The Essos bodychecked them after every shift. There were things you could pick up in the complex – sharp edges, poisons – but Management had procedures to limit opportunities for self-harm.
Twenty-six women shared Li’s sleepbox. It had ventilation grilles but no insulation or heating. Stank of feet and mould. The women worked different shifts and brought their different stinks back with them in their hair and skin and camp-issue jackets. Dump stink or chemical stink or gunpowder stink. They slept in shifts too, one woman got up off the cot and another woman lay down on it. You were never alone. It didn’t matter to Li. It would have mattered once but it didn’t now. Not the noise or the smell, not the skin diseases they picked up in the shower block, the respiratory sicknesses they passed, one to the other, or the way her ankle itched and festered inside the cast. Not the rank shitbox. Not the snarling out in the dark. Not the fights or the shaming or freezing out – the pack closing against one woman until it was another woman’s turn. The dripping ceiling and the icy burn of the walls didn’t matter. The snoring and crying and fucking and heads banging against metal at night. It didn’t matter when her period came back and half the women in the box were bleeding at the same time, scavenging cloth and paper, leaking and staining their shared bedding. As the cold season closed around them, they pushed the cots together and slept piled up like dogs, sharing heat. It didn’t matter to Li because her privacy didn’t matter now, her mind didn’t matter.
And because there was consolation too. They told their stories in the dark. Li didn’t talk much but she listened to each precise accounting of loss. Anna and her sister had run for a truck and Anna didn’t make it. She stood on the road and watched her sister slip and go under the wheels. Lumena had two children under Replacement. The ballot claimed them both – one was on the Front, the other had been on a ship that didn’t get there. Kathy’s father died of prostate cancer, slowly, in a makecamp. Jun had been separated from her whole family in a gate riot outside Fengdu. Susanna’s girlfriend was beaten to death. Camila paid her way onto a boat and when it started sinking she dropped her baby into the outstretched arms of a man in the water but a wave broke over him and her baby went down without a sound.
Azzi cried, listening. She said, My boy was terrified of the sea. He read books about sharks. I gave him sedatives to get him on the boat, but when we were in the water, he couldn’t stay awake. I tried to hold him up but he was too heavy.
Before Transit, Li had been alone with her grief, hauling it around like combat gear. Out there no loss could approach hers. Who had she thought she was? In here, their losses rubbed against each other, blunting the edges and smoothing into one thing. The lost were dead or they were alive, they were status unknown. They belonged to no one in particular, and spread out like that, they were easier to bear. What had she thought she wanted? She didn’t want to be alone.
Rest day was the hardest. There were so many hours. She had to concentrate on keeping her thoughts small, they slipped the fence and got out where the dogs were.
A man called her name through the fence. It was early morning and she had just got off the van at the end of her shift, was walking back to the sleepbox with the others, single-file along Charlie fence, and it took her a minute to lift her head. He was standing up against Delta fence, holding onto the wire with both hands. Rich. All that separated them were the two fences and a metre of concrete. He said her name again but she didn’t want to remember him, all her work now was not remembering. She walked into the sleepbox and lay down on a cot that was still warm and she looked up and started counting the grids, but she saw his face again outside the fence at makecamp, heard him laugh and call her wild woman. If you get caught you can’t help her. She hunched over, hit her head against the wall. She tried to beat back the memory but it was right there, all of it, all the time, waiting to steal her oxygen.
She counted until she slept. And while she slept, Matti called to her, I just don’t want to be in the other room without you Mum, because it’s dark. And when she woke and passed through the gates and stood in the food queue and rode the van and worked shift, all the memories came ripping, the flashes of her voice and face, her smell. And it stayed like that, day after day after day. It couldn’t be lived with but Li was still alive.
You don’t talk too much.
Megan stood with Li by the fence in the weak sun, smoking. Rest day. The gale had beaten itself out overnight and now the tussock was still and silver in the afternoon light. Megan’s hand shook a bit when she passed the cigarette and Li knew she was still thinking about the dogs. A couple of hours earlier, Megan and some other Essos had been repairing a damaged section of the outer fence, near maingate, when a pack of dogs had come at them through the gap. They’d shot
