Lovers in the Great Collapse ◊ NOVELLA

iv. » Jacqueline Gray

iv.

JACQUELINE GRAY

I met her in the rations hall.

It was cramped, hot, miserable, all of us jostling each other en route to the window cut out of the steel wall, where a woman in a hairnet distributed vitamin wafers. It was reminiscent in the worst way of my high school cafeteria, but there, people only pretended they'd starve if they didn't get their £0.40 milk carton or chocolate chip cookies.

Here, it was true.

She was seated at a table, surrounded by a dozen other young adults. Me, I'm Finnish and English meeting somewhere in the middle, with copper hair and a dusky spread of orange freckles. But her—she's masses of kinky, curly hair, full lips, dark skin, thick brows, and there is nothing like her in the thrall of a story: gesticulating wildly, eyes glimmering.

In the end, it wasn't high school. You sat where you sat, lucky if it wasn't the floor. This was my first time coming here without Dad or Owen—we were settling into our new lives and the people were exceedingly kind, but I was still itching to get back to our small living quarters as soon as possible.

There was a seat at her table. And so I sat.

"It's predictable!" she was saying. "This pattern's played out a million times. Don't get me wrong, the medicine, it's swell, but it was for-profit, right? That's the start. Am I surprised that big pharma fucked up the asses with AXI? Think again!"

"No way!" said a boy with bruised, scarred knuckles. "The vaxx companies had good motivations! Don't you know what they did for the world? They cured AIDs! They definitely blew it in the end," he added hastily at the dark expressions on his peers' faces, "but it was in the pursuit of good."

"Ahhhhh," said the girl, "but that's just the thing. Even Daedalus was running from something—the Labyrinth pressing at his back—"

"The fuck you talking about?" asked the boy disdainfully.

"Daedalus!" she exclaimed, spreading her arms. "Icarus and the wax wings! It's hard not to make the connection, right?"

"I mean, I... never thought about it," he said.

My heart leaped. "Icarus!" I interjected. Something normal. Something I knew; Mrs. Stowe's literature class, senior year. "Big pharma is Icarus. They only thought about escaping the Labyrinth. They never considered what might be waiting in the skies..."

The girl watched me, tilting her head, a smile ghosting across her lips.

"My point precisely," she said. "And AXI... AXI's the wings. Instead of trying to get closer to the sun, we were trying to get away from it." With one fell swoop, her fork descended, spearing straight through her chicken patty. "And we all got burned."

The girl was smiling so broadly—so insistently—that it was hard to notice the flicker of sadness in her eyes. It worked, because that first day, I wasn't watching her eyes. I was watching her brown, brown mouth, and the sad twist in its corners. I was watching the dusting of freckles on her lower lip, her Cupid's bow, the wide gap between her two front teeth. I was finding it a little hard to breathe.

Then, all too soon, she was unfolding her long legs, pushing away from the table.

"Gillian Larchwood!" I called, heart pounding.

She stopped, quirking her head to one side. After a moment, her dimples deepened, and rows of brilliant white teeth peeked out from her smile, like sun breaking clouds.