Chapter 10: Desolation Row, Pt. 1

Lily thrust her hand into the grow tank, feeling for a blockage in the filtration port. The edge of the transparent wall dug into her ribs as she leaned over a little further, chin inches from the water.

She tried not to think about it.

“Can you reach it?” Maggie adjusted the faded bandana restraining her violent brown curls. Her cheeks were flushed. “I’ll never fit in there.”

This was a test of will. It was a penance. Lily held her breath as her fingers skidded over the slime.

A lettuce float bumped into her nose. Maggie nudged it away as Lily withdrew her hand, clutching a triumphant fistful of green glop. The tube bubbled again.

“You gotta get some long sticks or something,” she said, wiping her palm on her coveralls.

“Gotta get a new foreman first,” Maggie replied darkly, handing Lily a rag.

If it wasn’t for Maggie, the situation would be unbearable.

Lily had spent days in a cell staring at a blank wall, waiting for them to kill or banish her, only to end up in this green otherworld with its warm grow lamps and long, dark tanks.

The conditions had been clear and inviolable: don’t leave Maggie’s sight during work hours. Don’t attempt to access any level except the common areas and Hydroponics. Ishmael had laid all of this out without making eye contact, and Lily agreed. What else could she do?

The first rule was bent regularly. Maggie got sick a lot and stayed home to sleep, and Lily tended the lettuce obediently in her absence. She never forgot the end goal, but freedom was a work in progress.

The cafeteria nearest to Hydroponics was filled with people in water-stained blue coveralls. They beat most of the crowd and got a table in a quiet corner.

Maggie wrapped a few squares of cornbread in her kerchief and tucked them surreptitiously into the front pocket of her coveralls. Lily had admired her skill in Hydro, too; the deftness with which she palmed carrots, tomatoes, potatoes…

Maybe there had been blight or famine here. Not recently, going by the lush tanks and Maggie’s ample figure, but why else would someone stockpile food in the face of this abundance? No dinners of boiled grass down here.

“At least we get a break now.” Maggie adjusted her canvas suit to hide the bulges. “Time for the monthly prick.”

Shit. Medical. Abigail.

Lily choked the rest of her lunch down. “Oh. Half day.”

“Tomorrow too! But shh, we mustn’t speak of the half day,” Maggie said, in a dramatic whisper. “We might scare it away.”

Lily almost laughed. She gulped down her lukewarm tea and followed Maggie to the lift, where they crammed in amongst shoulders and hips and elbows, listening to the cables groan.

There had been an accident once. A cable snapped and caused a chain reaction that sent four whole cars full of people plummeting down, down…

Maggie was full of morbid stories. She shared them with something close to glee: pigs devouring the unwary, suffocation in the lowest levels where the recycling fans were sluggish, traitorous doctors sent to the surface without biosuits—

Once, Lily considered sharing the things she’d seen. Starving people filling their bellies with dirt. Settlements with rads in the water where babies were born eyeless, limbless, inside-out. The Union Cities burning.

She hadn’t said anything, in the end. Even without the mandate of secrecy, sharing these things wouldn’t make her feel better. It would bring her no peace.

Visiting medical was a whole bouquet of problems: even if she didn’t see any of the people she was supposed to avoid, the thought of the small, inevitable violation turned Lily’s stomach.

No one I know will be working today, she thought as she lined up, willing it into existence.

Odds were good. The tests were run largely by volunteers.

Lily had put the pieces together as inconspicuously as possible. They’d killed all the doctors and the old Station Chief after a rumor circulated about contraceptives in the food. That had been seventeen years ago, one year after the last child was born in the Station. Naomi, former Deputy Station Chief, had sealed the power vacuum.

Lily reached the head of the line after a foot-numbing eternity and found a stranger operating the machine. Cool relief tempered her anxiety.

The injection stung her arm. The needle jabbed her finger. The light blinked red.

Something didn’t add up, Lily decided as the throbbing in her finger faded. If it was testing for pregnancy it was redundant — there was already a monthly test for that, no machine required. It couldn’t be for fertility, either, because they only tested women.

By the time Maggie got done too and they fought the lift congestion back down to the residential levels it was practically time for bed. Sunset on the surface.

“See you noon tomorrow,” Maggie beamed. “Three cheers for the half day.”

She waggled her bandaged fingertip at Lily before heading back toward the lift banks. The apartment she shared with Ellis, a bear of a man who worked in Engineering, was two levels down.

Lily swiped her ident card to unlock the door and flopped onto her bed without undressing. It was narrow and hard, like its twin against the opposite wall. She also had a bathroom — indoors. She’d spent the first night just turning the shower on and off.

One month of this. Her backstory was paper-thin, and there was so much that she had to pretend to remember. Riots, revolts, lift accidents…

Lily worried and breathed in the stale fabric smell until a knock jolted her into alertness. She padded over to squint through the peephole, then fumbled the door open and waited, blinking in the cold yellow light from the hall.

Usually Michael stood like he expected someone to take a level and make sure his spine was straight, but now he slumped against her doorframe in Medical whites and looked at her like…she didn’t know what, but she felt like she’d eaten something that was still alive.

“You were in Lower Med,” he said. It might have been a question.

“Yeah. Testing day.”

“I thought—” He straightened and clasped his hands behind his back. “I thought you left the Station.”

Lily folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself tight. There was a small stain on his sleeve; she stared at that instead of his face. “I didn’t.”

The overhead lights flickered. Now Michael wasn’t looking at her either.

“Are you still working in Medical,” she asked, but at the same time he blurted, “I’m sorry.”

They regarded each other warily.

“Sorry for what,” Lily said.

He blinked. “Everything. The Wasteland, Abigail…” he rubbed the back of his neck. “This, right now. All of it.”

“Oh. All right.”

The air filtration systems kicked in, burying the droning of the florescent lights. Lily thought about asking if he was ok, but one look at the shadows under his eyes answered that question.

“You should go,” she said. “It’s late.”

He took exactly four purposeful steps toward the lifts before doubling back. “You stopped shivering.”

“What?”

“You were so cold, but you weren’t shivering and I couldn’t wake you. I thought you were dying.” Michael rubbed his neck again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

Then he marched away without another word, leaving Lily speechless in the doorway, watching him go and waiting for the world to make sense.

—

“I’d save you if you fell in,” Maggie said, herding her float along. “I know CPR.”

“What’s that?”

They were up on the catwalks, pushing plastic floats of two dozen lettuce heads from one tank to the next so the water could be changed out.

This was the second most monotonous job in Hydro, after the seeding machine, but Lily hated it because it put her directly above the dark mirror surface of the water.

It only looked deep. It wasn’t moving

Maggie squinted. “I see why Medical reassigned you.” She gave Lily a little nudge to show she was joking. “You know, CPR. What you do when someone’s heart stops beating. Nobody’s ever drowned in Hydro, and we’re gonna keep it that way.”

Lily nearly dropped her pole.

Drowned.

Heart stopped.

She remembered Abigail and Michael trying to bring Alan back.

Then she remembered the river. Michael told her the current had dragged her up hard against a submerged boulder, but the only bruises it earned her had been on her chest. Off-center. Above her heart.

She’d come to on the riverbank, with 74 — with Michael — leaning over her, out of breath and wild-eyed.

“What’s wrong,” Maggie demanded. “Don’t puke in the tank, I don’t want to drain it.”

Lily jabbed down with the pole hard enough to send ripples through the armada of plastic floats. Why hadn’t he told her?

She was still turning this over when the lights went out.

The darkness was immediately punctuated by orange emergency lighting, but everyone was already yelling, all at once. Lily caught the word “Topsiders”, answered by a chorus of boos and furious shouting.

She’d heard that word before, but couldn’t remember where. No way to get clarification without attracting attention, so she stayed quiet. Just in case it might somehow apply to her.