Empire's Legacy - Snippets of the Past

Snippet 2. Sophia: Natterby Close Home for Unwanted Girls and Boys

With that, she clomped out of the room. Sophia reached into her bag, her fingers trembling, and pulled out a battered old book. Its aluminum casing was dented and scratched, and when she opened it the holo-pages flickered frantically.

"Please don't die," she whispered, holding it close. "Please."

She set it on her knee and after a moment the holo-pages stabilized, only flickering occasionally. Turning to the first page, she traced her finger over the fuzzy image plate and began to read A Little Princess for what must have been the hundredth time.

Hearing shouts on the stairs and echoing down the corridor, she hurriedly shut the book and thrust it out of sight under her mattress before scrambling to her feet. The other children came rushing into the room and stopped short upon finding her standing beside the bed, her hands twisted in front of her; the threadbare gown she still wore from the Twelfth District Commissionate Orphanage marked her as an outsider, but her eyes, wide and haunted in a thin, pinched face, were reflected a dozen times over in the crowd of children pushing in through the door and proclaimed her one of the lost children.

An older girl of about 17, with a pretty, round face and short-cropped hair, pushed forward to stand in front of Sophia, her arms folded across her chest. She looked the younger girl up and down and then spat in her hand and held it out. "We take care of our own here," she said, watching for Sophia's reaction. "Fitzy won't take care of you and the Commission don't give a shit. So we take care of our own."

Sophia lifted her gaze and then, her eyes never leaving the other girl's face, carefully spat in her own hand and extended it. The girl clasped Sophia's hand and gripped it tightly.

"Good," she said. "What's your name, then?"

"Sophia Davis," Sophia whispered.

"I'm Mellie." She jabbed her thumb at the others at the door. "You'll get to know this lot eventually. The little girls are upstairs. We got to take turns sleeping with them. They get nightmares. You'll get your turn eventually." Her nose wrinkled and she spat on the floor. Sophia flinched. "Boys are out in the extension. Most of 'em are harmless. We lock doors at night. Aren't supposed to—Fitzy's supposed to be able to come and go as she wants. Lazy bitch doesn't get up at night, so doesn't matter. You eaten?"

Sophia shook her head.

"Yeah, you're well skinny. Piece of advice—don't ever miss meal time. There's almost never anything left. But—" She turned around. "Abby, dig up something from the stores for Sophia, here."

A skinny redhead darted past and scuttled over to the corner, where she pried up a loose piece of plastic flooring and tugged out a sack. "Mellie -" she hissed, and, having caught the older girl's attention, tossed the bag her way. The other girls had filtered into the room and had shut the door—Sophia assumed this was to avoid being caught with unauthorized food by...Fitzy.

Mellie handed Sophia a wedge of cheese and the heel of a loaf of bread. "Scrape off the blue bits," she said. "It's just mold. You might have to hold the bread in your mouth a bit to get it to soften up—it's probably pretty stale."

Sophia grimaced at the warning, having already unwittingly attempted to bite down on the bread and almost chipped a tooth. "We did the same thing," she said shyly. "Kept food, I mean. At the Twelfth District Commissionate Orphanage."

"Oh, is that where you've come from? Abby." Mellie shook the bag at Abby until the girl grabbed it and went to tuck it away again. Sophia nodded. "What was it like there?"

Sophia shrugged. "Big. Crowded. No one ever talked to anyone else. Matron was nice enough. Stern. She's dead now."

Abby perched on the edge of the bed. "Did she die in the fire?" she asked, eyes bright with interest.

"Go to bed, Abby," Mellie said. "You're too interested in fires for your own good."

"Yes," Sophia said. "My parents died in a different fire."

"The Commission killed my parents," Abby said matter-of-factly. "They were very clever and were planning to bring down the government but the Commission found out and so they killed them. I was only little."

Sophia looked at her and said, around a mouthful of cheese, "How come you know the Commies killed your parents if you were little? I was 7 when my parents died and I don't think I'd've remembered something like that."

"Clearly I'm more clever than you," Abby said.

"Or you're a conspiracy theorist," Mellie said, catching Abby by the ear and pulling her up off the bed, ignoring the girl's cries of protest. "Come on, all of you, bed. You too, newbie. You'll learn how this works soon enough. The earlier we're out in the morning, the more chances we have of snagging better odds and ends." She bent over and confiscated something from beneath a girl's pillow, saying over her shoulder to Sophia, "Natterby Close probably has the highest number of children's homes for its size on this side of the planet. The sheer number of kids fighting for odd jobs and scraps is well stupid."

Sophia thrust her things back into her bag and tucked it under her bed. "Does—Fitzy—make you go out?"

"Well, no, but would you want to stay in if you could go out? Anything's better than here." A faint expression of pain crossed her face. "Well, almost anything." With a sigh, Mellie shucked her boots and pulled her dress over her head, draping it over the bedpost. "Besides, there's always the off-chance someone will decide they want to hire you for good." She slid into bed with a yawn. "That's what happened to Jim. Got a job with an accountant seeing as he was so good with numbers. Sometimes that just happens. Luck. Damnedest thing. Night night, Sophia. Welcome to Hell."

Sophia lay on her back on the hard mattress and pulled the thin blanket up to her chin. As she lay staring at the ceiling, listening the sound of the girls' breathing falling into slow and steady patterns, she thought about her parents and the tenement district in which she had grown up. In many ways the Natterby Close Home was not any worse than the tenements; the only difference was that then she had had her parents, who loved her dearly, and now she had no one except a loosely-formed coalition of girls. Somehow she was not reassured. And Fitzy's words about how she'd be wanted kept floating through her mind, bumping up against Mellie's words about catching jobs. Sophia knew what happened to pretty girls with no families, and from the look in Mellie's eyes she had a bad feeling that Mellie had already turned down that road. And Sophia didn't want that to happen to her.

Turning over onto her side, she pulled the blanket up over her shoulder and closed her eyes. Some day she'd get out of Natterby Close. Someday she'd see the universe.