“This place is worth a fortune,” Faryn said, rapping metal cabinets with her knuckles. “How do I turn off the alarms? I see computers that need to be lib-er-a-ted.” Faryn’s hips swiveled at each syllable.
“I don’t know,” Cora said.
The room fell victim to Faryn’s prowling. Partitions were rattled. Dark spaces were searched for hidden access. Levers were devised but found no purchase. Cora had already tried all this two months ago to no avail, only managing to trip an alarm tied to a computer display. The alarm had turned itself off when she re-balanced the display in its casing.
“How did you know about this place?” Cora said.
“I saw you standing at the window upstairs.” Faryn nodded in the direction of the landing above. “Floating in the air like an idiot. The cloaking doesn’t work when you light it from the inside.” Faryn goggled her eyes at Cora. “If anyone else finds this place because of your stupidity,” Faryn reached into a sleeve and pulled out a knife faster than Cora could blink, “I’ll cut out your eyes and leave you in the road.”
Cora made herself invisible when Faryn was around, but that was just late evenings and early mornings. On afternoons like this one, when Cora had the place to herself, she cleaned up the ground floor space, straightened clothes, arranged sleeping covers and wiped down the bathroom with a greasy cloth. Doing these things kept Faryn happy and gave the mesco time to build before Cora went to bed. Ancient computer displays with their scrolling numbers watched Cora at her chores.
She finished her work and climbed the metal stairs that jutted out from the curved walls. The landing that was her sleeping space lay above. Beyond, the stairs ascended to a space so narrow that a ladder was needed to reach the top. From the window puncturing the landing wall, when the lights were off and the curtain was pulled back, stars were visible above a city too distant to drown out their light. On the nights without mesco, when fevered, fitful dreams were sure to descend upon her, Cora instead stood at the window and watched the stars move across the blackened sky.
Tonight, though, mesco from the shelter filled her. She was a brimming cup, a sunlit flower, a warm wind blowing across the plain. She lay down on the landing to burrow into shelter blankets thick enough that she could not feel the metal floor below. Just before falling asleep, she peeled the Meta-mat from her leg and placed it on the landing. On nights when she forgot to do this, she would sleepwalk into the field outside and wake with the sun to the pulse of the Meta-mat. With the Meta-mat removed, the whomp-whomping in the air faded into dreams of Jude, pale-faced and dark-haired.
The sound of Faryn’s laughter woke Cora just before dawn. Downstairs, a man cooed. Cora sat up to run thin hands over her fuzzy arms and legs. Raised and calmed goose bumps willed her body to wake. The mesco had worn off. She moved to the window, pulled back the curtain and watched the stars disappear to the sound of Faryn’s rutting. This had happened once before. After, Faryn had made her help with the body.
From her window, Cora watched the transports from the warehouses lining the river snake into the city. Clouds pinked the sky and provided a backdrop for small aircraft that darted between the buildings or shot out of sight. The wind traced a rippling path across the golden-brown fields.
When Faryn and her john quieted, Cora reached for a food packet, salty on the outside but sweet and fruity within. Faryn was not inclined to steal the packets, which were free from any shelter, so Cora did not bother to hide them. The Meta-mat was another matter.
Cora found the edge of the Meta-mat, peeled it off the floor and once again laid its sticky side across her thigh. The whomp-whomping that was always in the air around her now infused her bones. Since that first day with Faryn, Cora had kept the Meta-mat on her leg. She stroked the Meta-mat from its center to its edge to stretch it out of its natural shape, that of the box it had come in. With her manipulation, the Meta-mat grew wide enough to wrap all the way around her thigh. Where femur once connected knee to hip, Cora saw through to the floor. She set a food packet on top of the space where her leg used to be and watched the packet hover in the air. Someday soon she would show this to Jude.
The Meta-mat had been hers since the week a spill closed the dump and cut off her only source of income for mesco. In her new home for just a few days, she had searched the building for something unsecured that she could sell. Red-eyed alarms put the computer equipment off limits. Nooks and crannies on the ground floor held only dust and mouse droppings. The landing had already been explored. From it, she called her name up into the tightening spiral staircase above. “Cora,” she said. The syllables echoed back, elongated to the whomp-whomping in the air. “Coooraaa, Coooraaa, Coooraaa.”
Drawn by the sound of her own voice, she had climbed the ladder. At the top, in air that sparkled, she found a small landing, a locked door and what appeared to be an empty box. From behind the door came the sound of machinery whirring and clanking in a riot of noise. An hour of work on the lock could not open the door, but a metal box in good condition would be worth something to the scrap buyers. Back on her own landing, she traced the box’s lettering with her fingertip. “Meta-mat, Incorporated,” the box said to her in a soothing female voice. “Your Partner in Innovation.”
But the box was not empty. Inside, on the bottom, was something soft and unseen that puckered when she pinched it. Her fingers found the edge and peeled. The Meta-mat, with its power to make things invisible, was the only magic she had ever touched. Selling it did not occur to her.
With the Meta-mat on her leg, Cora donned a thick pair of pants and a stiff linen jacket that had been her mother’s for the walk to the dump. She snuck past Faryn and the doomed man, both snoring, to reach the ground floor exit. Outside, the city lay in the distance. The whomp-whomping faded behind her in the air, but her bones still felt it as a faint rhythm. Icy mud crunched underfoot until she reached the broken concrete and the road. Jude filled her thoughts.
“I never wore the same shirt twice,” Jude had said the last time she saw him. Angled against one of the dump’s piles, he had spoken about his life in the city before his father died. Cora watched his wet, red lips move. “Every building has twelve elevators.” He jerked his head in the direction of the city. Cora had never been there. “We lived on the top floor of four buildings. We never talked to the street people. Didn’t even see them. The dining room was on 14th Street. We had a private walkway a thousand feet up to take us to the living room on 17th Street.” Cora could almost see the clean, happy people moving from building to building. “My room was next to the pool on 21st. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was farther uptown, but we got together every night for dinner. None of this paste stuff. Real meat. And we’d burn the paper plates in the fireplace when we were done eating.” Cora listened as if doing so would keep him talking forever.
Stony-eyed, Jude’s mother had watched them. Blood stained the old woman’s sleeves where she coughed. “That’s enough,” Jude’s mother said. “There’s work to do. We’re here for your chip.” The woman shot Cora a black look. “Not for her.”
Jude’s red lips had pressed together and turned to white. Cora watched him go. Mother and son could pick through enough trash to satisfy themselves in half the time it took Cora to earn enough credits to buy just one mesco tablet from the shelter. The best days were the ones that Jude’s mother, lost in her own scavenger thoughts, wandered away.
Weeks before, Jude had said that he and his mother were saving to re-program his chip’s prior-felon setting. Illegal reprogramming of his chip would be another felony, but it was the only way he could get a real job, maybe even one back in the city. Cora’s biggest problem with her own chip was that it told the shelter when she had already purchased her one allotted mesco tablet for the day.
The heavy iron gates were still closed when Cora arrived at the dump. The dumpmaster, shielded by his little concrete building, barked orders to flashing displays.
An eight-year-old boy shadowed the man to learn the family business of giving suspicious looks to the people gathered to enter the dump. The boy hissed at anyone who made eye contact with him. Cora looked away from the dumpmaster and the boy to see that, somehow, Jude was at the front of the crowd right where the gates would open. He was sure to be the first one through. His mother was nowhere in sight. Cora cursed herself for waiting until Faryn was asleep to cross the ground floor and head to the dump.
Scrap buyers with their old carts, greasy clothes and clean faces lined the street leading to the dump. The presence of so many buyers suggested that new trash had come to the old pile overnight. Cora strained to see past the people in line to the fresh mound. It lay at the far end of the dump where scavenger birds circled overhead. Their shrill diving cries were just audible over the moan of the wind.
When new trash was near the entrance gate, older pickers had the advantage. They stuck together to muscle out the younger ones. When the mound was on the far side of the dump, though, youthful sprinters would emerge richer for the day. A new pile always depressed the prices that the buyers would pay for the more common plastics and colored glass from the older parts of the pile. Cora looked around and saw disappointment on all the wrinkled faces.
The crowd became a mob when the gate opened. Cora sprinted through, hurdling over the fallen. Despite this, she ended up on the other side of the new pile from Jude. Out-of-breath pickers fanned out across the new heap and divided it into sections based on how much territory they could defend. Above, the birds squawked at the encroachment.
Cora picked through the morning. Others got their fill and left to exchange their goods for credits that the buyers added to their chips. This trash, like the city from which it had come, was full of wealth. Metals abounded. The mesh bags with Cora’s scraps soon bulged with enough to buy mesco on two days, but checkerboard moves across the pile did not bring her to Jude until the sky was high in the sky. He was moving slower than usual.
Cora used the back of her hand to smooth the hair at her forehead. “Hi, Jude,” she said. He grunted without looking up. His portion of the pile was hollowed out where he had dug into it. “Where’s your Mom?”
“Mom’s sick,” Jude said and turned hard eyes on Cora. He licked his lips. “She wouldn’t get out of bed. They don’t like that at the shelter. I had to get her breakfast.” Jude balled his hands into fists. “The distributors don’t believe you when you say you’re taking food for someone else. ‘One chip, one ration,’ they said.” His voice got louder. “So I told them I wasn’t going to cut out her chip just to get her some food. We did that with my dad right after he died. We had to.” Jude was almost yelling. “And they kicked us out of the city for it.” The pickers around Jude turned to him and assessed the threat. Some decided that their bags were full enough and moved away. Jude’s reedy anger turned guttural. “She’s still alive.”
“Will she get better?”
Tears filled Jude’s eyes, but he did not speak. The pile shifted where they stood. The edges of Jude’s hollow collapsed to bury him to the knees and leave him cursing. Cora fought the urge to reach for objects that revealed themselves.
“I think I see a circuit board,” Cora said and pointed to a spot near Jude’s feet.
“It’s mine,” Jude said and reached down to yank the board free.
“I wasn’t going to take it.”
Jude hitched up his pants. “Sorry.”
They returned to their work on the pile. Fortified by the conversation, Cora reclaimed her spot and picked through the afternoon.
“Will you come with me?” Cora said to Jude later when her belly and nerves told her that it was time for food and mesco. Today, she was sure that Jude would come back with her to the landing. He had stayed at the dump much later than usual. “You have more than enough for you and your Mom.”
Jude’s large dirty fingers squeezed his bulging mesh bags. “I don’t want to see Mom like that.”
“We can go to the shelter on Wisconsin,” Cora said, knowing his mother was at another shelter. “The food there is good and the mesco lectures are shorter. And then you can come home with me.”
“I don’t have any credits for mesco,” Jude said and scratched at the chip in his arm. “Mom and I are saving up.”
“Careful.” Cora looked around to make sure they were not being watched. “Someone will cut you for that.”
“I’m from the city,” Jude said but stopped worrying the spot. “My chip’s new. It won’t work for other people.”
“Tak fiends won’t know that.” Cora fought the urge to rub the spot where her own chip sat just under the skin of her thigh. The Meta-mat lay atop the spot that had just begun to itch. “I have enough for you. I’ll give you some credits. The shelter won’t let me buy more than one hit of mesco a day anyway.”
They sold their junk to the scrap dealers and walked to a kiosk for the credit exchange. At the shelter on Wisconsin, dinner with Jude was punctuated by outbursts from angry, unmedicated pockets of the cafeteria. After the meal, Cora and Jude were each directed to a mesco counselor.
“I’d like a mesco tablet,” Cora said.
“Of course,” the counselor said. She had the look of one who was newly-minted by the city college and had memorized a persuasive speech about the dangers of drug addiction. “Let me pull up your chart.” The counselor tapped a device on her forearm, paused and said, “I could get you a warmer coat if you’d like.”
Cora pulled her mother’s jacket closer and tried to stare through the glossy floor. A prying conversation with a newly minted city college counselor was a small price to pay for genetically-tailored mesco that offered several hours of bliss and no convulsions afterward. “Just the mesco, please.” Her father’s face flashed before her as a reflection in the tile. Her foot moved to scuff out the image.
The handheld beeped. “You’ve been getting mesco for two years,” the counselor said. “Have you ever thought about something more for yourself?”
“Tak is too expensive,” Cora said. Tak was a three-day trip, but it would take a week at the dump to earn enough credits for it, so Tak fiends had other ways of making money, none of which Cora could imagine herself doing.
“Not another drug,” the counselor said, moving her hand closer to Cora’s arm. “Another way to live your life.”
Cora stepped back and reached for the knife in her pocket, but security had made her leave it at the front before they would give her dinner. “Just the mesco,” Cora said, shaking. People at the shelter were supposed to know that they could not touch you. She held out a hand obscured by the tatters of her sleeve. The Meta-mat pulsed on her leg. “I already gave them my credits.”
The counselor looked from Cora’s obscured hand to the open one and pursed her lips. “Just a moment,” she said and dragged a finger across her forearm device. A small machine embedded in one of the room’s cabinets sprang to life. In a moment, a cover opened to dispense a yellow package that showed the outline of a pill. Between a clean white thumb and a ringed index finger, the counselor held out the object. “Maybe next time you come in we could talk a bit?”
Cora did not reply. Instead, she snatched the packaged pill and sprinted out the door. She met Jude in front of the shelter. Seeing her, he started to tear into his mesco package.
“Not yet,” Cora said, thinking of the rate that mesco moved through her body and not wanting to shorten her time with Jude. “Later. When we’re closer to my house.” She said it like Jude had already agreed to the destination, but he did not argue. With luck, the place would be theirs alone until past midnight. They walked.
When the disused road came into sight, they popped the mesco wrappers into their mouths. The gel dissolved on their tongues and started the chemical reaction that paved the way for the mesco tablet. Jude bent down to kiss Cora. His slippery, gel-
coated tongue moved around in her mouth, experimenting, causing her skin to tingle. They parted to put their tablets between gum and cheek to melt.
Chemical warmth began its long slow drip through Cora’s body. They had an hour before the peak. The wind kicked up when the plain came into sight. They turned off the road. Waves of tall winter grass undulated in the long light of the setting sun. The whomp-whomping filled the air. Cora’s leg began to pulse under the Meta-mat.
“Where are we?” Jude said.
“I live here,” Cora said. They slowed to the beat of the mesco and the whomp-whomping. She led him across the field until the circle of dirt came into view. Cora felt for the seam of the door, but Jude, not understanding, backed away. “Don’t worry.” She beckoned to him. “You can feel it.” He hesitated before stepping closer to place the flat of his hand against the soft warmth. “You’d never know it was here,” Cora said, “unless you ran into it.”
“What is it?” The wind from above ruffled Jude’s hair to the beat of the whomp-whomping.
“It’s my home.” Cora walked around the base of the unseen building. Her fingers trailed the exterior wall. “Isn’t it amazing?”
Jude stared upward. “I think it’s a windmill,” he said.
Cora completed the circle and stopped in front of him. “A what?”
“A turbine. Big blades spinning in the wind.” His index finger traced a circle in the air timed to the whomp-whomping of the blades.
She looked up and saw only the fading sunset. Her leg throbbed with each wash of air from above. “I guess.”
“It makes electricity.” Jude rubbed the chip in his arm and looked worried. “Are there people working inside?”
“No, just some old computers.” Cora turned to the door. She found the seam, pushed the door open and tumbled inside. The mesco was starting fill her up. The sound of the blades coursed through her. She flew with them. “Come in,” she said to Jude who hesitated without crossing the threshold. He stared at the interior space visible through the open door.
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