C James - Dome Six

But the main access panel was several meters closer to the intake. Only an idiot would venture inside without knowing when it would come alive. His dad was no idiot.

The men watched from a distance as he approached the intake access. The four other janitors on the scene sloshed grimly through the bloody water that soaked their hemp shoes, barely aware of his presence. He opened the release lever and pulled the panel free. As bad as the scene looked on the outside, the inside was a thousand times worse.

The gears that drove the pulverizing drum at the mouth of the machine were slathered red, jammed by the woman’s twisted clothing. It wouldn’t have looked any different if she’d exploded. It appeared the components could be pulled out and inspected or cleared by hand but he’d still need tools to do it properly. He would be there for a while. And just like with his father, the entire Dome would have to wait until it was done.

Just then, a faint movement on one of the gears caught his eye. Something very small. He peered closer, glancing over his shoulder to ensure no one had come up behind him.

“Hope you didn’t have plans this morning, Yamamura,” said the supervisor, still sniggering.

Hideki ignored him and focused on the movement he’d noticed. Something was stuck to a smear of blood on the tip of a gear tooth. He gently pressed his finger to it and pulled it out into the light. He recognized it immediately.

A tiny, wriggling Macro, red as the blood.

In the dream, Elle is 15 again. The faceless man is there with her, and he is much stronger. But not just physically. He is in control in all the ways that matter. He won’t let her turn around to look him in the eye. His rancid breath is on her neck. She hopes IDA will detect her distress and raise an alarm. But then the door opens, and she wakes up.

The dream is why she’s Administrator of Dome Six. Why she isn’t that girl anymore. Why no one will ever take advantage of her again.

Light never quite streamed through the window of Elle’s unit like she wanted. Somewhere in the Cache, she once stumbled across a photograph of a woman bringing a cup to her lips as she peered out through a window. The wispy drapes were buoyed up by a gentle breeze outside, framing her lithe figure just so. The unfiltered orange glow of a radiant sunrise fell across her loose white blouse. A blurry blue field in the deep background suggested the ocean.

She didn’t recall what it was for, but she always loved the image. Mornings made her think of it. She liked to fantasize about being on her own in some quaint beach house, plaintively gazing into the eyes of dawn. That was the kind of loneliness she might choose, given the chance — the kind where she could merely linger in a delicious moment, safe from the dream.

Unfortunately, choice was among the most precious of the Dome’s dwindling resources.

“What time is it?” asked Luther. He shifted in the bed so his arm fell across hers, hairy and solid.

“Early,” she said. “You should go back to sleep.”

She didn’t exactly want him to leave but didn’t want him to stay, either. Encouraging him to sleep in was a way to get both.

“I need a scrub,” she announced, and pulled back the covers. “Don’t get up.”

She unfolded her scrub tub, laid down, then emptied the container of synthetic insects over herself. They spread out and went to work cleansing her body while she closed her eyes and tried to relax. After a few moments she heard Luther shift again in the bed.

“I know it got awkward at the ceremony yesterday,” he said. “I thought you handled it well, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering Tosh’s hostility.”

Elle thought about Tosh often, especially over the last few weeks. The accident at the cafeteria was only the latest in a string of incidents that seemed calculated to undermine the public trust. News had spread of critical shortages in the Stores. A water line broke across town on Rad 56 in early fall, creating a water-filled sinkhole four meters across. Longer shifts in the Towers, directed by IDA, were causing older workers to collapse from exhausting. It seemed everything was broken or about to break.

She was just a kid when Luther, then in his early 30s, told her that to lead was to be alone. Whatever doubts she’d had about that had long been erased. Even with him just a short distance away, propped up on one elbow in her bed, it was still true.

“We were close once,” she mused. “A long time ago.”

“Did you see her brother? What a waste.”

Dek did look really bad. Busting him down to Sanitation stemmed the tide of black-market Macros but didn’t stop it. They’d run out of Cytomatrix soon. Once that happened, their ability to treat disease and injury would be set back 200 years. But Hideki was the least of their problems.

The empathy she had for the Yamamura twins was real and deep. She was largely estranged from her own parents, both of whom now made clothes. They never had the relationship that Tosh and Dek had with their parents.

Whatever led Daisuke to trip the O 2alarm and disappear into the FPC with Minori remained a mystery, but he’d had his wits about him. That much was certain. She surprised him just outside the utility building moments after the klaxons started to blare. He asked her to look the other way and she did, following at a distance until she watched him and Minori slip into the FPC together. Only then did she tell Luther what she saw.

It was he who led the inquiry into the Yamamuras’ disappearance. He who claimed that they’d crawled into the multimeal processor. He who put forward Dome Fever as the explanation.

They didn’t talk about that anymore. In fact, they rarely talked at all. That wasn’t the nature of their association.

“What was your Placement like?” she asked, eager to move her mind off the Yamamura family.

“My Placement? Hell, I hardly remember.”

“Where’d you start?”

“On the line in the FPC,” he said. “Sorting and stemming for Tower 7.”

Going from an FPC or Tower apprenticeship to the Authority was rare. Elle was placed directly into the Authority, which was rarer still. IDA’s selection algorithm seemed to place a high value on loyalty. On one hand, a shitty Placement would distinguish the true believers. On the other, it could destroy whatever faith they had in the system — the system it was now her job to maintain.

“What did you feel when moved to the Authority?” she asked.

He shook his head. “That I finally got the Placement I earned. I talked to Legacies. Probably read a million pages in the Cache. I knew how the game was played.”

Years ago, when she was just an apprentice at the Authority, Luther told her that objectivity was a gift. That it distinguished them from the rest. She was too empathetic for that, but she could control how she reacted. That was her true gift.

“The man who fell from the roof,” Elle said. “Do we know what happened?”

He sighed and threw the covers off, then dressed while he talked. “He took one trip outside the crawler and another one straight down.”

“Yeah, but what actually happened?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because he was a citizen of this city,” Elle replied.

Luther loomed over her as he buttoned his shirt.

“Look, if you want to cry for the kid, be my guest. I’ve got work to do. I’ll see you later.”

He left without another word. As hard as the Scrubbers were working, Elle knew she’d never feel completely clean.

The elevator down to the Nexus never felt like it was moving, yet when the doors opened, only a narrow hallway stood between Luther and the door to the airlock. Once he stepped inside, the door closed behind him and he was blasted by air. It came in from the top and got sucked away below his feet, like a vertical wind tunnel. The point was to remove as much lint, hair, and flecks of skin as possible so it couldn’t pollute the coolant.