Shards and Ashes

No, I wanted to tell her. Fear doesn’t get you anywhere. But that would make me sound way too smart, so I just stared stupidly at the drone and squeezed Pria’s hand once, to let her know I was sorry.

Then I let go.

The drone gestured at her to stand up. She did, shaking like bad machinery, and then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell on the clean floor of the train and had a fit.

It was an outstanding act. Better than mine. Only I wasn’t so sure it was an act at all, because she didn’t look good, and then she started vomiting and choking, and I was pretty sure it was for real after all.

I snapped out of it and rolled her over onto her side.

The drone’s disgusted stare snapped from Pria to me in an instant, and he pointed at me. “Not so slow after all, are you?” he said, and snapped his fingers. “Up, boy. Over here.”

I didn’t have much choice. Sure, I could probably take him in a fight—he was Corporate, not much muscle on him, and for sure he hadn’t been schooled in dirty fighting—but once I did, what then? I didn’t know how to make the train doors open again, and with a lurch, the whole thing began to move anyway.

No real choice. The man was armed; he could burn me down into a grease stain if he wanted. So I stood up, walked to the group of nine he’d already assembled, and stood there like I was part of it.

The Corporate drone nodded, touched something on his handheld, and said, “Don’t move, any of you.” Some of the kids still seated were crying; some were just staring down at the tickets clutched in their hands. Nobody really thought that we were going to a game anymore. Or if they did, they were slower than I’d pretended to be.

The train ran for about thirty long minutes, smooth and swaying, before it pulled to a stop. The doors didn’t open.

The drone cleared his throat and drew all eyes back to him. “You’re owed a notice, by law, so this is it. We’re over budget. Level K has been exceeding allowable resource levels for five years running. A downsizing order has been given. Your people on the level were notified by drop this morning. You witnessed us choosing random numbers. We try to be fair in any redundancy process.”

I heard every kid take in a deep breath, but nobody said anything. Even the kids who’d been crying were silent. Redundancy. Somebody was getting the sharp edge of the ax . . . and they’d pulled numbers.

Seat numbers.

They were going to kill us purely to save the cost of feeding and clothing us for the next couple of years until we could earn our bread in the mines or the factories. The bottom line was that the Company had too many human resources.

We were victims of accounting.

“Everyone still seated, please stay in your seats; the train will continue momentarily.” I barely heard the drone’s voice over the sudden hot rush of blood in my ears. Not that I was scared to die, not at all. . . . Death is pretty much a part of any day on Level K. But I just felt . . . angry. And I was wondering if it would hurt much. Probably not. They needed us gone; torture was just wasted man-hours.

I could hear the murmurs of the kids in the seats, and they were tinged with relief. We weren’t a sentimental bunch, we K kids. Everybody had to look out for himself. Couldn’t blame them. I’d have been just the same.

The doors opened, and beyond was a tunnel, dimly lit with long strips of glowing glass in a dirty orange. It was clean, but plain. The drone gestured us out, and after a hesitation, I led the way. Better to go first than last, almost all the time. There wasn’t anywhere to run. Nothing but a barred gate in the wall, and the trains, and walls.

The drone was the last one out. As I looked down the train, I saw that all the other cars had opened, and drones were leading or hustling out their quotas of ten as well. Ten per train car. Maybe a hundred, total.

There had been worse Company cullings. All of Level H had been made redundant, after food strikes and riots; nobody knew what had happened, exactly, but there hadn’t been contact with Level H for four years now, and Corporate had just sealed it off and left it with biohazard warnings on all the entrances. Sometimes on K we told each other gruesome ghost stories and dared each other to break in. Nobody ever had. All ten thousand people on H had just . . . vanished. As if they’d never been.

The Corporate drones in their black jackets and neat haircuts, with their handheld devices, faced the train cars and stood there waiting for something. I saw something flash on our drone’s screen, and he nodded and tapped a control.

The doors banged shut on all of the train cars at once, and then . . . then the screaming started. It was a few voices at first, then a panicked wave of sound. A freezing feeling came over me, something that numbed me right down to the core.

I took a step toward the train car. It was stupid, and I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d never looked into that window and met Pria’s dark, panicked eyes. Seen her press her small hands against the window and mouth my name.

Because I couldn’t help.

It wasn’t us being made redundant after all. It was those on the train, with their pathetic painted faces and team colors and tattered little banners.

One thousand nine hundred of them, give or take a few orphans.

It was maybe a minute before the last screaming fell away.

I don’t remember moving, but suddenly I had my back to the tunnel’s rounded wall. Around me, others sank to the floor, crying. One girl screamed and tried to run back for the train car—family in there, maybe, or someone close to it. I grabbed her and wrapped my arms around her as she flailed, until she went limp. I still held her, a warm rag-doll weight, because holding on to someone, anyone, felt good just then.

At least it had been quick. Well, they’d stopped screaming quick. Maybe not the same thing.

“Process complete,” the drone said, and tapped a command on his handheld.

The silent, dead train glided on, a smooth and beautiful monster with a stomach full of prey, and the cool breeze blew over us as it picked up speed and pulled away. When the hissing sigh of it was past, the drone turned and looked at us.

“You’re all employed at Corporate,” he said. “Congratulations. You now hold the job title of dogsbody.”

A dogsbody is the lowest form of labor available at Corporate, as opposed to the Operations. The old term for it is servant, or slave, but it’s not really either one of those. You’re an employee, and you get paid, but you can’t ever be more than a third-class dogsbody, unless you make it to the top one percent in your one-year review. If you don’t make the top cut, you get culled. Easy as that. Always new, strong dogsbodies being brought in from the levels to replace you.

I was a One Percenter at fourteen, and promoted out of third class. By sixteen, I was second-class dogsbody to Senior Management. I was an appliance. A very reliable machine. And for as long as I worked, they’d keep using me, so I kept myself working, ticking along, growing stronger and faster and deadlier every day.

I could have tried to run; there had been chances, over the years, but running back to the levels was great only if you wanted to die hard, and alone. No, I stayed. I became a good little Corporate drone, and I kept earning promotion credits until one day, just a few days before my seventeenth birthday, my handheld showed me transferred upward to the ultimate top level.

Dogsbody First Class to Tarrant Clark, Global SVP, Corporate Resources. Where I’d set out to be from that very first moment in the tunnel, listening to those screams, because according to everything I’d been able to look up, he was the man who ordered downsizings. One thousand nine hundred, give or take a few orphans. I wondered if he remembered anything about it. He was a busy man, after all. He probably ordered hundreds of massacres just like it every year.

I reported for my first day of work to Tarrant Clark’s Residence Office—the Res, in dogsbody slang. The man who opened the door to the Res was named Helman, and the insignia under the Corporate logo on his coat pocket meant that he was classified as Junior Administrative Assistant, and he was young and intense and worried.

“You’re a big one,” Helman said, looking up at me. I presented him with my handheld. “Xavier Gray. Right. You’ll be working upstairs, with Pozynski.” He pulled out his own handheld, and the two devices talked together