Chapter 17

Harl waved Raelin over from halfway down Sorting Room 3. Rows of metal tables ran the length of the narrow room, their surfaces crowded with wire bins and stained filters that residents sorted one by one. Harl gestured to the empty chair beside him. The screen above the station read RAELIN KESTREL. MODULE 1847.

Raelin sat. “Found your way back, then,” Harl said. “Saw you choose sorting this morning. You left before I could catch you, so I kept this one open.” He nodded at the screen. “Even put your name on it. A reserved chair and a full bin of dirty filters. The Compound spares no expense.” Harl chuckled at his own joke, then reached into Raelin’s bin and lifted a filter by its frame. “Know what you’re looking for?”

Raelin leaned closer. The frame was bent at one corner, but none of the joins had cracked. The mesh was clogged with grime but unbroken. “I’d clean it and straighten the frame,” he said. He looked across the three chutes marked CLEAN, STRIP, and DISCARD, then pointed to CLEAN. “That one?”

“Would be, if they paid us to fix anything.” Harl set the frame against a white square painted on the table. A gap showed beneath the bent corner. “CLEAN means the frame fits neatly into this little square and the mesh has no tears. Bent or broken goes to STRIP. Anything fused to another material or too hard to strip goes to DISCARD.” He slid the filter into the chute marked STRIP. “If you think they should fix up the bent ones, put a note in the suggestion box.” Harl chuckled to himself again.

“Thanks,” Raelin said. He leaned into the bin and pulled out another filter. He turned it over, set the frame against the white square, then held the mesh beneath the inspection lamp. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Sorting or the Compound?” Harl asked. He lifted the next filter, gave it a single glance beneath the inspection lamp, and tossed it into CLEAN. “Sorting comes and goes. The Compound has had me going on nine years.”

Raelin’s hand stopped above the next filter. “Nine years?” He turned to Harl and said, “How far below zero were you? I should be out of here in a year at most.”

“Wasn’t,” Harl said. He reached for another filter. “First time I came in, I was at zero. I’ve earned my way above zero three times.” He dropped the filter into CLEAN and nodded at Raelin’s idle hand. “Keep that up and you’ll find out how the penalties work before the day is over.”

Raelin set the filter against the square. “Three times?” The frame fit, but a tear crossed one corner of the mesh. He sent it into STRIP. “What brought you back?”

“Same thing every time,” Harl said, lifting a trembling hand from the table. “I worked on ventilation systems for forty years. Changed filters, patched ducts, kept the fans running. Then my hands began to shake. At first, I could make up the lost time on easier work. Later I started dropping screws and redoing seals. Once I began missing quota, each miss cost more than a good day paid.” He sent the next filter into CLEAN without checking it against the square. “Every time I got above zero and left the Compound, I was still an old man without a job. Food and a bed took what I had, and back I came.”

Raelin checked the next filter for bends. “What happens when your balance goes above zero?”

“First comes a recovery review,” Harl said. “Your OmniLink wakes up while the Oracle looks for a job and housing. Mine always says NO SUITABLE PLACEMENT AVAILABLE. Then it gives me until the end of the next rest cycle. After that, the module assignment ends and the ration dispensers stop serving you.” He sent a filter into DISCARD. “First time, I left with three points and the Oracle’s congratulations.”

“What about retirement?” Raelin asked. “You worked forty years.”

“I wasn’t old enough to retire when the Oracle dismissed me,” Harl said. “By the time I qualified, I had no job to retire from.”

“I get it,” Raelin said. “I didn’t have a job before they sent me here. Even if I get out, I still won’t have one, on top of all my other problems.”

Harl reached for one of the few filters left in his bin. Raelin’s still looked almost as full as when he had sat down. “Enough of my cheerful history,” Harl said. “How did you end up here?”

Raelin glanced at the people working at the nearest tables. “I climbed up through the Shaft, trying to reach the Apex. I only made it as far as Skyline before an Eye spotted me and the Wardens caught me.”

Harl laughed once. When Raelin did not, he lowered the filter to the table. “You climbed all the way to Skyline?”

“Do they really put gold in their drinks?” a woman at the next table cut in. “That’s what I heard.”

“I was busy being chased by Wardens,” Raelin said. “I didn’t see any gold, but the drinks were all different colors, and some of them sparkled. There was even clean water running in channels along the paving just for decoration.”

“Never mind the drinks,” a man two tables down said. “What was the sky like?”

“They say it’s so big you lose your balance when you look up,” another woman said from across the aisle. “I’d spend half the day staring at my boots just to stay upright.”

When she finished, the three of them turned to Raelin. Harl was already watching him. “It was…” Raelin looked down at the filter in his hands. “Wrong, at first. There was no ceiling to give it a size, and I couldn’t tell how far away the clouds were. The longer I looked, the less steady the ground felt. But I didn’t have any time to waste staring at it.”

“What were you doing all the way up there in the first place?” the woman at the next table asked.

“My sister’s sick,” Raelin said. “The treatment she needs exists, just not down here. I thought if I reached the Apex, I might find a solution somehow.” The woman at the next table gave him a grim smile. Around the room, several people nodded.

“All right, all right,” Harl said. He picked up the filter he had left on the table and shook it at the others. “The boy still has most of a bin to finish if he ever wants to get back to his sister.”

The others returned to their bins, but some continued muttering as they worked. By the time Raelin had cleared the top layer of his bin, voices at the far end of the room had taken up the story. He caught only fragments about Skyline and the Wardens. Raelin kept sorting.

When Harl emptied his bin, he pulled a stack from Raelin’s onto the table and began sorting. “Just don’t get used to it, son,” he said before Raelin could thank him. “The Compound gave you a reserved chair already. Can’t have it getting a reputation for hospitality.” Harl kept drawing filters from the bin until Raelin sent the last one into STRIP at 17:51. ASSIGNMENT COMPLETE replaced his name on the screen. A brief three-note fanfare sounded from the station speaker. When the final note ended, +3 POINTS appeared beneath the message.

Harl nested the empty bins and slid them onto a rack beside the door. “Come on, son. Time for another gourmet meal.” Raelin followed him out of Sorting Room 3 and through the concourse. At the ration dispenser, a beige bar dropped onto his tray. It held its shape this time, with green flecks across the surface and a faint smell of onion.

Harl collected his own tray and led Raelin into the mess hall. Mara had kept two places open at the end of her bench. Near the entrance, one of the men from Sorting Room 3 leaned toward his neighbor as Raelin passed. “That’s him,” he whispered. “The one who climbed to Skyline.”

Mara pulled her tray closer to make room for theirs as Raelin sat. “Are you going to explain why half the room is staring at you, or should I believe the rumor that you climbed to Skyline?”

“I don’t know exactly what the rumors are saying, but I did climb all the way to Skyline before the Wardens caught me,” Raelin said.

“Then let them stare,” Mara said. “Most of them have never been above the Substructure, let alone made it as high as you did.”

“I didn’t get to stay, though,” Raelin countered. “They weren’t too keen on visitors.”

Mara laughed. “No, I suppose they weren’t.” She lowered her voice. “I heard the part about your sister too. How is she?”

Raelin sighed. “Still sick. I climbed all that way, and all I have to show for it is a good story and enough debt to keep me here for close to a year if everything goes right. Honestly, I don’t have a plan anymore.”

Neither Mara nor Harl had an answer to that. Raelin took the opportunity to bite into the ration bar. The dry edge crumbled, but the center stuck to his teeth. The onion flavor quickly gave way to the stronger, familiar mineral bitterness.

Harl pushed his empty tray aside and drew a cloth pouch from his pocket. “Ever played Conduit?” He tipped a collection of narrow black tiles into the space between them. Each was divided down the middle, with a faded utility symbol in each half.

Mara turned the tiles facedown and mixed them across the table. “He means, would you like him to cheat you before curfew?”

“Depends,” Raelin said. “Is there anything else to do around here?”

“Nothing better,” Harl said. He placed one tile faceup in the middle of the table. A fan marked one half and a droplet the other. He drew six more and stood them in a row before him. “Match either symbol to an open end. If you can’t, you pass. Doubles are splitters. Lay one crosswise and it opens two branches. Join two branches and you play again. First one out wins.”

Raelin set the rest of his ration bar on his tray. Mara slid six tiles toward him and took the remaining six for herself. He stood his in a row. Fans, droplets, lightning bolts, flames, gears, and linked circles appeared in different pairings across their faces. Raelin chose a fan paired with a lightning bolt and placed it against the matching half of the starter tile.

Mara laid a double droplet crosswise against the starter’s exposed droplet, leaving three open ends. A second splitter later increased that to four. Harl used both halves of one tile to bridge two of the open ends, closing them into a loop. That left two branches open, one ending in a flame and the other in a gear. With his extra turn, he matched a flame-and-gear tile to the flame. Both open ends now showed gears. Raelin had no gear among his remaining tiles. “Pass,” he said.

Mara matched one of the gears on her next turn. Raelin placed one more tile when play came back to him, but it was the last one he managed. Harl blocked him twice more, then laid his final tile while several remained in Raelin’s row.

Raelin scowled at his pieces. “All I had to do was match symbols. How did I lose that badly?”

Harl spread his hands. “A magician never reveals his secrets.”

“The double gear and the gear with linked circles have been gone for a while,” Mara said. “He knows the set, and you don’t. That’s the whole trick.”

Harl gave Mara a wounded look. “You could have waited until after the rematch.”

During the next round, Raelin learned that the Conduit set had belonged to Harl’s late wife. She had taught him to play when he was still a ventilation apprentice and had beaten him more often than he cared to admit. She had spent forty years trying to teach him how to lose with dignity, and Harl had no intention of learning now. He beat Raelin again before he finished the story.

Mara won the round after that. Between turns, she told Raelin that she had worked with a recovery crew at the Cascade Terminal until one day she failed to reach the exits before a clearing cycle began. The accident cost her left arm, and afterward she could no longer carry and sort fast enough to keep her place on the crew. A strong enough prosthetic might have let her return, but she had no way to earn the points for one. Her old crewmates still brought food when they could, but without a way to earn points, the cost of living eventually pushed her balance below zero and left her in the Compound.

A soft tone sounded overhead. “Evening sanitation access is now open,” the synthetic voice announced. Around the mess hall, conversations wound down as residents gathered their trays and packed away their games. Harl counted the Conduit tiles back into his pouch.

“We sit here most evenings,” Mara said. “We’ll save you a place if you want one.”

Raelin thanked her. After returning their trays, the three of them joined the line forming beneath SANITATION.

SANITATION was warm, damp, and crowded. Mara and Harl took the first two stalls to open, and Raelin entered the next. He stripped, hung his clothes on the wall hooks, and pressed the button beneath the shower head. Lukewarm water ran for five minutes, barely long enough to wash while keeping his bandaged hand raised and the dressing over his ribs dry.

When the water stopped, warm air blew from a vent until only Raelin’s hair remained damp. He dressed and found Harl and Mara waiting beside a dispenser marked BEDDING. After they keyed in their module numbers and collected folded blankets, Raelin entered 1847 on the panel. A gray blanket dropped into the delivery slot. The fabric was thin and rough, with the same disinfectant smell as his mat.

Carrying their blankets, they crossed the concourse together. At the numbered corridors, Harl and Mara said goodnight before heading toward their modules. Raelin continued alone to 1847. He pressed the lit plate beneath the number. The door slid open, and he stepped inside.

The door slid shut behind him. Raelin set the folded blanket at the foot of the mat and removed his boots. He stripped to his underclothes, easing his shirt past the dressing over his ribs, then folded his clothes onto the bare shelf. He lowered himself onto the mat, settled his back against the wall, stretched his legs forward, and stared at nothing.

He had to do something for Kiri. The thought came with all the force of an order and none of the direction. Every attempt to crystallize it into a plan only led him back to the same place. He had to do something for Kiri.

He had been desperate before, but there had always been something new to try. Somewhere to go, some avenue left unexplored. Now there was nothing. His debt might keep him Pointless for close to a year. Even if his balance rose above zero tomorrow, he would still have no idea how to save Kiri.

The light above him dimmed so gradually that Raelin did not notice until only a faint line remained along the ceiling. He slid down the wall until he lay flat on the mat, then pulled the blanket over himself. He kept searching anyway until one thought blurred into the next, then into sleep. In the morning, it would be the Oracle who gave him something to do.