The Great Revolt, Episode 1: Arrival

Morning came up blue.

The deep blue that had pressed on the window all night thinned to a paler, brighter blue, and the kitchen filled with it. The light alone would not have woken her. The panel did, small and pale, opening low in her sight the moment rest ended, telling her the cycle had turned and work had come. That was the Wakāri, the chip behind her ear and the screen of light it threw across whatever she looked at. She cleared it with a glance and got up. She was thin in the close-cut work layers she wore to her shift, the line of light down one seam long dead, her hair pulled back hard, the skin under her eyes dark from three nights without sleep.

The children were already at the table. The boy bent over his bowl, eating fast, the gray morning ration that came as a dry brick and cooked down to something soft and almost without taste. His sister sat across from him with her own bowl going cold, reading aloud off her Wakāri, her eyes tracking up the air in front of her. Some children’s story about a boy who walked through a door in an empty house and came out under a different sky, and could never find the door again. The boy was not listening. He grunted when she paused, and she took the grunts for interest and read on.

Their father’s chair was empty, and it had been empty for three mornings. He worked nights at the water plant, where the district pulled its water back to something a person could drink, and three nights ago he had gone to his shift and not come home. The first morning she had told the children he was working through. The second, that he was held over. This morning she had said nothing, and they had not asked. His cup still stood by the cooktop where he had left it before that last shift. She had not been able to wash it.

She was packing the children’s lunchboxes while the messages came in down the side of her sight. Into each box went the good food, the real green leaves and the dried slips of mushroom she paid the extra tokens for, the things they never got at the table. The leaves were the only thing in the kitchen with a smell. Her own shift reminder. The air reading, amber again, masks for the children. A soft bright panel from Sōshō, the smiling face the state liked to wear, offering her a few extra tokens if she would only give her thoughts on a question of community concern. She cleared it without answering.

The last panel was not like the others. It carried the seal of Sô Kari, not the smiling face from a moment before but the hard one, the mark stamped on the checkpoints, the patrol armor, the doors that did not open for you. She stopped, the last box still open under her hands.

She did not so much read it as fall into it. The cold, polite Kôri the state used when it had decided something about a person, the words that thanked you and were sorry for you while they did it. His citizen number, not even his name. One word she knew by its shape before she knew its sound. Transitioned. Around it the sentences slid past half read, a few pieces snagging, in association with, declared terrorist, the Ikkendan. Under a thin line, a sum, three hundred and forty tokens. A small bright key beside it. A warning about the ration dropping a tier if she let the cycle close without paying.

She did not read the rest. She could not. The kitchen pulled back and went quiet around her, the boy’s spoon, the scrape of his sister’s voice, the hum of the lanes beyond the glass, all of it dropping away, and she stood at the counter with the open box under her hands and could not find the bottom of it. Three days she had told herself he was working through. There was no working through. There was the rent, there were the two of them, there was only her now, and she could not make her hands move.