Orgasm is swift, uncomplicated, even if afterward it leaves her faintly dissatisfied. The lack of a weight indenting her bed save her own, the absence of a person waking up next to her in the morning. But the sensory links satisfy her skin hunger, if only just.
Suzhen sleeps for seven uninterrupted hours, her optimal amount of rest. Ninety minutes to spare before she has to leave for work. She brushes her teeth, cleans, dresses. In the living room, she raises her eye to the altar, a small shelf high up with a cup of offerings and an image of her mother Xinfei. A snapshot taken long before her passing: this was her at fifty-seven, newly arrived on Anatta, body lean from difficult voyages and gaze heavy with the weight of survival. Suzhen used to cry every moment she could find the energy, unable to grasp why she was ripped from the life she knew and forced into one of stunning misery. She’d spent much of their journey here in suspension, curled inside a pod, and each waking would introduce her to a new terror.
“Good morning, Mother,” she says as she changes out the offerings—glutinous rice dusted in gold leaf—for a fresh dish of oranges and a sprig of cherry blossom. Another point that makes her appreciate living alone. The altar, her mother: neither of them is something she wants to explain to a born-citizen partner or even temporary bedmate. Never explaining anything, never admitting, is the path of the least resistance but also the least pain.
She draws her coat around herself unnecessarily as she exits her building’s lobby. The morning, like the morning preceding it, is as flawless as AI synthesis. The weather is orderly, compliant with the forecast. The climate grids never malfunction, as far as Suzhen knows. On Anatta the rain falls when it is required, snow and sleet when it is the least inconvenient and the most scenic. Her feet glide along the pearly footpath. Not a single flagstone is out of place; a cluster of maintenance drones whir past, scrubbing and polishing as they go. Manicured trees rise to a uniform height, spaced at every eight meters, dripping spindly leaves the color of blood and candlelight. A few extend oblong fruits, matte black and rich, available for any passersby to partake. She doesn’t—the color makes her think of frostbitten skin, epidermis so charred it no longer looks part of a human but instead a piece of earth. So easy for flesh to become that on remote stations, the near-abandoned stops her mother had to make on the way to Anatta. Suzhen remembers other refugees who had even less than she and Xinfei did.
She does her best to forget the association of fruit and frostbite. Small things remind, invoking the neural pathways years of readjustments and counselors haven’t been able to defuse.
Suzhen is about to board the train when her guidance says, in a voice quite unlike itself, “Agent Suzhen Tang, your presence is requested in House Penumbra Zero-Seventeen.”
Her feet click, juddering, against the smooth floor. She looks down at her reflection, a hazy blot on the tiles. She stands absolutely still while her throat closes and her stomach plunges, her pulse stepping up triple-time. Sometimes she thinks, when this happens, that her skin and organs would succumb to gravity and fall away, independent, leaving the rest of her behind. There she would stand, rooted to the spot, a frame of hollow torso and bones stripped of meat.
Ever since she left one, she has never been to a halfway house. Not to visit, as selection agents can opt to do in a pretense of humanitarian interest. Not to pass by and gawk, as though refugees are zoo exhibits. There are two halfway houses in this city, Penumbra Zero-Seventeen and Antumbra One-Eighty. The former holds candidates that have been judged high-caliber, the ones with no infraction on their profiles, the ones with high potential for integration.
Perhaps it is routine.
She calls a taxi. It floats down, dragonfly body unfurling, gossamer doors shuddering open. Chassis opacity toggles to full once she’s inside. “House Penumbra Zero-Seventeen,” she says in a flat, remote voice.
From afar the compound looks pleasant, situated in Indriya’s outskirts and cupped in the palm of a sculpted hill. A civilized purgatory, much kinder-looking than the one that kept her and her mother all those decades ago. As her taxi descends, it becomes evident that Penumbra is built into the hill so that the land itself imprisons the compound, clutching it in a grip of earth and stone and grass. There are no windows and, from the outside, just one door.
A warden receives her, conducting her straight from the vestibule to a small waiting room: she does not get so much as a glimpse of the inmates. The warden is dark, late seventies and plump, and though she’s in uniform—that deep green found at the bottom of a pond—there is to her an odd discomfort, as though she’s not used to wearing it, to bearing arms. “We’ve got a particular candidate,” the warden is saying, “and most agents have reached their quota this month.”
So they have. So has she. She wonders at the warden’s point. None is forthcoming: instead the warden disappears, presumably to fetch the particular candidate. Suzhen leans back in the tight, uncomfortable chair, and glances at the leaded pane which looks out to and displays nothing. Because she has to, she listens and strains her ears. Silence. The walls are entirely soundproof to ensure solitude. It was like this for her, too, existing within a table of time precisely allotted. This many minutes for a meal, this many hours for sleep, all in complete isolation. Not even permitted her mother’s company. Afterward, she learned that there was a possibility she might have been adopted by Anatta parents to ease assimilation. Only by an agent’s capricious mercy and outside intervention did she leave the house with her mother. Two months in the halfway house and she’d have done anything to return to the camp, where she slept curled in her mother’s arms, where she had others to speak to—a place where she’d still thought herself a person.
It is such a small room, the lighting an anemic silver: the chair, the table and the floor are clean but empty. A halfway house does not receive guests. It receives inspectors and inmates: this is not a human place. And now she is on the other side of it, as despicably unhuman as the rest.
The door slides. The warden precedes; behind her follows a figure in an inmate’s shapeless smock. At the warden’s instruction, the inmate steps forward.
They stand nearly two meters tall, broad-shouldered and pale-skinned. This person’s eyes are alert, taking in Suzhen, a new variable that must at once be incorporated into the formula of survival. Calculation done at the velocity of machines, or feral things. Their long arms and shins are bruised by restraints, injection sites puckered like slag. Late forties or newly fifty, Suzhen judges, though the camps make people look much older than they are.
“This is Ovuha,” the warden says. No last name. No refugee has one—in the camps they are stripped of their past, rendered a blank canvas on which Samsara may write. “I’ve sent you her profile, Agent.”
Suzhen holds Ovuha’s gaze. The refugee is gaunt, cheeks recessed and skin taut, and yet she recognizes that either Ovuha was born of fortunate genes or she was tailored with no expenses spared—such options are available even in the colonies. The columnal neck the hue of fresh ivory, the wide generous mouth the shade of pomegranates, the cut-glass jawline as accentuated as statuary. Someone pored over her projected phenotype, going over the shape of skull and the scope of brow, the cartilage that would make up the nose and the ears. Each angle was deliberated upon to ensure elegance. Malnourished and haggard as she is, still Ovuha would stand out as a product of polished genesis.
“Hello, Ovuha,” Suzhen says. “Please, sit.”
Ovuha does. Her hands fold on the table rather than in her lap and her gaze is steady, direct without being confrontational. She says nothing and it occurs to Suzhen that she will remain silent until prompted: that is a habit any refugee learns. Never speak until spoken to. Any utterance may be used against you.