All Rights Reserved. Gregory Scott Katsoulis
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of a product or business. Miss Harving would be entitled to those earnings and then whatever damages Butchers & Rog could dream up. It is utterly out of the question.”
The blinking grew faster. My heart rate went with it.
“Mrs. Nince,” Saretha muttered, imagining the wrath of her boss.
I hated Mrs. Nince, though I’d never met her. During Saretha’s first week of work, the woman had “accidentally” jabbed Saretha in the arm with a leather punch, leaving a small crescent-shaped scar in the flesh above Saretha’s right elbow. She’d sued Saretha $90 for causing a workplace accident.
“Speth can work. She’s past Last Day, and she doesn’t look like anyone,” Holt suggested.
I almost snorted. What kind of job did he think I could get?
Attorney Holt’s face contorted as he remembered one more thing. He looked conflicted, then tapped at his Cuff a few times and looked to the left and the right, as if he were afraid to be observed.
“You can’t get sick,” he said. His bill had stopped creeping up. He was paying for this bit of advice himself. I don’t know why he did it. Compassion is trained out of Lawyers, but Arkansas Holt wasn’t a very good Lawyer. Had some small bit of kindness survived? “You can’t go to a hospital, because that would put your face in public. You can’t get arrested or taken into Collection, either.”
Saretha’s eyes seemed to go blank. Sam’s lips formed a question, but he didn’t need to ask. We all realized the same thing.
While we’d never had any significant hope of paying off our debt in our lifetimes, we had to keep making progress. Our parents’ income and our income had to be at a high enough level to chip away at our debt. We lived in constant fear of losing ground, because if the algorithms foresaw us earning under our minimum payments, they would take Saretha into Collection. Until Holt’s visit, we were afraid of her being sent to Indenture like my parents, stuck working a farm or much, much worse. But now, if that happened, they would disfigure her first.
“Just stay safe and healthy and home,” Holt counseled.
The Zockroft™ Ad popped up again, this time with a name. Saretha Jime: Be Positive! it read. The pills danced.
“We can talk again at the start of your next billing cycle,” Arkansas said, his attention falling away. “Perhaps I’ll think of something,” he mumbled quickly. Before we could agree, the call winked out and an Ad screamed at us to buy new, fluffier toilet tissue. I sat numbly by Saretha, the screeching noise from the Ad blasting over us like an unforgiving wind. I stood and shut the whole wall panel off.
Saretha buried her head in her hands. What were we going to do?
Mrs. Nince was the kind of woman who wore a cinched half-corset and tight black jeans, even though she was sixty years old and weighed about eighty pounds. She had jet-black hair interwoven with delicate, sharp, printed shapes. Her face had been rebuilt at least a dozen times, and it looked like something from a creepy wax museum. She thought her look was stylish, though that wasn’t the word she used to describe it. She called it modish, because she owned that word. She bragged about how she’d watched auctions for years for a word this good to be sold. I think she just took what she could find. Modish wasn’t exactly a common word.
Mrs. Nince wanted people to say it so she could make money. Words, she knew, were good investments.
Saretha had worked under her for two years and never said a bad word about her. She never described Mrs. Nince’s face as pinched and cruel. She never mentioned how painful the clothes must have been to model. In fact, she never mentioned Mrs. Nince at all, if she could help it, because Saretha never liked to say anything bad.
Her boutique was north, part of the shops above Falxo Park, but far enough along the outer ring that it was in the next section, the Duodecimo. I’d never understood why that section had a Latin name. The buildings were still printed to look French. That was baffling, too. The obsession with French style supposedly came from the period when the French let all their Intellectual Property rights lapse, but I’d only heard that from kids passing it on. It didn’t seem like the full story. My history classes were weirdly devoid of information about the world outside our nation’s borders.
At the shop, Sam asked for Mrs. Nince, and a pretty girl in a painfully tight silver corset and tight white jeans scurried awkwardly into the back to fetch her. I don’t think she could bend at the knees.
We waited.
“Litsa, pour l’amour de Dieu!” a voice croaked. The girl backed out the door and nearly fell over.
Mrs. Nince stepped out of her office, locked the door behind her conspicuously, then turned to us expectantly as she pocketed the key.
“We were hoping,” Sam said, trying to sound both humble and professional, “you might consider letting my sister Speth take over Saretha’s job?”
I tried my best to smile Saretha’s smile. I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My short hair stuck out at odd angles to keep the style in the public domain. I had to be careful not to let it get too neat, or it would drift over into a Patented Pixie 9®. My eyes were red and puffy and opened too wide.
I looked ridiculous. I dialed my expression down to a more appropriate level.
“Her?” Mrs. Nince asked, drawing a long finger up and down in the air to indicate what an inferior specimen I was. Then she drew herself up and held a hand to the silver rim of her Cuff, indicating she would like us to pay for her speaks. The Cuff vibrated—99¢. The gesture was not free. Sam tapped in our family code, and Mrs. Nince relaxed just a hair.
“Litsa, get back to work,” she growled at the girl who was hovering nearby. The girl scurried off, the top and bottom halves of her body seeming to twist without coordination, the corset, perhaps, hampering communication from top to bottom. Phlip and Vitgo wanted to see her nude? Why was this supposed to be attractive? It looked warped and creepy to me.
“What is it that you wanted?”
“We know Saretha can’t work here anymore...” Sam began.
Mrs. Nince rolled her eyes. “Saretha’s unapproved departure from my employ was extraordinarily inconvenient.”
“But Speth...”
“Speth,” Mrs. Nince spit the word out with even more distaste than Mrs. Harris. She shuddered. “At least it isn’t one of those tedious French names like Claudette or Mathilde. Those are rather passé, and so costly.”
She looked me over again—probably jamming me into a corset in her mind—and grimaced. “Why would I want to hire her? She’s flat as a board.”
My face heated up. Sam took a breath. He didn’t want to be part of this conversation. Neither did I. I hated this woman, and it set my jaw tight to think about working for her. I pictured the crescent-shaped scar she’d punched into Saretha’s arm and had to work hard to clear the image from my mind.
“People might be curious...” Sam began. “Affluents...they might like to see if they can get her to talk.”
“How would that be good for business?” Mrs. Nince asked. “Why should I want people distracted by some carnival game of trying to make a Silent Freak talk when they should be buying my modish clothes?”
Sam tried to answer this, but she talked right over him.
“My modish customers don’t want some oddball Silent Freak hovering over them. Can you imagine? You ask the Silent Freak how you look in these modish jeans, or you ask the Silent Freak how many ribs should be removed for a modish Frid-Tube™ Halter, or you ask the Silent Freak if we’re having a sale, and the Silent Freak would just stare and stare like a farm animal.”
“Don’t