“Well, I’ll be. If it isn’t Draven Castle,” a booming voice greeted him. He turned to see a tank of dark brown flesh descending. He smiled at her warm voice, her warm smile and warm greeting. Now here was a woman who was warm in the right ways. Her embrace was cool as a night breeze. “Must be my lucky day,” Bonnie said, gathering his thin body against her large one. “To what in evolution do we owe this particular pleasure? You caught us another sap? We ought to just punch in a monthly bonus for you. When you gonna come back and work for us again, anyway? You know this is where you belong.”
“I lifted her from a bad neighborhood when I was driving through the South End this evening,” he said. “She looks a bit healthy to have been working at one of the holes they call restaurants, so you might scan her ID. She likely belongs to someone.”
“What you doing in South End? You go looking for trouble, or it just find you its own self?”
“I’m only doing my civic duty,” Draven said, wishing he hadn’t run into her. He had enjoyed her company, but she paid far too much attention to everyone else’s doings.
“Nobody in the South End’s doing their civic duty. I tell you what. You get lonely, you don’t got to go hookering around down there. You know just where to find me.”
Draven laughed. “Yes, I do. But I’m fairly certain you’re the only Third Order woman left who doesn’t make a man pay, and I don’t always get time to come over here.”
Bonnie laughed. “Ah, quit kidding. It isn’t that bad. You know what your problem is? You’re just a discontented soul. Never content to just work alongside the likes of me. Now come on in here and fill out the forms and let me look you two over. You’re looking so good I’m half tempted to have a bite out of both you and her.”
Draven followed Bonnie into the office and watched her settle behind the desk. “I see you’ve been promoted,” he said. He began filling out the form.
“I’ve been here a while now. You probably would’ve gotten my job if you stayed longer. But oh no, can’t keep Draven Castle happy.”
“Come now, you know that’s not true.” He smirked at her.
“Oh yeah? How many jobs you had since you left here? Six? Three? I bet it’s no less than three.”
“Who’s counting?”
“See, I tell you, but you just don’t listen. You’ve got to be content with your own self, and then you’ll be promoted. You’re one of the best Catchers we ever had.”
“I know, Big Bonnie. You tell me every time I see you.”
“Which is never, because you’re afraid I’m going to suck you right back in, and you know I’m right, too. So how about it? What’re you doing right now?”
“Bouncing at a restaurant.”
“Bouncing?” Bonnie laughed so hard her big body shook. “You’re no bouncer. Your scrawny ass? I could break you in half. You’re born a Catcher and you’re always going to come back.”
“I did prefer my paycheck here.”
“You see? The Confinement takes good care of us. And boy, I’ll take good care of you, too. You come back anytime. Now get on back to work before you get fired. Again.”
“I never get fired, Bonnie. I just switch.” He handed her the tablet with the completed form. He might have skipped it, but he needed the money, and he didn’t want to bring any suspicion upon himself by skipping the formwork necessary for collecting his payment.
“You just switch a lot,” Bonnie said, turning the tablet to check that he’d completed the file before speaking to Cali. “All right little sap, you understand what I’m saying?”
Cali, who had sat in silence studying their conversation with apparent interest, now nodded.
“All right then, turn around and pull up your shift there and let me scan your code.” Draven watched Cali do as she was told. Her heart began beating wildly when she lifted her shift. He didn’t understand what frightened her—saps had their hindmarks scanned quite often. Bonnie scanned the code on the upper part of the sapien’s buttocks and said, “Yeah, she’s in the system. Belongs to a restaurant. We’ll get her back. Thanks, Mister Castle. You come back by here and visit a lady now and then, you hear?”
“Oh yes. I hear you.”
“All right, go on then. We got her.”
As Draven turned to go, he caught a glimpse of Cali’s stricken face. If he could, he would have told her that she wouldn’t go back, that she’d stay at the Confinement. But he couldn’t say that in front of Bonnie without exposing his lie, and he wouldn’t be left alone with Cali again. Bonnie would take her statement and hold her until the end of the night when they would run all the saps through the system. By then, Enforcement would have input the raid, as well as a list of confiscated saps and where they had been relocated, mostly in rehabilitation clinics for a few days before transfer to the Confinement.
Cali had spent her rehabilitation at his apartment instead of a clinic. It wasn’t so different. Really, he had gone beyond the call of duty. He had taken on the responsibility of a sap’s care instead of letting the state pay for it. They ought to thank him for that.
19
For the rest of the night and one whole day, Cali sat in a little white room with one other guy. He didn’t say much, mostly slept. After a long time, the fat lady Superior took him away. Then Cali was by herself. She didn’t care though, not very much. She was still tired from the awful restaurant where she hardly ever ate and had to let Superiors eat from her all night. So she slept on the hard bench, white like the rest of the room.
When she woke again, someone had left a little chamber pot and a plastic cup of water and a plastic plate of food. Cali ate all the food and drank all the water and used the chamber pot. She put the picture back in her underpants, since it was the only place she had to keep it. Now what would she do with it? Most people at the Confinement didn’t know anything about Superiors. And she’d been so scared they’d see it when she’d lifted her shift for her hindmark scan.
After a while, she slept again. When she woke up, she paced around the room. She knew what happened next—they’d take her back to that awful place, and she’d probably die this time. She couldn’t expect a Superior to come to her rescue every time. Sooner or later she’d stop getting lucky. She sat down and held her hands tight between her knees. She kept looking up at the walls, halfway expecting a little window to appear like the ones she’d had in all her rooms. But every time she looked, the wall stayed the same. This room had no windows, and she couldn’t tell what time of day it was. But every day ended, and when night started, the Superiors came back.
One of them opened the door just then, like he’d waited for her to think of him so he could show up. He looked like all the Superiors, or most of them, anyway. The only difference between Superiors and people, as far as Cali could tell, was that Superiors dressed in a whole lot more clothes and were a whole lot cleaner.
She was thankful she’d gotten to take a shower. The bad restaurant only let the workers shower once a week, and she’d gotten nasty and grimy the last four days before the sometimes-nice Superior had taken her home. He didn’t seem to care when she showered, so she’d done it a lot—when he’d gone to work, when he’d been home and sleeping. All the time. She hadn’t told him she’d never had a warm shower before. He might have realized she wasn’t supposed to and turned off the warmth somehow. Even at the nice restaurant, cold showers only. She’d heard about warm showers. It seemed like humans knew about everything Superiors did, even though she didn’t know how. Kind of like all the legends about what Superiors could do. Cali only believed about half of it. She hadn’t even known for sure if warm showers existed until she’d had one.
The man who opened the door to the little white room had hair about the color of Cali’s, and he wore glasses, another thing only Superiors had. He wore blue pants and a blue shirt with a stylus in the pocket, and she knew him at once even though she’d never seen him before. He was a doctor. They all wore that in the clinic. Another Superior, a girl one who looke
d about the same age as Cali, stood right behind him. She had black hair under one of the nets all the Superior girls wore, and she had the hugest nose of anyone Cali had ever seen. She started talking to Cali in another language.
The man Superior said, “You speak my language or hers?”
“Yours,” Cali said. “Is it time to go back? Do I have to?”
“Just come with me,” he said. “That man who brought you in, didn’t he tell you that you’d get to stay here?”
“Yeah, but…I guess I thought…he just said that so I’d be good.”
The doctor Superior shook his head. “Come along. I know the conditions were bad where you’ve been, but you’ll be fine here at the Confinement.”
Cali nearly screamed with joy. She wanted to hug that man, too, but she figured she’d been lucky that the Man with Soft Hair hadn’t punished her for that. So she held back her excitement at the thought of going back to the Confinement. Back home, after all this time.
She followed the doctor and the girl down the hall and outside. The smell of the evening at the Confinement—dirt, smoky food, rotting vegetables, animals and people, soap and sweat—rushed to greet her like an old friend. She hadn’t even known it had a smell. But when it came to her, she knew she’d never forgotten it at all. It was like she’d only left last night instead of over three years ago.
The Superiors kept talking in that other language. She wished she knew what they said, if they talked about her. Lots of Superiors talked in the other language, but the humans mostly used hers. She wondered why Superiors would need a secret language. It wasn’t like her people could do anything with Superior secrets even if they’d understood the language.
The doctor led Cali to the clinic. She’d gone to the clinic plenty when she’d lived in the Confinement. She’d had exams, and once she’d gotten sick and had to go every night for five nights and take awful-tasting medicine. She didn’t mind the medicine as much as the exams. The doctors always talked in other languages to each other and sometimes laughed while they poked around under her arms and on her stomach and back. They mostly used her language to tell her what to do. When they did talk to each other in her language, they used all these words she’d never heard before so it sounded almost like a different language, anyway.
The doctor pushed Cali to a tiny little room and made her go in. She didn’t like it when Superiors led her by the back of the neck like she was a dog or something. Like she couldn’t have understood if he just told her where to go. They always had to hold onto her. She wondered what would happen if just once she did what she wanted, shrugged his hand off and told him she could figure out where to go without his hand pushing her along.
“Okay, just go ahead and undress for me,” the man Superior said. The girl started tapping away at that little black square that Superiors always carried around and looked at.
Cali sighed and undid her shift and let it drop around her feet. She crossed her arms across her chest and waited for him to start scanning her with his little scanny-wand thing and telling her to do this or that, lift her arms, jog a minute in place, twist this way and that, bend this way and that.
Instead, he said, “Okay, good, now just get on that table. And take off your underpants, too.”
Cali stared at him. Did he know about the picture? What if it was something important, not just a picture? What if she got killed for it, or sent to the blood bank again? Or maybe he didn’t know about the damp, bent picture at all. Maybe he wanted the other thing inside her underpants.
She knew what that was all about. She’d heard girls at Estrella’s talking about it. She’d even had to learn how to tell her bouncer to make the nasty-thinking Superiors go away when they said stuff about renting her. At the dirty restaurant, she’d heard a lot more about it. And she’d thought she was safe, that she’d escaped that. The Man with Soft Hair hadn’t done anything nasty to her, and she’d thought she’d gotten lucky for once. But now someone else wanted to do bad things to her—and at the Confinement, of all places, where she should have been safest.
“Go on,” the man Superior said. He didn’t look very happy to have to repeat himself. Cali did what he told her, turning around while she hooked her thumb under the picture and the band of her underwear. She folded it inside and pushed it under her shift. Her hands shook; her legs, too. But the doctor didn’t even glance at her pile of clothes.
He gestured for her to get on the table, and then he put on some blue gloves that just matched his clothes. She tried awfully hard not to cry while he looked at her everywhere and poked around everywhere, asking her the whole time what the Man with Soft Hair had done to her and if he hurt her or touched her private places. Then the doctor poked in her most private places, which hurt, and then she did cry. A little. But he didn’t do the worst thing to her.
She got off the table and dressed while the doctor Superior and the big-nosed Superior talked in the other language and smiled a lot. Cali bit back her tears and wished she had something a lot bigger to put on, something that covered every inch of her body and didn’t come off. Maybe covered her head, too. The doctor Superior sat on a chair and started tapping on his little black thingy, and the big-nosed Superior put her black thingy in her pocket and led Cali out. She didn’t say anything, just took Cali outside and left her with another Superior, a skinny boy one who also looked about as old as Cali. Actually, most Superiors looked about the same age, as far as she could tell.
This one made her lift up her shift, and she thought someone else was going to do bad things to her, but he only scanned her hindmark and brought her in near the beds and told her where she’d sleep. She had wanted to come back awfully bad, and now she had made it back. But some of her excitement was lost now that someone had molested her. She followed the boy Superior outside, and he pointed to the communal buildings, like she didn’t remember from three years ago where to go.
She went in and got in line to get her food.
“Hey, you’re new,” a woman behind Cali said. “What’s your name? Where you from?”
“I’m Cali. Or, I mean, Aspen. I was Aspen, but then I worked at a restaurant and they made me change my name.”
“You worked at a restaurant? Wow, that’s lucky. I heard restaurant workers have it lots better than us. That true?”
“No,” Cali said. “It’s not true. Actually, I’ve wanted to come back here every day since I left.”
“Really? You came from this Confinement?”
“Yeah. Three years ago. My mama is Louisa, and my sisters are Poppy, Gwen, Zinnia, and Maypull. And my brothers are Leaf and Boyd. Do you know any of them?”
The woman laughed. “Girl, there’s about ten people here with each of those names. Except maybe Maypull. Come on, eat with us, we’ll put the word out and find your family if they still here.”
After Cali ate, she went to the rows of little tin houses. They didn’t look quite as nice as she remembered. Maybe her restaurant time hadn’t been so bad. But she’d missed her mama, and she could hardly breathe from excitement as she followed the three women who had eaten with her. They bellowed out her mama’s name, and after a while, they found the row, two over from the one Cali thought she remembered.
Her mama came out and said, “Yeah? What you calling my name for?” Then she saw Cali and kind of stared and blinked.
“This your daughter?” the other woman asked.
“Mama? Is that you?” Cali asked, although she knew it was. Her mama looked a lot more than three years older, but she was still the same woman.
Her mama threw her arms around Cali and hugged her hard. “I can’t believe you came back,” she said. She started crying, and Cali did too, a little. “I thought I’d never see you again.” She pulled back to look at Cali. “Girls, come look at your sister,” she called.
Three girls came out of the tin house, all of them looking about ten years older to Cali. The littlest one, still bony but for her chest, which looked humongous compared to the rest of her,
had a baby on her hip.
“Aspen?” she said. “Holy sap-crap, it is.” She hugged Cali so hard she crushed the baby, who started crying. “Look, I had a baby. Sandy’s her name. She cries all the time.”
Cali hugged the other girls and told them all her new name while they brought her in the house. They wanted to hear all about the outside world, the city and the restaurants and what the Superiors looked like and more important, what the people looked like. Did they dress different? Did they get to go out alone? Did they have more things, better houses, did any of them really learn to read or get to freedom? Cali spent half the night in their house talking, telling them everything and showing them the thing she’d stolen, which they found interesting, although no one could guess its use. She wanted to stay all night, but the house was already too crowded.
“Where’s everyone else?” she asked.
Mama patted Cali’s leg. She had Cali on her lap even though Cali was nearly as big as her mama by now. “Well, Leaf got married, and he got some stuff together and made a house. He has two babies now,” Mama said.
“Boyd got taken off somewhere else,” Poppy said. “Not to a Superior though. He got taken with a bunch of guys. To work in another area on one of the food-farms, but we don’t know where. Somebody who was up front said they went south.” She waited to see if Cali would react. Cali knew the legends as well as anyone. People said in South America some saps lived free. But she didn’t give trust to all those hopeful stories. She’d heard those same stories about how the restaurants were heaven, and they hadn’t been all that great to her.
“And Maypull?”
“She’s inside. Now that all my babies are grown, we couldn’t all fit out here,” Mama said. “She’s got a boyfriend in there, so she wanted to go in.”
Cali looked around at her family, at Zinnia’s big stomach and Poppy’s baby. And her littlest sister had a boyfriend. Everyone would have their own families. Except her, and Gwen, who shared some of Cali’s fears about having babies. “No one else has a baby?” she asked.
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