I spend the rest of the day in Telly’s place, whatever ‘day’ means down here, worrying myself sick over how Fark might vote me dead. I do have Telly on my side—me and her make two votes for No Death already—but I can’t shake the possibility. At least the documentaries on the television are distracting; I had no idea that making butter was a complicated process, and given the narrator’s dates for the most cutting-edge technology, time really has marched on in my burial-absence. There’s a ‘future’ date or two. My friends must have missed me and...moved on by now.
A nap is what stops my rumination. Telly doesn’t have an actual bed in here, but her couch unfolds into a futon that has seen better days—soft and fluffy bits wear out fast when you’re metal and stone instead of flesh and blood. I sleep on the floor. The doc used to say it was for my spine.
I realize how limber I am for a person who was trapped in one position for years. In my dream, I’m a circus performer under a big top tent—the ringleader applauds my routine of swinging trapeze and doing trick shots with a BB gun, and he praises me with a spin of a roulette wheel. Its nine blank sections spin, spin, spin, getting ever slower and slower. I wake up before the dream can decide which one the wheel stops upon.
The next morning, Telly shows me the ropes of sustenance in the depths of Mob Rule. We have to get moving, anyway, to make it to the election.
“So who refills them?” I ask, while walking through the shelves of a convenience store—or thereabouts. There are big signs that mark the ends of aisles, as if to indicate what’s inside them—bread, rice, spices, snacks, toothpaste, the usuals—but the signs are just snakes of metal welded where text should be, like those outside. My sandals clop on the white, speckled floor, under buzzing blue-white lighting bars above, illuminating mostly-bare shelves and the refrigerator doors along that one wall of frozen or cold foods that every grocer has.
“Dunno for sure,” Telly says, walking right alongside me. “North stayed overnight in one of these, and he said they grow, like fruits. I’m not convinced until I see it with my own eyes, but it explains why you get a tiny bar that doesn’t taste good sometimes. Not ripe yet, maybe.” She sweeps her hand along one side of the aisle, the texture and color of aluminum, with tiny punched-out holes in the back of each shelf. “The selection sucks, but hey. Take what you want. Have you ever shoplifted before?”
“No, never,” I lie.
“First time for everything. There’s no teller. The cash registers don’t even open. Go on.”
From nearly-bare shelves, I pick out some goodies that I’m interested in. There’s a can of ‘EVAPORATED MILK!’, a tin of ‘PECAN!’, a box of bottles of ‘WATER!’ behind the not-at-all-cold refrigerator doors, some ‘RHUBARB!’ vacuum-sealed in a plastic bag with a white sticker slapped on for the label, and two wheels of ‘CHEESE!’ that I confirm are either brie or camembert after I take a bite. I scarf down the first one and leave the circular wrapping box on, presumably, a trash can—it’s a huge overflowing pile of wrappers and boxes in a corner of the convenience store, burying a waist-high and rectangular-prismoid box.
“No garbage collection?” I ask.
“No garbage collection,” she confirms. “We weren’t meant to be in here this long.”
I walk out of the store, stealing those groceries in my arms, bagless. My heart rate doesn’t go back down when we leave.
The walk to the voting palace is uneventful. Given what the TV clock said when we left, it might be around 12:00, by now, which is what Telly said the election times normally were. Supposedly, we can be late. More to figure out. If I do this right, it won’t matter for long. The low ceiling of the dome rapidly rises on our path from Telly’s house to that convenience store to the central pagoda, but the streets stay much the same for most of it. I see warehouses for companies that are just squiggles, bleached orange by rust. I see a power line in the middle of a street, where it’s not supposed to be, and I wonder if these things even work. How is electricity pumped around to all of these lights when the entire iron dome is one big short circuit waiting to happen? We even pass by a flat, open patch of iron with corrugation waves and studs behind a chain-link fence; I can’t read the squiggles on the freestanding sign, as always, but I think that first letter might be a D, and it’s not very long.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Dog park. For all the dogs here, obviously.
The screw-studded streets reach the centerpiece of it all, the pagoda—it’s in the center of a roundabout, in which a single lane of motionless burned-out car chasses have been stationed in a circular traffic jam, for who-knew-what reason. It’s wall-to-wall buildings in this core of the city—no soccer fields, no fake single-family houses—and the pagoda doesn’t belong at all. Five roofs of traditional Japanese architecture, rendered in iron and aluminum, are cut like identical twins from a factory of roofs, making a square shape to the sky instead of a tapering trapezoid. Panes of sheet metal hang from the roofs like price tags, hung with chains instead of plastic twine. There’s nothing on them—just more rust. Several of them are broken, like teeth knocked out from each row by the boxing prowess of time and decay; I can see how well the rust has eaten around the hole of a fallen tag that has stabbed itself into the ground, corner-first, with a swing from gravity. It’s right there between two cars. And at the ground floor of the pagoda, elevator doors are waiting, where a shoji paper door would normally be. Iron can’t imitate translucence.
“Beep beeeeep,” comes the sharp voice of Adol, inside a car. She’s sitting in the driver’s seat; the vehicle faces away from us, but I can see her from the empty back window frame. Her hands turn a rotting steering wheel back and forth, back and forth. These may have been actual car chasses, like the kind that accumulates in a junkyard, instead of fake ones. “Pew, pew pew, hoooonk...”
“Oh no! We can’t change lanes! The humanityyyyy!” responds a soft, half-laughing voice sitting next to her. So far, everyone I’ve seen has been mineralized in at least some color complexity, but not this woman. She’s bulky, tall, the kind of person that self-important men are too scared to ask out, because she matches their height and all but a bodybuilder’s muscle. It’s hard to make out exact features because she’s stone-black, like graphite or hard carbide ceramics. Carved sections of the ceramic make up what few features I can make out—her ears, her defined clavicles, her hair. When she turns her head and leans over, to press the center of the steering wheel and its long-dead horn, I can spot two great bangs of hair that frame her face like a pair of crescent moons. Her facial features flow so smoothly in motion.
“We’re never gonna make it to band practice!” Adol rejoins.
While I’m wondering what on earth has gotten into them, Telly hip-swings her way up to the car and knocks on its sunroof. The ceramic woman pulls the sheet metal back, rust grinding against rust, while Adol mimes the turning of a crank at her car door—complete with whooshing sounds from her mouth. “Morning, officer!”
“Hey. I’m here now,” she says, smiling with half-lidded, proud eyes. “You don’t have to wait in traffic anymore.”
“Okay! Orbora, park for me?” Adol asks.
“I will!”
Adol opens the door, with much creaking, and gets out. Telly wraps an arm around her shoulder and guides her back towards me—and all I know to do is wave awkwardly. Adol meets my gaze. We stare. Her smile wanes to a serious, vacant frown.
“Hi, Number Nine,” she says, voice lowered.
“Hi. It’s Sammy,” I answer.
“Yeah, c’mon, c’mon,” Telly says, tugging on Adol’s wrist. “Be mad at ‘em at the vote, not here.”
As Telly leads us to the palace, Adol watches me like a cat that glimpsed a laser pointer, her head twisted around on her shoulder more than ninety degrees to watch me follow twenty steps behind. I don’t think I’m getting out of this without a death vote from her. The others will have to be enough.
