen somewhere, watching this drone's feed, trying to extract information from the way I breathed.

Was it my imagination that it hovered longer over me than the others?

Probably. But it wasn't the same as certainly, and in this world, it was probably enough to get you killed.

Relax. Stay perfectly still, just like every other morning. Blend in. Become small and insignificant. Then nothing bad will happen.

My personal modus operandi. My survival philosophy, such as it was — not a belief system so much as a posture held so long it had become structural. My heart was racing. My breathing had quickened. My veins felt fizzy with adrenaline, the body doing what it always did when it recognized danger, regardless of whether the mind had given it permission. I hoped the drone's sensors didn't extend that far. I hoped my insides weren't as legible as they felt.

Go away.

And just like that, as if the thought had nudged it, the drone skittered upward and jetted out through the broken window, taking its attention with it.

I allowed myself a fraction of movement. My eyes opened to the dim room, taking inventory. Those still in their cots held the careful poses of people who had learned that appearing asleep was its own form of privacy — the only kind reliably available to us.

Several figures stirred and sat up, quietly fumbling through their routines with the practised efficiency of people who had long since stopped making peace with their circumstances and simply moved through them. One reached under their cot and retrieved a device, pressing it until it beeped green, then set it aside with the carelessness of something done so many times it had lost its horror. Only the women had to do that — the daily confirmation that nothing had changed inside us overnight, that the state's property was still intact, ready and waiting for further instructions. Each cot had either a locked box or a small duffel beneath it, storing whatever meagre constellation of belongings a person could reduce their life to. One person ate bread. Another disappeared into the shared bathroom in the corner. A few minutes later, they had traded places, the exchange wordless, private, two people performing the small dignities of morning in a space that had not been built for dignity. They left separately, knapsacks shouldered, bedding left behind as a silent promise of return — the closest thing to a permanent address most of us had.

I exhaled into the dusty, damp, lilac-threaded air and sat up. My eyes went immediately to Martin's cot, the reflex as automatic as checking for traffic before stepping off a curb. Self-protection dressed as a glance.

He appeared asleep.

One of the early risers was my friend Beth Tyndall — jaw-length brown hair, petite and quick, glasses, moving through the room with an almost nymph-like efficiency, as if she had decided to take up as little space as possible and had gotten very good at it. She was pursuing an early business career, working to prove herself in a system structured specifically to make it difficult for someone like her. The other figure moving was Nathan, who had started a delivery business and poured everything he had into keeping it alive — rent, taxes, transport, the grinding calculation of survival that left nothing over for anything else.

Each of us was a working professional barely keeping our heads above water. Lucky — and that word required its quotation marks — to afford a cot in a shared room with fourteen others, one bathroom, a small kitchen with appliances that worked when they felt like it. The most basic physical needs are technically met. Others in the Zoo couldn't even say that.

We co-existed the way people co-exist when survival has consumed all the bandwidth that might otherwise go toward living — seven days a week, often twelve hours a day, working to cover rent and taxes and food and transport, the four corners of an existence with no room inside it for leisure, for hobbies, for friendship, a relationship and for the slow and necessary business of becoming a person rather than just a body that reports to work. We were human beings operating at the threshold of what we could sustain, and the regime had calculated that threshold with great precision.

"Oberle!"

1. Martin was awake.

I turned my head and pulled my dark knit hat further down, a reflex as much as a gesture — cover what you can, offer as little surface area as possible. I shifted inside my oversized tan sweater and large white sweatpants, tied tight at the waist as always.

Entitlement oozed from his tall, muscular frame the way damp seeps through a cinderblock wall — persistent, structural, something you couldn't address at the surface because it came from somewhere deeper. He flicked his head to move brunette hair from his face, small shifty blue eyes moving over me with the proprietary ease of someone inspecting something he believed he had entitlement to. Grinning, because men like Martin always grinned, as if the whole arrangement — the room, the women in it, the absence of consequences — were a private joke he was always in on.

I bristled internally. Outwardly, nothing. After last night, standing my nervous system down required deliberate effort — my body was still running the threat it had filed under unresolved, the adrenaline looking for somewhere to go. I could smell Martin from two cots away: arrogance, self-importance, the stale physical evidence of a man who had never once worried about what he smelled like to someone who had no choice but to be near him.

Martin was getting bolder. As last night had demonstrated with cold clarity, there were no protections for women in the Zoo beyond ingenuity and the skills you developed by necessity. I pressed my hand against my pants pocket, confirming the switchblade's presence. It had introduced itself to a testicle or ten, over the years. It was not a perfect solution. It was the only one I had.

I ignored him. An eye-roll may have slipped through — I tried not to nourish his narcissism by acknowledging his existence, but some responses are below conscious control.

Martin was a civil engineer. He was also the reason I slept wound in my grandmother's blanket, the fabric an extra layer between his gaze and my skin, which I understood was more psychological than practical and did not care. He had been pestering me for my attention, my body, some version of me that existed only in his imagination, since the day I arrived — without provocation, without reciprocation, without apparent awareness that the word no, repeated clearly and consistently over months, was a complete sentence. It was as if he had already decided I was his in some register that my objections couldn't reach. His certainty was its own kind of violence — quieter than last night, more deniable, no less exhausting.

If he had known what happened in the alley last night, he probably would have considered it an invitation rather than an assault.

If it weren't so difficult to find anywhere to sleep, I would have moved. But this behaviour was everywhere — openly condoned, woven into the fabric of a society that had built the conditions for it deliberately and called the results order. Better the devil I knew. No one else in the room had bothered me. And Beth was here, which mattered more than I said aloud.

We were the only two women. We had both received approval for higher education when most women weren't permitted past basic literacy — if they were lucky enough to receive even that. Uneducated people are easily controlled, easily deceived, and easily kept in place. The regime understood this the way a farmer understands a fence. Education was rationed accordingly and also propagandized as unnecessary and evil.

People our age typically slept on cold ground beneath a tarp, under a bridge, in a makeshift shanty assembled from whatever the city discarded. No services. No hygiene. Even less safety than this — Martin notwithstanding. This room, for all its grey cinderblock bleakness, its one bathroom and sour-smelling kitchen, was a step above what waited outside its walls. Which was either a comfort or an indictment, depending on the morning.

I had lived homeless for years after my mother's work-related injury, which took her income and left her dependent on rare legacy insurance that covered only her basic needs, not her family's — the fine print of a system designed to cover exactly what it needed to cover and nothing more. I had survived. I carried the weight of that survival the way you carry something that never fully heals — functional, present, managed, but never gone. I kept those years locked in the same place I kept everything else I couldn't let out. This wasn't life. It was survival. It always had been. I had simply gotten better at making the two look similar.

I preferred to stay busy. Dissociated. Moving forward, eyes ahead, the past sealed in its room.

Today was my scheduled laundry-and-shower day — the small rituals of maintenance that, in their own quiet way, were acts of defiance. Proof that I was still tending to myself. Still here. Still bothering.

I got up, hand-washed my clothes in the laundry sink, wrung them out and hung them to dry on a line over my cot. I carried my bag into the bathroom, locking the door behind me — or attempting to, the lock hanging loose in its frame like a promise that wasn't quite keeping itself. I jammed it as best I could and stripped.

The shower ran lukewarm, then cool, then cold. I scrubbed anyway, ignoring the stall's state and the accumulated evidence of too many people sharing this room who barely had time to eat, let alone clean a bathroom. I scrubbed off the week's accumulation — grime, exhaustion, and the particular residue of last night, including vomit-guy's drool from the back of my neck, which I attended to with specific, deliberate focus. I had a few shallow scratches on my chest from being pressed against the building's concrete wall, my own building's wall, which felt like an added indignity I didn't have language for. The water was cold and invigorating, and mine, briefly, in a way that very little was. I stepped out and towel-dried in the cramped space, grateful to be clean, grateful to be standing.

My thoughts drifted, as they had since yesterday, to Trenette and Verity — to the world they inhabited, where beauty was currency and the soul optional, where women sculpted themselves into instruments of retention and called it freedom because no one had offered them a word that fit better. In my world, there was no time or resources for makeup, perfume, or hair products — they weren't available in low-class stores because no one who ran those stores believed we would waste money on them, and they were right, because we couldn't, and they had helped build a society that made sure of it. What Trenette spent on a single appointment could feed this room for a month. I tried not to think about that.

My underwear was my own design — fashioned from uncuttable fabric salvaged from a duffel bag I had found years ago, cut and assembled into something that functioned as armour without looking like it. Several pieces, with a small area for a padlock to secure the waistband — not foolproof, but capable of buying time, which in certain situations was the same as saving a life. Since any form of pregnancy prevention was illegal, it couldn't look like it functioned as such. It had to look like nothing. Like a woman who simply liked to dress a particular way.

I had sewn it by hand in this bathroom, in stolen increments, over several weeks. It was the most useful thing I owned.

I yanked an oversized grey sweatshirt over my remaining bra — the other one a casualty of last night, and pulled old jeans over my invention. I pressed my finger to my PED until it beeped green. The state, confirming its inventory. Everything accounted for. Nothing changed.

I put the device back in my pocket and prepared to go out and do it all again.

Mandating. The word arrived in my chest the way it always did — not abstract, not political, just the knowledge of what it meant for a woman in my position in this city. My mother was mandated at twenty-eight. She found my father before the deadline, and what began as a necessity became something genuine, which was either a miracle or an indictment of the system, depending on how you looked at it. She had begged me for years in the urgent tone of someone who had already lived the situation: "Don't have a child. Promise me.” I kept the promise close to me, alongside my knife. The two most essential things I carried.

The genetics, they said, were in the public domain. The bodies that carried them were not consulted on this arrangement. My mother commented once on how my eyes might get me flagged in their system for these “genetics” programs because they are unusual. For some reason, the issue with my eyes is only background noise in a place where other noises matter more.

The processing centres, where non-compliant mandated women go, kept Elite men distracted and compliant, their appetites satisfied, their restlessness managed. Age was not a consideration. The women and girls inside had no recourse. Occasionally, a low-class man who had pleased the regime was granted free access as a reward — the violence distributed by the hierarchy like a treat, teaching men at every level that this was what power looked like and that the aim was to get enough of them to participate. The pretense was more births and “duty,” but those points were a cheap excuse for the real reason, which remained outwardly visible but unnamed – coercion, oppression, abuse, fear.

I live in a morally depraved society. The thought arrived not with outrage anymore but with the flat resignation of something stated so many times it had worn itself smooth. A fact. Just a fact.

Once mandated, you had sixty days to comply — sixty days to locate the assigned partner and conceive, or they would deliver you to a Processing Centre themselves. If you displeased the government: Processing Centre. If they desired your genetics: Processing Centre. If you were simply unlucky enough to be noticed by the wrong person on the wrong day, Processing Centre. The threshold was not fixed. That was part of the design of fear. We were hunted.

No one who went to a Processing Centre returned the same way. If they returned at all. I had heard stories — women held for months, subjected to beatings and repeated assaults until pregnancy occurred, their bodies reduced to mere functions, with the person inside treated as irrelevant to that function. Many died. Those who survived were hollowed out in a way that couldn’t be repaired; the light behind their eyes dimmed to something that still technically worked but no longer truly illuminated. Some part of them was taken and never returned, and the world outside the centre simply expected them to continue — to work, to function, to move through the streets without showing what had been done to them, because revealing it made others uncomfortable. The fear was a higher priority than the pregnancy. The fear was revenge — women being punished for not submitting to the government’s engineered control.

Mom watched me grow up in this world, which had been harder than anything she had endured, which, given what she had endured, told me everything I needed to know about what she thought of the world she had been forced to bring me into.

My thoughts drifted — the way they did in the brief unguarded spaces of a morning — to the stories my mother had shared about the Before Times, when women had more choices and more standing, when the state had not yet decided it owned the bodies of half its population, releasing its property after a birth, or childbearing age. Stories of underground movements that had helped women resist government control, slipping through the cracks of a system that had not yet sealed all of them. Mom would describe these stories with a particular expression — marvel at the bravery, an ache for the danger of it, a wistfulness that she had never encountered anything like them herself. The movements existed somewhere between rumour, legend, and hope. Which was, perhaps, the only place anything resembling hope could safely live.

I had learned to be pragmatic and unfeeling about this, or to perform it so convincingly that the distinction blurred, and I deceived myself into thinking I was holding myself together. Just keep going. Detached from myself, detached from others. The numbness was not peace — it was insulation, the practical kind, installed because the alternative was to feel everything all at once, and that would stop me from moving entirely. I shared the same lived experience as everyone I knew. We were all insulated in our own ways. We just didn't talk about it.

I brought my mind out of my thoughts and into the room.

I finger-combed through my wet, wavy hair, piled it on top of my head, and secured it under my tattered hat. Slung my backpack over one shoulder. Took a breath.

As I reached for the door, voices drifted up through the venting system from the nearby stairwell — two women, their words fragmented but unmistakable.

"—said I could see Maya on Sundays. Sundays only." The woman's voice broke at the edges, the fracture line clearly well-worn. "She's three years old. She cries for me every night, and I can't — I can't even comfort her."

"You should never have married him, Dora."

"I know. I know. But I was mandated. I had no choice. And I thought — maybe if I had his child, he'd be kinder. That Maya would make him..." Dora sobbed — not the sudden sob of something acute, but the exhausted sob of someone who has been crying about the same thing for a long time and has simply stopped trying to stop. "Now he uses her to control me. If I don't do what he wants — continued access to my body, my money, everything on his terms — he threatens to cut visitation entirely. It's legal. He has full custody. I have nothing."

"Can't you do something?"

"How? What rights? I'm his wife. Legally, I'm his property. So is Maya."

I did not want them to know I had heard. But I could not unhear it either — the words had already landed somewhere deep and were spreading, the way cold spreads from a stone floor through the soles of your feet, whether you want it to or not.

That could be me. Mandated. Married. A child used as a leash — tethered to a man through something small and helpless that had not asked to be born into the arrangement. That was what Verity had threatened, with saliva on my eyelid and absolute authority behind her eyes. She had not been speaking abstractly.

I got into a protective stance, assembled what I needed from the inside out, and opened the door.

Martin was blocking my exit. Predatory grin in place, the expression he wore like a default setting, as if he had practised it so long it had become structural.

"Move," I ordered.

He did move into the bathroom, his hand poised to close the door. Before I could choose how to respond, a large ivory hand attached to a muscular arm reached in and removed him from the doorway with the effortless efficiency of a man dealing with something beneath his full attention — jerked him soundly backward into the room and deposited him there.

"Don't be an asshole," the mouth attached to the arm said, with the calm authority of someone who did not expect to have to repeat himself.

"Thanks, Sam."

"No problem, girl," he said, already returning to his cot. Unbothered. The way you are unbothered when doing the right thing costs you nothing, and you have decided that is simply how you operate.

Martin — and his erection — left the room in a storm of wounded entitlement. I went to my cot to organize my things. I left a bun from my knapsack on Sam's pillow. No note. None needed. That hadn’t been the first time Sam had intervened with Martin.

I made my way down the shabby, uneven, creaking stairs — craning for the sound of other footsteps, the way you listen for weather before you open a door — and emerged onto the busy street. I folded myself into the moving crowd, just another hat pulled low, another pair of eyes aimed at the ground, walking past the lone lilac tree outside my building that kept blooming anyway, that kept offering its small purple extravagance to a street that was far below its beauty. I had always found it either inspiring or heartbreaking, depending on the day.

No Martin. No vomit-guy. No other male threats that I could perceive. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any lurking. This is the casuistry I attended to each time I stepped out the front door of my building.

My building was six storeys of grey cinderblock, nestled among many more identical grey blocks — the city's aesthetic reflected a regime that viewed beauty as a resource reserved for those who could afford it. Street-level stores sold only essentials: grocers, pharmacies, department stores stripped of anything non-essential, their shelves a catalogue of survival rather than life. Drab, careless, colourless. But functional. I had never known anything different, which itself was a kind of violence — the violence of a ceiling so low you stop looking up.

I was planning to visit my mother today. I intended to walk the twenty blocks to her care home — hat pulled low, dark sunglasses, a steady and unhurried pace, like a nurse on her day off rather than someone being cautious. The sky was the colour of old concrete, with rain falling in a fine grey drizzle that mirrored my own mood perfectly, as if the city were finally being considerate.

Propaganda posters crowded every surface to prescind my attention and shape my beliefs. President Aamon's blue eyes, sinister smile, fake-amber tan, and grey-and-white streaked hair stared back from billboards, screens, and pamphlets — the face of the regime inescapable and omnipresent, installed at eye level everywhere you might look up. This is the fourth Aamon, culminating in eighteen terms of Aamon rule. The number itself is an obscenity.

His smirk reminded me of Mr. Voss — my primary school teacher, Mid-Elite, of course, assigned to instruct lower-class children in the approved version of history, with the barely concealed contempt of someone who considered the assignment beneath him and the students unworthy of his time. They didn’t prioritize reading, science, history or math, but they prioritized propaganda.

"The first President Aamon," he had said, pointing to the portrait on the wall with the reverence of a man pointing at a god, "was elected in the Democratic Era. The people chose him freely. He saved us from chaos."

Even at ten, I knew it was a lie. Mom had already told me the truth — how Aamon's ancestor had run on populist and nationalist fury and manufactured hope, had been elected, and had then spent five years systematically dismantling every institution that might constrain him: elections suspended, judges replaced, dissent criminalized, the borders sealed so that leaving was as impossible as staying was unbearable. He had given government contracts to his friends — the oligarchs, the men who stole from others, abused others and called it privilege, and who faced no consequences because they had written the laws that defined consequences. By the time people understood what was happening, the door had already closed and locked from the outside.

In class, I had nodded along with everyone else. We all had. The truth was dangerous. Nodding was survival. I had learned early that these two things were not compatible and had chosen accordingly, as everyone around me had chosen, as we were required to choose, as the system had been constructed specifically to ensure we chose.

These were only thoughts in my mind — sealed there, pressed flat, kept at a temperature that would not ignite them. I would not mutter anything remotely resembling them aloud. The air had ears. The ears reported.

A drone was tailing me — the same measured distance maintained whether I walked fast or slow, stopping when I stopped, with the patience of something that did not experience impatience. I had become practiced at sensing them, the way you become practiced at sensing insects.

I looked up from the pavement, and he was directly in front of me.

A young Mid-to-High-Elite man from a family whose wealth and political connections had insulated him from every consequence his character deserved. Arrogant, narcissistic, ruthless — not in the dramatic way of villains in stories but in the mundane, relentless way of someone who had simply never been told no by anyone with the power to make it stick. Slightly taller than me, thick-bodied, small eyes, large, broad nose, black hair, haughty expression — a man who moved through the world as if he owned it because, in every way that counted, he did.

To Shane, I was not a person. I was a rare object — genetics to be procured, a status elevation wrapped in a non-autonomous body he had decided was already his, the decision made without consultation and not open to appeal.

"Fancy meeting you here, Evaleigh."

Not him again. He had been “bumping into me” for about three months now, each time escalating his demands or his messaging declaring ownership of me, expecting I would agree this time.

I kept my gaze on the space ahead of me and kept walking, stepping around him without breaking stride, my expression a sealed door.

He fell into step beside me, struggling to match my pace — long legs had always been my practical advantage — offering one-sided small talk into the silence I maintained like armour. I noticed the drone had peeled away. Shane had probably used it to find me. The surveillance state and the privileged's personal entitlements operated hand in hand, each making the other more efficient.

I considered punching him. Decided that any engagement — physical, verbal, even sustained eye contact — would provide him with either a predatory dopamine hit, a legal pretext for having me arrested, or an erection. Possibly all three. I didn't want to provide him with any of these things.

"You know what I want," he said, the pleasantness dropping away like a costume, what was underneath it not a surprise.

I quickened my pace. My strides easily outpaced his shorter attempts to keep up — I had always found a particular cold satisfaction in this.

"You have no choice, Evaleigh. You are mine. Everything is mine," he called after me, reaching his fingers not quite finding purchase before he fell behind, then turned down a side street, already raising his PED to his ear, already making the calls that would, no doubt, set his various mechanisms of control into motion.

"Tight control is not the way to move any relationship or society forward," I muttered under my breath, scanning for drones. Nothing visible.

"People will always be free to think for themselves, no matter what they do to control behaviour." Quieter still, spoken to the pavement, offered to no one, a small and probably pointless act of defiance that I committed anyway because some things need to be said even when there is no one to hear them. Especially then.

I unclenched my hands. Kept walking.

Strained by last night’s events and my interactions with both Martin and Shane, my nervous system was firing on high — the familiar, persistent, varying degrees of background radiation of living in a body that had learned it was unsafe. My breathing had become more rapid. The tingling and numbing sensation was spreading through my limbs, as anxiety surged towards the point where it became unmanageable and transformed into a wave.

Not here.

I stopped. Knowing that stopping made me a target. I pressed my back against the brick wall of a grey building and held position, eyes sweeping my surroundings in the practiced way — threat assessment conducted while breathing deliberately, forcing the exhale longer than the inhale, talking the body down from the ledge it kept approaching. The familiar wash of unsafety moved through me like weather moving through a valley — I could not stop it, I could only stand still and let it pass and trust that it would pass, because it had passed before, every other time, even when it hadn't felt like it would.

After a few minutes, I began to walk again — briskly, purposefully, the movement itself a regulation strategy, the body's nervous energy redirected into forward momentum. Reach Mom faster. Burn off what couldn't be stored.

The panic folded back into numbness, which was not fine but functional, which was what I needed.

I noticed the rain had stopped.

Shane's threat was serious, and I didn’t dismiss it. He had the connections and motivation to have me forcibly committed — to shape the very future I had spent my entire adult life avoiding. A short-lived victory for him, enjoyable until pregnancy, then, after claiming the child, he considered himself superior to me and controllable. An unwelcome and grim narrowing of everything I was — my body, my choices, my fragile hold on my own life — directed into a future I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t escape. I would never agree to marriage. That was the only door I had decided never to walk through, and I had made that decision so firm and early that it stopped feeling like a choice and started to feel like part of who I was.

As I approached the care home, a shiny black vehicle sped away from the curb — out of place in a lower-class area, the way a diamond is out of place in gravel, conspicuous precisely because it was not trying to be. I noted it and kept moving.

Inside, I checked the board for Anna's room number. She moved rooms with some regularity, which I had learned to treat as a given rather than a source of worry. I climbed to the second floor and knocked on her door.

Mom lit up when she saw me — the particular brightness of someone whose world has become small and who still finds, within that smallness, a great deal of room for love. "¡Hola, mi hija! Pase, pase, por favor" I hugged her carefully, navigating around her crutch, the embrace both comfort and reorientation — checking her, the way you check something precious for damage. She was fifty-five years old and had the body of someone twenty-five years older, the work accident and subsequent stroke having rewritten her physical vocabulary into something slower and more effortful. The disability payments barely covered her costs. She had spent years hating that she couldn't protect me more, and she still carried that hatred quietly, the way you carry something you can't put down, but also can’t give away.

Mom was a breath of safety in a world where no one was safe

"What was it like before the Aamons?" I asked, helping her adjust her pillow—a question I had asked before and kept asking. I needed to know that there was a time and place where people and systems were not so cruel, greedy, and power-hungry. For some reason, knowing it had once existed gave me hope, even if only at a molecular level.

Anna's expression darkened. "Better. Not perfect — but better. We had choices. I remember older folks talking about the election that changed everything. I, obviously, wasn't born yet." She rolled her eyes.

"It is impossible to think people voted for him."

"Many did. Aamon's great-grandfather promised jobs, security, and order. Said the government was corrupt, which was true, and that he would clean it up. Drain the swamp, he called it." Anna shook her head, the gesture carrying generations of retrospect. "People were desperate. Angry. They wanted someone strong."

"But he lied."

"Of course, he lied. People who carry the basest of easy emotions, mainly fear and anger, are easily swayed. Within a year, he had declared a state of emergency, suspended elections, arrested the judges who opposed him, disbanded the electorate, and closed the borders. He gave all the government contracts to his friends — the oligarchs, the men who did terrible things to others and faced nothing for it. By the time people understood what was happening, it was too late. Anyone who protested..." Her voice caught on something. "Your father..."

I held her hand. Some sentences do not need to be completed. They are already finished.

"How long has it been?"

"Four generations under Aamon family rule, each more cruel with a more distorted personality than his predecessor." She looked at me with tears perched carefully in her eyes, not yet falling. "Your father believed our generation could change it. He was wrong." A pause that held everything. "He paid for his hope with his life."

Mom had been mandated to have me — the state's hand reaching into her future and rearranging it without consultation. David, who had earned an MBA, ran a small company and was everything Anna had been looking for, considering the circumstances. He agreed to be my father, and what started as a necessity had become something genuine and warm — a small family that surprised even itself with how much it meant.

Our tiny bachelor apartment had been a warm oasis in a cold city, the kind of warmth that is more precious for being improbable. Mom and Dad in love, marvelling at what they'd made — me, apparently, though I have always found it difficult to see myself as something worth marvelling at. I have patchy, sun-coloured early memories of playing with Dad, of Mom's happiness, of the particular quality of a life that felt, briefly, connected, and future-focused.

It did not last. When I was three, my father was killed in a public street for being present near a gathering where someone was speaking against the regime, not even the speaker, just a man walking past with his small child. They killed thirty-seven people near that meeting. They denied it in the same breath as doing it, in full view of thousands, and the denial was the point, too — the message that they could do anything and then describe it however they liked, without any government witnesses present, and that the description would become the officially propagandized truth.

I still remember the day the last of my dark hair was trimmed away — it had grown down to my knees, the trauma having bleached it from the inside out until nothing of the original colour remained. From then on, people remarked on my eyes and hair with a frequency that felt less like admiration and more like marking, as though the difference in my appearance had made me legible in ways that complicated my survival. My olive glow I got from Mom — that, at least, was hers to give me.

Mom supported me wherever she could, with what she had, which was never enough to fully close the gap between what I needed and what the world was willing to give. While I was unhoused, she was a listening ear, a source of advice, and an anchor in a time when most things were moving, dangerous, and uncertain. She would encourage me to see the gifts in hardship, something I never understood. It is hard to see the gifts when sitting in a metaphorical puddle of mud.

She dropped vitamin capsules into my hands to use daily—made from dried herbs of her Latina heritage. Reina Soberana, she called them in Spanish. Sovereign Queen. I had never asked for them. I used them because they mattered to her, and what mattered to her mattered to me, which was the simplest and most complete form of love I knew.

We told each other stories — the carefully edited versions we kept for each other, true enough to feel real, curated enough to protect. She could not wait to hear about my work. I listened to her accounts of roommate disputes and staff drama with genuine attention, beneath the stories, for what she wasn't saying, noting the brave front she maintained and loving her for it, even as it ached. Anna had connected me with the nursing scholarship benefactor who had made my education possible — one of the threads of a net that had caught me when most things were falling into the abyss.

My heart was full, and heavy, and full in the way that heavy things can also be — the weight of love for someone you constantly worry about. I did not have enough time with my mother, but safety demanded that I not wait too long before I made the walk home.

“Te Amo, Mama.”

“No tienes idea de lo preciosa que eres,” she responded.

I felt treasured by my mother.

“Te amo más allá de las palabras, hija.”

With my heart nourished, I pulled my hat low again, tucked the small supply of unrequested vitamins Anna had given me into my coat, and stepped back out into the grey afternoon. I walked the twenty dark, drab blocks back to my cot and the bathroom with its ill-fitting door, to the room I shared with fourteen others and their own carefully maintained silences. The night air had a chill in it, threaded faintly with pine and the distant smell of ocean — an olfactory rumour of a world larger than this one, arriving just long enough to remind me it existed before the city smell covered it again.

I made it home without a drone or an attacker at my back. I sent Mom a message to say so.

Her reply came almost immediately: Te amo.

I read it twice. Ate a bun for dinner. I engaged in my quotidian bedtime routine and crawled into my cot, pulling my grandmother's blanket up to my chin. The blanket smelled like Mom — not literally, not anymore, but in the way that objects absorb the meaning of people and carry it forward long after the person is gone or far away. It smelled like the idea of her. Like the version of safety I associated with her. I held onto both.

Sam had arranged for the cots to be swapped while I was out — Martin's now across the room, mine now next to Sam's. He was already in his cot when I got back, pretending to be almost asleep. I looked across at him and conveyed my thanks without saying a word. He smiled and waved one hand — no problem — and closed his eyes. There were still pockets of people in the world who operated from integrity, who moved through this system without being entirely consumed by it, who swatted flies not because they expected a reward but because the fly was being an asshole. Dragons with a compass. Sam was one of them. I had learned not to take that for granted.

In the dusk light, Martin was out of my immediate sight line. Beth was back, exhaustion wearing her like a second skin, falling into her cot with the efficiency of someone who might have been asleep before she finished lying down.

I was almost there myself when the edge of my cot shifted under weight.

I jolted awake, hand already reaching.

"It's me," Beth whispered.

I let go of the knife. "What's wrong?"

"Did you hear? Rebecca from the third floor got mandated."

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. "No."

"She has six months to produce a pregnancy, or they'll take her to the building." Beth's voice was flat, the way voices go flat when they have run out of the energy required for an appropriate emotional range. "I can’t imagine what that would be like in there. It would feel like the end of…everything. Everything for her is over."

"Some Elite person wants to marry her and is trying to force her into that decision?"

Beth laughed — the short, bitter laugh of someone who has heard a naive question and recognized it. "Want? Once they're married, he owns her. Legally. No rights, no money, no voice. And if she has the baby..." She trailed off. We both knew the end of that sentence.

"Why don't women just refuse?" I whispered, even though I knew.

"They do. That's why mandating exists." Beth looked at me in the dim light, her expression carrying something more urgent than conversation. “They feel like we can’t make our own choices for ourselves.” She paused. "Your eyes, Evaleigh. That Elite woman wasn't joking. You need to be careful."

"I know."

"No — really careful. I feel like there are things going on just under the surface that matter. Shane has connections. If he wants you mandated, he can make it happen." She reached for my hand in the dark and held it — the specific grip of someone trying to pass something important through touch because words weren't quite carrying it. "Promise me — if you get the notice, you run. Don't go to Processing. Just disappear."

"Where would I go?"

"I don't know. Anywhere. Anywhere is better than becoming property. I can’t bear that thought for you."

The thought moved through me quickly and left a residue: trading myself to be property to secure temporary safety. I felt it, let it pass, and did not follow it anywhere.

After Beth returned to her cot, I lay still for a long time, looking at the ceiling in the dark. Thinking about Dora and Mia — a mother and a three-year-old separated by the legal design of a marriage the mother hadn't really chosen. Thinking about Rebecca and her six months, the clock is already running. Thinking about how close I was to becoming a version of either of them, how thin the membrane was between my careful, controlled, purposefully small life and the futures this world prepared for women who got noticed by the wrong person.

I thought about Beth. I had met her when we were both sleeping rough on the streets, both studying toward careers that would require extraordinary luck and persistence to reach from where we were standing — and we had looked out for each other with the unspoken loyalty of people who have decided, in the absence of any official structure of protection, to be each other's structure instead. Some kind of safety. Someone to talk to. A fixed point when everything else was moving. I was proud of her and realized, lying in the dark, that I did not know her as well as I should — that survival had kept us close in many ways, but the emotional walls from survivalship prevented closeness in others, the way cold keeps two people near a fire without necessarily making them known to each other. I wondered how deep that protective pattern went.

In that moment, I understood that Beth and my grandmother's blanket served the same purpose: comfort, and the specific kind of belonging that asks for nothing in return and requires no explanation. Both were threadbare in places. Both still held.

I reached into my pocket for one of my mom’s capsules. Put it on my tongue. Felt some of it dissolve and swallowed the rest. I let myself be held by the blanket and the idea of her and the distant, improbable smell of pine and ocean threading in through the broken window from somewhere larger than here.

I was asleep before I had finished deciding to be.