Gyrus

Chapter Ten: Contingency Plans

A gentle tap on the shoulder woke me up. The greyhound had stopped and the ticket master was going row by row waking up the passengers who were to stop at Fortuna, the town we were supposed to continue our search for Alyssa. Wong and Zoe were already up and struggling to pull their knapsacks out of the overhead compartment. I joined them and soon all three of us were off the bus and standing awkwardly under the sterile lights of the bus stop, wondering how much hope we had of finding Alyssa by ourselves. I tried to fight the dread that was growing in my chest. Here I was, with Wong my rival and sometimes enemy and Zoe, an extremely dangerous girl who I barely knew - and who somehow had become an intricate part of my future - about to act on a ludicrous idea to find someone who could be anywhere. I sort-of missed Edwin and his twitching and the Tower, but this was neither the time for rethinking decisions nor home sickness.

"We're at Fortuna. So...what happens now?" Wong asked.

"We need to find a hotel." Zoe replied with finality in her tone. "We all need proper rest; otherwise one of us will collapse at very inconvenient time."

I grumbled, because I wasn't in the mood for hotel hunting, but I couldn't fault her logic. I could still feel the after-effects of the forced vision and Edwin's extensive mind meddling and it was only by sheer force of will that I could still think coherently.

"Where should we go?" I asked. Zoe scanned the area, not seeming to look for anything in particular, before she replied.

"To the Seven Eleven."

We left the bus station and walked up to the main road. The town itself was nearly three miles away and was only connected to the station by a stretch of highway. We couldn't afford public transportation and none of us was in any shape to cover that distance on foot. Luckily, just when we were about to give up and go sleep on the grey hound station's waiting room benches, a truck slowed down and picked us up, mistaking us for hitch hikers. Not that we were complaining.

Fortuna was a big town, built around the twin canneries that provided work for its citizens and, as it seemed, their identity. The houses here were gaudily painted and sported entire houses wallpapered with startling impressions of the popular canned soup and tomatoes that the town's warehouses were renowned for. It was almost 8am as we arrived at the centre of the town and passed the scanty street, empty except for the early-rising factory workers who stopped to watch us as we passed by in the back of the farmer's truck. We stood out like sore thumbs with our casual clothes, in stark contrast with the crisp khaki-coloured uniforms the natives were all wearing.

"What...what is this place?" I whispered at Zoe.

"And why in the Name of Ash Ketchum does it even have a greyhound station?" Wong added, a little too loudly.

"A worker town." She whispered after shushing a sullen Wong. "They believe in the sanctity of labor and the migratory nature of workers and the canneries are totally manually-operated. Not a cog of unmanned machinery anywhere in there. I came here because they didn't ask questions and they let minors work for full wage, provided you were over the age of twelve. But it was nowhere near this organized the last time I worked here. At least, there were no uniforms then."

"Oh." That was the only thing I could manage to say. It had never occurred to me that Zoe might have been an orphan. It cost a fortune to send one's kid to St. Andria and even though we all resented our parents, we had the comforting knowledge that they were somewhere out there worrying about us. The urge to ask came over me, but I quickly suppressed it. No need to add insult to injury. The truck driver stopped abruptly in front of a paddock and put down the tailgate.

"Y'all need to be goin' now; the Seven Eleven is that way. I got some cuddlin' t'do wit' ma li'l missus."

We thanked him and headed in the direction he'd pointed, using the neon sign that rose over the rows of identical bungalows as our beacon.