Chapter 9: Subterranean Homesick Blues, Pt. 1

Lily studied the crowd in the dining facility, savoring the last few spoonfuls of vegetable stew.

A handful of older teens were dotted amongst grey and greying heads, but there were no children. No babies. No pregnant women. Lily had never been in a gathering like this that didn’t include pregnant women.

It was hard to miss the air of desperate, forced cheer. The shadowed eyes, the too-wide smiles. The bandaged fingers. They must’ve thought they were the end of the human race, but they kept going and it was tearing them apart.

She wanted to stand up on her chair and shout the truth, but she didn’t want to die. And of course there were worse things.

Ishmael’s questions about pregnancy and siblings made sense now. If her mother had lots of children then she probably would too. It was something in the genetics, a profane Coalition word that Lily didn’t understand.

She’d gotten a red light, which obviously wasn’t a surprise — unless it was checking for general capability. Maybe Castor had done her one small, bleak favor before expiring.

Across from her, Abigail pushed her half-full bowl away.

Lily’s hand twitched toward it. She was so intent on the food that she didn’t realize Abigail had spoken. “Huh?”

“I asked if they were making you commute up from Supply.”

“Um. No. They said it was…too far to go,” Lily hazarded.

“Well, you can sleep in the bunk room tonight. There’s only one other person in there; I think he’s from Supply too.”

Oh. Wonderful. Lily’s new history had more holes than a slab of worm-eaten wood. It wouldn’t hold up to even casual questioning.

Abigail gathered their plates and stood. The uneaten food was dumped into a squat green barrel. Lily’s heart broke to see it go.

They squeezed into the corner of the lift together as it rocketed down; Abigail’s face was pale and queasy. They both breathed easier in the corridor outside Medical.

“Tomorrow it’ll be back to normal,” Abigail yawned. “Ok. That door’s the bunk room. Your card should work. See you tomorrow for first shift.”

With that she was gone, hurrying down the hall.

Lily assumed her new ID card was supposed to open the door somehow, but it was already ajar. Light streamed out into the corridor. She took a deep breath, tugged the hem of her shirt down, and marched in.

There were four bunk beds in the low-ceilinged room, made up with rough grey blankets, each with a small shelf for personal belongings.

Lily barely saw any of it. She couldn’t move past the doorway, couldn’t move at all.

He’d already picked the bed furthest from the door and turned the blanket neatly down. Maybe it wasn’t real, maybe she just wanted and feared it so badly that—

Michael’s head snapped up. He half-turned and saw her.

He blinked. Twice. Then, calmly, he lay down facing the wall.

Lily stared at his back and shoulders, frozen. Asphyxiating. What had he seen on her face? What had she looked like?

She turned off the light and took the bed closest to the door, curling up on top of the blankets. After a little while she heard deep, even breathing from the other bed. From Michael’s bed.

Lily lay her hand flat across her sternum, pushing down against the sharp, bitter ache building beneath it. He couldn’t be here, it wasn’t possible. He was dead out in the Wasteland or gone over the mountains without her.

The pattern of his breathing changed. Quickened.

If they’d found him, then it explained why Naomi thought there were more outsiders coming. But why hadn’t Ishmael mentioned finding someone else? Why keep it a secret and then put them in a room together?

She balled a pillow up against her stomach, holding tight.

Across the room, Michael sat up and screamed. Or tried to. She’d made sounds like that before.

Lily held still, heart pounding, eyes wide — he was a hunched shape in the dark, sucking in deep, shuddering guulps of air.

Then he rolled onto his face with a muffled groan, and didn’t move again.

—

“It’s called a malunion,” Abigail explained, pointing to two blurry lines in the short bone of Lily’s shin. “The pieces didn’t line up when it healed. When was this?”

“I was seventeen,” Lily said faintly, staring in awe at the image on the screen, rotating her leg and watching the inverted picture move too, the bones white shadows against the darker mass of her flesh. “Do you think…can you fix it?”

Abigail shrugged. “We’d have to re-break the bone, but—”

“No!” Lily jumped up. Her leg twinged and the screen blacked out. “I mean, I’ll have to think about it.”

She’d do nothing but think about it now, particularly at night, as she lay in her cot unsleeping. Maybe tonight she’d be the one with nightmares, and she could wake Michael up.

He hadn’t spoken to her, even after Abigail introduced them on the first day and asked if they’d worked together down in Supply.

The question had made Lily’s heart stutter. Pieces were coming together, suggesting the whole shape of the problem. If Ishmael or anyone discovered that she and Michael had known each other before the Station, it would confirm Naomi’s worst fears. Whatever they were.

“No,” Michael had replied, to the wall past Lily’s shoulder. “It’s a big department.”

There was a man recovering in the ward with a broken arm. Apparently he’d done it; in spite of everything, Lily found this particular violence hard to visualize.

As a result he was stuck behind a narrow desk, transferring the contents of red folders into an ancient, humming machine with a staticky screen while Lily trailed Abigail up and down the rows of beds.

Lily wasn’t sure how long she could keep up the charade. Ironically, she knew a great deal about childbirth. She knew what germs were, how to treat burns and frostbite, and was intimately acquainted with how not to set a bone. Otherwise the medical arts were foreign to her.

She was given a patchwork of study materials: handwritten notes, worn textbooks, and a few step-by-step illustrated guides that she latched onto gratefully, along with the disjointed hands-on training she got from Abigail.

Thankfully, most of what came through the door were minor injuries. She changed bandages, checked vitals, and occasionally did terrible things with needles and tubes, jumping at any chance to learn or prove herself.

Once Michael’s hand shook when she passed him, rattling the paper he held. He made a tight fist, shook it out, and returned to work without looking up.

So it went.

Lily still couldn’t believe he was there. Sometimes she changed her route to take her past the desk just to make sure he hadn’t evaporated. She ached to ask how he’d come to the Station, why he’d broken a man’s arm in two places, whether Ishmael had told him to be a doctor too…

Abigail didn’t walk, she bustled — down the rows, into the supply room, past the pharmacy, over to the desk to lean over Michael and ask if he was having any trouble. And put her hand on his shoulder.

Whatever he said in response made Abigail laugh. Lily’s heart was rubbed painfully raw, and she soothed it by accidentally breaking a cup and sweeping it up with painstaking care.

Dinner.

Abigail took them both to the dining facility, as she did every day. If she stood closer to one of them in the lift, it didn’t matter. Lily measured her shoes against the floor tiles and said nothing.

“You ok,” Abigail asked as they joined the line. “You look queasy.”

Lily busied herself counting the number of red jumpsuits. “I’m hungry.”

A large, cheerful man in green with hair only on the back of his head hustled up to the line, and Abigail stepped out to hug him.

Lily thought there was some family resemblance, but all these people looked similar anyway, just like in tiny surface settlements where nobody traveled much.

“Uncle Alan, this is Michael and that’s Lily. They’re our new Med trainees.” Lily tried to smile as Abigail said her name, but if it came out as more of a grimace, Alan didn’t seem to notice. “Are you on break? Can you eat with us?”

“Sorry Abby. I’ll be down later, though.” Alan opened and closed his thick-jointed fingers. “I did what you told me, it’s not really helping.”

“I also told you to take a desk, but you didn’t,” Abigail said with mock severity, standing on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.“It’s not just the arthritis. Don’t forget.”

He beamed down at her like a benevolent moon. “I can’t, you won’t let me. I’m coming down after work for my prescription, I’m sure you’ll harass me again then.”

Abigail said something else to Michael as Alan excused himself, but the line had moved up and Lily focused on the food.

She carried her tray off to a corner and didn’t watch Abigail lead Michael over to a different table. She didn’t watch them talking.

The lights flickered overhead, and the noise of the crowd ebbed before swelling up again, loud with relief. A red-suited woman playfully cuffed the shoulder of a reedy man in black, asking why he couldn’t keep the power on. What was next? Toilets reversing themselves again?

His indignant response was lost amid good-natured ribbing from the rest of the table.

Lily watched the lights.

Afterwards, outside Lower Med, Abigail pulled Lily aside. Her face was flushed. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes,” Lily said warily, expecting what came next to sound like ‘you’re not from Supply, I asked and they said they’d never heard of you’.

“You and Michael aren’t…” Abigail blew stray hairs out of her eyes. “You don’t like him, do you?”

“What? Oh. No. I barely know him.” It was the horrible, unfortunate truth.

“Oh. Ok.” Abigail laughed and sighed at the same time, a tiny explosion of air. “I thought — well, you’re always looking at him, and I don’t want to…”

She wasn’t always looking at him, he just got in the way of things she wanted to see. Lily thought of several colorful and descriptive things to say, but settled on, “It’s fine.”

It was fine. It was.

She glanced at the clock. It was five exactly. When it turned seven it would buzz, the night shift would come in, and she’d go back to the bunk room and try for at least three hours of rest before…well. Maybe tonight he wouldn’t come in.

Abigail hurried away to relieve the technician who’d covered their lunch break.

Lily pressed her knuckles into her stomach, watching Michael drop into the chair and drag his hands down his face before pulling over another set of forms.

When, Lily wondered, had she become so bitter? She couldn’t remember if she’d had the kindness ground out of her, or if she’d always been hard inside and her life had molded itself to that framework.

She hoped it was the first. She hoped it was reversible.