Rina wakes before the bell and lies still, reading her.
Anna sleeps on her back, one hand curled near her chin. Everyone born down here sleeps like that, nothing like the training reels. Her breath is shallow and fast. It has been getting faster for a week, and Rina knows it the way she knows the fans in their section — not as a figure but as a change in the room.
The bell goes at first shift. Anna’s eyes open and find hers immediately.
“Kumusta ka?”
“Mabuti.”
Anna sits up and something catches when she reaches overhead. Rina sees it. Anna sees Rina see it. Neither of them says anything, because saying it is a thing you do to someone.
In the head, Anna goes first. Rina waits in the corridor with her shoulder against the plate. When Anna comes out she doesn’t look up. Rina goes in after. The water in the bowl is dark, darker than it was. She flushes it twice before she uses it and once more after.
Mess at half. The porridge tastes the way the loop tastes when the filters are near their change — wet, and slightly of metal.
Anna saves her fruit and slides it across. Rina saves her bar and slides it back. They worked this out four months ago in a long negotiation of conditions and exceptions, and now their hands do it before either of them is properly awake.
Anna unwraps the bar, takes a bite, chews a long time.
“You don’t have to.”
“Ayaw mo ba?”
“Hindi.” A pause. “Salamat.”
Down the table the cohort is on Teo again. He came off white-only last window and he is not coming back off it, because the boards clarified the range in the spring and the clarification reached backward and took in a boy who had been growing for nine years by then.
There was no hearing. Nothing was decided.
Teo sits two places along eating his porridge and lets them talk, and they talk about it in the voices adults use for weather.
The board goes up by the door. Rotation Seven for their cohort, soil prep, Section Seven-B. Half the names are new. A term ran out in the spring and took eleven bodies off the section at once, nobody has replaced them, and the window is close.
The night before they went, Salcedo gave the long form to the man he’d bunked with for nine years, at this table, and the man stood up and left his food where it was. Nobody said anything about it then and nobody has since.
Anna’s band pulses against her wrist when the assignment loads. Soft, twice.
She stands up. Rina follows her.
Seven-B smells like ground and water. Anna calls it real earth, which is a joke, because neither of them has been anywhere near the real thing.
The black is in transfer bins along the wall, waiting to go to the beds — the mature medium, cycled through the loop for years, holding everything the loop has ever held. The white is stacked in the corner. Clay-synthetic, new, inert. It grows nothing worth eating.
Kwan comes down the line with his tablet. He is not unkind. He has never once been unkind.
“Santos. You’re flagged. White only.”
“Yes, po.”
The po is respect. It is also compliance, and Kwan hears both and takes the one he needs.
He assigns the rest and moves off. Anna goes to the white station. Rina goes with her, though they’re meant to be split — more throughput that way, Kwan says. He stopped splitting them months back. Easier. Less to manage.
Anna fills bags. Steady, mechanical, her grip on the scoop too tight, knuckles pale.
Rina knows what the flag is worth. Everyone their age knows. There is an entry against each of them that the boards will read when they’re old enough for a term, and it only ever accumulates.
A flagged girl who does light work is a flagged girl with nothing on her entry but the flag.
Down the row somebody calls for hands on a black bin. Too heavy, short a body. The window is close.
Kwan is at the far end checking someone’s technique.
Anna looks at Rina.
Rina looks back and does not move and does not say anything, and that is the thing she does. It takes about as long as a breath.
Anna walks over to the black.
Her gloves are in the locker at the head of the section, a minute away. She reaches bare-handed into the bin and scoops the dark medium into the carrier. The man on the other end takes the weight and says something. She laughs.
Rina watches her hands: the grit going under the nails, the dust settling into the lines of her palms.
Anna wipes them on her coverall and comes back past Rina without looking at her.
At the sink she runs the water hot and scrubs until the skin goes red at the wrists.
Her band pulses. Task credited. Rina’s stays quiet. She stood and watched.
Anna holds out her wrist. Rina holds out hers. The bands touch, hold. The entry moves across. Their fingers are touching too, and Anna’s hand is hot from the water, and damp.
“You didn’t have to.”
“Gusto ko.”
That night Rina lies awake with Anna asleep beside her, breathing fast and shallow, and works out how it would go.
Tell Kwan. Kwan tells medical. Medical takes her for observation, and nobody visits during observation, and then either it is nothing or it isn’t, and either way the flag is on her entry twice.
Or don’t. Keep her here. Keep her close.
She turns it over. It will not come apart. There is no version where she learns anything she doesn’t already know.
Anna’s hand finds hers in her sleep. Rina holds it and does not think about the water in the bowl.
Second day, Anna is slower. Longer to dress, longer to eat. She leaves most of the bar and Rina wraps it and puts it in the locker.
“Not hungry.”
“Mamaya.”
Seven-B again, maintenance, no lifting. Anna kneels at a bed with the probe, writing onto the pad, her hand unsteady. Rina kneels next to her and reads the beds instead.
At the break Anna’s entry shows near the top of the cohort, which it has never been. Rina’s has slipped. Last window Rina had been at the top of it and it had seemed like the only thing there was, and now she cannot find where that feeling went.
“Eat something.”
“Later.”
“Now.”
Anna takes a bite and swallows it and takes another and stops with the bowl half up and puts it down.
“Can’t.”
“Okay.”
Third day, Anna doesn’t get up at the bell.
“Tara na.”
“Saglit.”
She sits up slowly and swings her legs over and stays there, hands on the edge of the bunk, breathing. When she stands she puts a hand on the rail before she needs it.
Rina watches her do it and feels something go through her that she has no name for, because that is not how Anna moves.
That is how the old ones move. The ones who came up the well and stayed too long and got grounded onto light duty and then onto none.
In the head Rina doesn’t look. She doesn’t have to. The smell is sharp and wrong and it has changed again.
Mess. Anna doesn’t eat. Rina doesn’t either. They sit at the end of the table.
“You have to tell them.”
“Not yet.”
“Anna—”
“Not yet.”
Kwan sees them from across the hall, and frowns, and comes over.
“Santos. You sick?”
“No, po.”
“You look it.”
“Just tired, po.”
He checks the tablet. He always checks the tablet.
“Your flag’s live and you’re past due on a panel. Report to medical after rotation.”
“Yes, po.”
He goes. Anna looks at Rina.
“I have to go.”
“I know.”
“If they—”
“I know.”
Anna puts her hand out across the table. Rina takes it. They sit like that until the bell.
Medical is three corridors over. Rina walks her down and Chen stops her at the door.
“Family during examination.”
“She’s my bunkmate.”
“Family.”
Anna squeezes her hand once, lets go, goes in.
Rina waits in the corridor. She puts her back to the plate and looks at the floor, the hatch seals, the run of conduit overhead. She makes herself look at each of them properly, one after another. It doesn’t work. She does it again.
Anna comes out a long time later with Chen and someone Rina doesn’t know walking on either side of her, not touching her, close. Anna’s face has nothing on it at all.
“Rotation Seven,” Chen says. Not to Anna. To the other one. “Now, please.”
The other one writes it in the assignment field, the same two words that go up by the mess door every morning.
For a moment Rina thinks Chen means the section — the beds, the white bins in the corner — and she is already halfway to thinking this is good news before it turns over.
She steps forward. Chen puts a hand up.
“No proximity to a flagged patient.”
“She’s my—”
“Not on the sheet. Effective now. Clear your side of the quarters, you’ll have a reassignment inside six hours.”
They walk Anna down the corridor. At the corner Anna looks back once and Rina can’t read it, can’t read anything on her, and then the corner takes her.
The quarters are the wrong size now.
Anna’s bunk is unmade. Her locker is open. Three flats of her parents in a bay somewhere out-system. A wooden bird painted blue that came up from the well with her father, the only object in the section that grew. A stack of letters from the window before last. A drawing Rina did of Seven-B that gets the beds wrong.
Rina sits down on Anna’s bunk. The sheets still smell like her — sweat and soap and the green smell of the section, the one that never fully washes off anyone who works it.
She lies down, stays there, gets up again because she can’t.
Then she makes the bunk. Squares the corners the way inspection wants them, which neither of them has ever bothered to do, and smooths it flat with both hands, and stands looking at it.
The reassignment doesn’t come inside six hours, or the next day either.
She goes to Kwan’s office and knocks.
“Come.”
He’s at his desk with the tablet, filling something in.
“Reyes. What do you need?”
“Take my entry off.”
He looks up. “Say again.”
“Off the list. All of it. Give it to somebody.”
“It doesn’t come off.”
“Then set it to nothing.”
“There’s no nothing.” He says it slowly, working it out as he speaks. “It’s a running entry. It runs. You can decline assignments and it’ll show that you declined them, and that goes on it too. There isn’t a —”
He turns the tablet around. A field. A value.
“There isn’t anywhere to put what you’re asking for.”
“Okay.”
“Reyes.”
“Okay, po.” At the door: “Salamat.”
Chen finds her in the section at the end of the week.
“Reyes. Come.”
“Is she—”
“Come.”
They walk. Chen takes her past the main ward and down a corridor Rina has never had reason to be in, to a hatch with a number on it, and swipes it open.
Anna is in the bed. Her skin has gone yellow, the whites of her eyes worst, and there’s a line into her arm and something running beside her that keeps time with nothing.
“Ten minutes. Don’t touch her.”
Rina sits in the chair. Doesn’t touch. Watches her chest rise and fall.
Anna’s eyes open.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You’re not meant to be in here.”
“Chen let me.”
Anna tries at a smile and most of it doesn’t arrive. “What’d you give for that.”
“Nothing.” A pause. “Everything.”
Anna’s eyes go to Rina’s wrist and the band on it. “Yours has dropped.”
“It doesn’t come off.”
“Rina—”
“It doesn’t come off.”
Anna’s hand moves a little on the blanket. Rina wants it and doesn’t take it.
“They can’t tell me what did it,” Anna says.
She says it the way you’d read it off a sheet, and Rina understands she has had this room to wear it smooth in.
“The one who came in sat down and went through it with me. She wasn’t being careful. She had a list and she gave me the whole list. How I grew. The water in Nine, because half that section’s got something and nobody knows what. My mother’s, because hers went the same way and they couldn’t tell her either. Four days I did in the surface bays when I was six that nobody logged, because I wasn’t crew. The black.”
The machine keeps time. Somewhere down the corridor a hatch cycles and somebody laughs.
“And then I’ve been lying here adding to it. I got another one this morning — there was a season when the beds in Seven-B came out wrong and they turned the whole run back into the medium and nobody wrote down which run. That’s on it now too.”
“You knew about the black.”
“I knew what the flag said.”
“You did it anyway.”
“I know.”
“You should have—” Rina stops.
“Would you have told?”
Rina thinks about it. Properly, all the way down, the way you have to when you’re not going to get another turn at it. Three days with her. The dark in the bowl. The hand on the rail before she needed it.
“Hindi.”
“Why.”
Rina reaches for it and it isn’t a shape she can get her mouth around. What comes out is: “Because you wanted it.”
Anna closes her eyes. When she opens them they’re wet and she doesn’t do anything about that.
“They’re moving me on the window,” she says. “There’s a unit at the port that can do the exchange and there isn’t one here and there won’t be. There’s no berth to come back to. I’m not on anything.”
“Time,” Chen says from the hatch.
Rina stands up out of the chair and doesn’t move away from it.
“Rina.” Anna waits until she looks. “You owe no return.”
Rina’s hands do something on their own, down at her sides, and stop.
She takes Anna’s hand, which she was told not to. It’s cold. She holds it anyway until Chen says her name again in a different voice, and then she puts it down carefully, the way you put down something that belongs to someone.
At the hatch she looks back.
“Mahal kita.”
“Mahal din kita.”
Chen closes it.
They move her out on the window. Rina doesn’t go up to watch, because there isn’t anywhere to watch from.
The cohort board gets updated the shift after. Anna’s name comes off the top of it and goes down onto the bottom, under carried.
The reassignment comes the week after that. A girl called Maya, nine years old, transferred off Eleven when the section consolidated. She’s shy and careful and she looks at the made bunk for a second before she puts her kit on it.
She doesn’t ask where the other one went. Rina doesn’t tell her.
Maya starts unpacking and gets as far as the shelf and stops, because the bird is on it, and the flats are still up, and none of it is hers. She stands there with her hands full.
Rina comes over and takes the bird and the flats and the letters and puts them on her own side, in her own locker, and shuts it. She doesn’t say whose they are and Maya doesn’t ask, and afterward there is room on the shelf.
Rotation Seven, soil prep, and Maya’s cohort entry opens that morning with nothing on it at all, clean, the way they all start. She’s put on the black, because there’s no reason to put her anywhere else and the section is still short.
Rina watches her go at the first bin the way a nine-year-old goes at anything — square on, both hands, all of it at once — and sees exactly where it will end up, which is in her back by the end of the shift.
She doesn’t say anything. Saying it is a thing you do to someone.
She gets under the other side of the carrier without being asked, and takes the weight low, and holds it there until Maya adjusts to it, and shifts her own grip an inch so the girl has to shift hers to match.
Twice more down the row. By the fourth she’s carrying it right and she doesn’t know she is.
Mess at the end of it. Maya has a bar and doesn’t want it, and Rina has fruit she isn’t going to eat, and the trade happens somewhere below the level where either of them has to think about it. It isn’t until Maya is chewing that Rina hears what her own hands have done.
She sits with it.
The porridge is bad. The filters are still near their change. The section is short and will be until somebody’s term runs somewhere else. The window is closed now, it’s a long way to the next one, and the work will be there the whole time.
It’s a little easier than it was. Not much.
She eats.
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