by Sean Grigsby
Shamika toed it with her boot. When she lifted her eyes to Lena they became softer, more accepting. “What are we going to do?”
“We need to fix or at least make one of those sensors the shipments have on them,” Lena said. “This last shipment should have a fresh one. It’s the only way we can get through the Veil.”
“Those things get fried as soon as they come through,” said Shamika. “There ain’t much left to work with.”
“I’m pretty good with that kind of shit,” Ava said.
“OK.” Shamika pulled her curls back. “Even if we busted our asses and somehow lucked out and fixed the sensor, what are we going back in? Those shipment boxes don’t have controls, and I don’t see a ship lying around.”
“We’ll have to build one,” Lena said.
The entire OC laughed. Most shook their heads. One murmured, “Bitch, please.”
“It’ll be hard,” Lena continued, undeterred. “But if we all come together on this, all of the dwellers under us, we can do it. There was a time we didn’t have cyclones racing down these streets, you know.”
“And how big is this ship going to be?” Shamika asked. “There’s no way it’ll be able to fit every sheila on Oubliette.”
“No,” Lena said. “It won’t be big enough for everybody.”
The anger Sarah had put on hold was making a comeback. How was Lena any better than the dickheads on Earth who thought they could decide who was worth saving and who was only fit for the shipping box?
“The dwellers will have to draw for a spot,” Lena said.
Shamika rubbed the bridge of her nose. At least someone shared Sarah’s feelings on the subject. “Why in the hell,” Shamika said, “would the dwellers help build this ship if there’s a chance they won’t be able to leave on it.”
“Well,” Lena said, “they won’t know until after it’s built.”
“Oh, Lena,” Shamika said. “You’re one cold, heartless bitch.”
“The alternative is all of us starving to death out here as we sing ‘Holding Hands to Hold Back the Cold.’ And damn, ain’t it great that we all decided to stay together instead of getting off our asses and having a few strong sheilas get off this shithole city?”
Shamika grinned. “OK, Horror. I get your point.”
“And I don’t plan on letting the ones who stay here die. First thing we’ll do is send a shipment with manna. Then we’ll work on getting them back to Earth.”
That’s better, Sarah thought.
“Cause the shippers are just going to bow at our return and let us do whatever the fuck we want.”
“They won’t be breathing by then.”
“Ooh!” Shamika rubbed her hands. “This is getting better. I like a little revenge with my hostile takeover. So we send manna, and then bring back everybody we left behind. Then what?”
“Not everybody,” Lena said. “We have to get rid of Farica and her dwellers.”
Sarah wanted that same thing. At least, it’s what she thought she wanted. The excitement she’d expected in avenging Sterling wasn’t there. Instead she felt exhausted, and so damn overloaded with warring thoughts. How could you have balance when the light and darkness inside you kept fighting for dominion? When you couldn’t tell them apart?
“One Amazon and her loony followers?” Shamika said. “No. I’m not worried about them.”
“They could be a problem,” Lena said. “The quicker we–”
“The quicker we build the ship, the quicker we can get off this city,” Shamika said. “You want my help, my gang’s and my dwellers’, for this psycho mission? Fine. I’m down with that. I see the purpose. There’s no love lost between the Amazons and my gang, but I’m not wasting time hunting down cannibals. Not when we need to use every bit of our time in getting through the Veil. Got me?”
Lena’s eyes moved from Shamika down to Rory. Her stare on the baby remained as she said, “Fine.”
It was unclear if any of this was going to work, in Sarah’s mind, and she didn’t have much to be sure of any more. It sounded like a fool’s errand. But the pieces she’d been able to grasp from what Lena had told Shamika painted a horrifying picture. If the UCNA was sending drones to capture video, video showing what was happening on Oubliette, especially in the last few hours, they would have seen a bunch of psychotics running the asylum. And they would do something about it.
At least now the gangs had something to work toward together instead of fighting. But that was the tricky thing about Oubliette, Sarah had learned. There was always a fight around the corner, and someone always ended up dying.
Chapter 41
The shipper port was the last place Dolfuse ever wanted to return. Besides the joy of seeing Spangler, the whole place gave her a headache. Warden Beckles’ threat didn’t make things too welcoming either. But this time, Dolfuse walked through the doors with a strange confidence. She wasn’t entirely sure where it had come from. Maybe accomplishing her task had unearthed something inside her. She liked it. She felt unstoppable.
“Hello,” Dolfuse said to the red-cheeked guard, with a burst of enthusiasm.
She’d taken the guard by surprise. The woman got to her feet, mouth agape.
Dolfuse laughed to herself and spoke before the guard could get her mind right. “I wanted to come by and tell you I’ll be pushing for a vote on that matter we discussed the last time I was here. I have to say, you inspired me so much I couldn’t wait to bring it to the floor.”
The guard smiled. “You mean–”
“If the bill passes, which I’m sure it will, anyone sixty-five or older will have their rights given to their first-born child.”
The guard frowned. “I’m the middle kid.”
Hell’s bells.
Think fast, think fast. Dolfuse’s pathetic lie was crumbling at the foundation and her confidence with it.
“Not to worry,” Dolfuse said. “How many siblings are older than you?”
“Just one. My brother.”
“Aha!” Dolfuse raised a finger, pretending some lightning strike of an idea. “I can change the language of the bill to allow only first-born daughters to receive the rights. How does that sound?”
The guard’s smile returned. “Yeah, that would work!”
“Glad to hear it.” Dolfuse smiled at her, cheeks hurting. “Say, since I’m here, would it be alright to go say hi to my old friend upstairs?”
The guard nodded. “Sure. Thanks for coming to tell me about the vote.”
“No problem,” Dolfuse said as she slipped through the scanner. “My pleasure and duty as an elected official.”
Dolfuse would have discarded her false smile as she left the guard to celebrate, but it became a genuine grin at having weaseled her way into the shipper port. Was this how she used to be when she first came to Washington? Full of poise and bullshit? She’d been burned out for a long time, she’d known that for a while. But this personal mission – not the task Martin had given her, but Dolfuse’s own agenda – had sparked her back into life. She wasn’t going to waste it.
She continued smiling as she neared the control room, thinking about the absurd lie she told the front guard. Most of the Senate and Congress were composed of people over sixty-five. There was no chance in hell a bill like that would pass. There was no bill. Not any more. It had been shot down the minute a young senator from Quebec had mentioned it, simultaneously killing his career.
Spangler sat at the main controls, like he always did when Dolfuse came to visit. She adored his predictability, but this time he didn’t get up when she entered, didn’t say anything.
“I tried calling you,” Dolfuse said.
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve never ignored me before. What did I do?”
“Didn’t the warden tell you never to come back here? What are you trying to do to me?”
Dolfuse sputtered her lips. “I’m not afraid of that sasquatch. What’s she going to do to me? I’m a senator of the United Conti
nent. She likes to swing her member around like she’s more important than she is, but I’m good at dodging cocks.”
Spangler snorted and covered his mouth. “Stop it.” He giggled. “I’m trying to be serious. What’s gotten into you?”
“Do you think you can do me another favor?”
Spangler’s face sank. He sighed.
“Not sneaking anything off like before,” Dolfuse said. “I just wanted you to look someone up. I would’ve had you do it at my place if you’d ever picked up your phone.”
“I’m trying to stay out of any trouble.”
“You have access to records of all the shippees who’ve left this port. I just need you to find one woman. Who she is and why she was sent up.”
Shaking his head, Spangler said, “We can’t ask their mothers why. It’s just their choice. The rest is confidential, Linda. There are privacy laws.”
“For shippees who’ve already been sent up and forgotten? Give me a break. Besides, this is a matter of continental security.”
Her lies were multiplying, crossing lines she never thought she’d compromise. She’d never lied to Spangler before. Not once. But this time, she had to play a little dirty.
Spangler whispered a prayer. It was that surrendering sound that meant he’d given in to her pressuring. “Who is she?” he asked.
“I don’t have a name. Only this.”
From her bag, Dolfuse gave Spangler a printout of the last image the drone had captured, the woman who’d shot light from her arm.
“She doesn’t look familiar,” Spangler said. “Not that I can remember the thousands of faces who come in here.”
Thousands. Oh, yes. Something she’d forgotten to ask him. About all those shippees being kept underground like a human stockpile. Did he even know? Later, she decided.
“Judging by how old she looks, I’d guess she was shipped before my time.”
“So you’re going to run a facial recognition program?”
He pushed himself away from the control panel, riding the wheeled seat to a computer in the corner. Dolfuse went to lean over his shoulder.
“Yep. And to save time I’ll run it within certain parameters. Caucasian girls who’ve been shipped from before five years ago.”
Dolfuse cleared her throat. “By the way, would it be possible for someone to ship a baby?”
“What?” Spangler said.
“If someone wanted to smuggle an infant in one of your shipments, could they get away with it?”
“You mean like a drone?” Spangler asked, focused on scrolling through the hundreds of pictures. “Why would anyone do that?”
“Ten year-olds get shipped.”
Spangler shrugged. “Hypothetically, someone could bribe the guards. They’d ship their own mothers for the right price. But I wouldn’t let that happen. No way in hell.”
After a few minutes of watching the computer wade through endless pictures, Dolfuse said, “I got an email from Bobby.”
That got his attention. He turned around and had to push up his neon orange glasses to keep them from falling off his nose. “Crazy. So, he’s coming home?”
Dolfuse nodded. “He wants to start a family.”
“That’s great.”
“No. I screwed up big time. I gave my baby up when I didn’t have to. He’ll find out. He’ll–”
“Never have to know,” Spangler said. “You can start over. With another baby.”
She felt a headache coming on. She hadn’t even meant to come to Spangler to spill her emotions like some seppuku samurai. But it always seemed to happen anyway. He was trying to help, but he was saying the wrong things. Dolfuse wanted him to tell her she was a horrible person and she deserved to feel as bad as she did. People telling her that she was brave or that they understood what she must be going through, even if they didn’t know the complete truth, that made it all stale and plastic and wrong.
That old question popped again in her head: how could anyone just forget someone? Especially someone that had grown inside them.
“This sounds terrible to say it out loud,” Dolfuse said, “but there was big part of me that just knew Bobby wasn’t ever coming home. And I couldn’t raise a baby without him. I didn’t want to do it without him.” The computer scrolled on, until a familiar face flashed onto the screen. “That’s her!”
“What?” Spangler spun back to the computer and the picture of a soft-skinned girl with big brown eyes and thin lips. “Are you sure?”
“Compare it to the picture I gave you.”
Spangler held up the more recent photo. He hummed agreeably. “You’re right. She’s gotten a lot rougher around the edges but… Lena Horowitz. She was shipped about ten years ago.”
“Is her mother’s name listed?”
“Renee Horowitz,” Spangler said. “45 Blinkley Circle, Mechanicsville, Maryland, is the address.”
“That’s only about an hour and a half away,” Dolfuse said, after searching it on her phone.
“You going to go talk to mama and find out what I can’t tell you?”
“Pretty much.”
Spangler wrinkled his brow. “This has something to do with your baby, doesn’t it?”
Dolfuse smiled. Dodge and divert. “Let me ask you something. Why is Beckles holding back girls from every shipment?”
He leaned back as if he’d been snake bit. “What are you talking about?”
“The good warden is keeping shippees for herself. Could be a thousand. I saw where they keep them below ground, but I just don’t understand why she’s doing it. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
He was going to lie to her. She saw it in the way the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes twitched. He even opened his mouth, like he would, but then his face relaxed. He couldn’t lie to her.
“Why don’t you ask me yourself?” came the warden’s voice from the ceiling.
Dolfuse jumped and turned to Spangler, who backed up and looked above. At the door, a group of guards charged in.
“Wait!” Dolfuse shouted, not knowing what else to say.
“You can see firsthand how wide I can swing my member,” Beckles said through the unseen speaker. It was the last thing Dolfuse heard before the guards dragged her and Spangler from the room.
Chapter 42
“What are your bets up to now?” Lena asked in the dark.
They’d gathered in the ganghouse’s main room, bringing down their manna box beds or claiming one of the couches. It reminded Sarah of slumber parties she’d seen in movies, never having been lucky enough to go to one herself. She’d had to travel a million miles for this moment – cracking jokes in the dark with other girls. She just wished the food was better.
Pizza. God, what she wouldn’t do for a pizza, the deep dish kind where they put the inorganic tomato sauce on top. She’d only had it once, on her twelfth birthday in lieu of a present, but the memory of it stuck with her even now. But the manna was at least filling.
The Daughters agreed it would be best from then on to sleep together in the main room. Hurley Girly had gotten too excited when Lena first suggested it, and Lena had to explain it was to be close to the cyclones if the need arose for them to make a quick exit. Sterling’s cyclone sat in the corner, cold and neglected. Sarah avoided looking at it.
The new sleeping arrangements worked just fine for Sarah. She hadn’t told any of them, but she slept like crap and would almost scream when she woke up alone in the dark, forgetting where she was for a few seconds.
None of them had forgotten what they’d seen in the Amazon ganghouse – the religious-like devotion of the dwellers. Farica had enough followers to retaliate, it was just a question of when. Tomorrow, the Daughters and the OC would start building a ship and find a way to get through the Veil.
Sarah’s skill set didn’t fall among mechanical things, and she wasn’t sure how much good she’d be. Fighting and sign language were her strengths, but she’d lost a reason to do either.
Don’t think, she
told herself. Instead, she focused on what Lena had asked about their bets. “Our bets?” she asked.
“About why Lena was sent to Oubliette,” Ava said. “I’m up to five manna loaves.”
“Parts off my cyclone and two loaves,” Dipity said.
“I keep putting up a good pussy-licking,” Hurley Girly said, “but these bitches keep turning me down.”
“Ain’t none of us want that shit,” Dipity sputtered her lips.
“I was hoping one of you would match my bet and reseperate,” said Hurley Girly.
Ava said, “It’s ‘reciprocate,’ you dumb fuck.”
Sarah laughed, and damn, it felt good. They all laughed.
“I think Lena was deep into drugs,” Hurley Girly said. “Her mom tried to get her clean, but when she wouldn’t…” she clapped her hands “…off to Oubliette.”
Lena remained quiet, not giving a hint to whether or not Hurley Girly was right.
“Poverty shipping,” Dipity said. “Gotta be.”
“None of you are thinking about it,” Ava said. “You’re just throwing out the laziest story that pops in your head. And none of them have been right.”
“What do you think, Ava?” Sarah asked.
“Her mom sold her to the military, but she got kicked out for some reason,” Ava said. “That’s the best I can assume.”
“What about you, Pao?” Lena asked in a sleepy voice. She moved on her bed, creaking the box.
“I don’t know,” Sarah said.
“Guess.”
Sarah thought over everything she knew about Lena, what she’d seen and heard. Her gang’s leader was crazy for sure, but also calculating and patient. Lena didn’t have a lust for the more base desires like Hurley Girly or some of the dwellers. But she’d been obsessed with stealing Rory. The baby meant more to her than to the other gang leaders. Shamika wanted the baby because of race. Farica out of spite. But why was Lena so adamant about it?
“A boy,” Sarah said.
The other Daughters laughed.
“It’s a good guess,” Lena says.
“I’m not done,” Sarah said.
They got quiet.
